Israel’s defense minister on Wednesday said he aimed to boost the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank to one million within a decade, from around 400,000 at present.
Naftali Bennett, a hawk who draws much of his support from settlers, is leading his New Right party to elections in March.
He was speaking at a Jerusalem congress on Washington’s November policy shift stating that it no longer considers Israeli settlements illegal, alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US ambassador David Friedman
“Our aim is that within a decade a million Israeli citizens will live in Judaea and Samaria,” Bennett said, using the biblical term for the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Friedman, who is also Jewish and a strong supporter of settlements, disputed the use of the term “occupied.”
“We are not occupiers in our homeland, we are not occupiers in our own land, we are not like the Belgians in the Congo,” he said.
Both men’s comments drew swift condemnation from the Palestinian Authority.
The PA foreign ministry described them as “racist” and “reflecting the Jewish colonial nature of the deal of the century” – a reference to US President Donald Trump’s so-far undisclosed peace plan.
The ministry added that Friedman and Bennett’s statements were “official confessions of their involvement in the crime of settlement and the confiscation of Palestinian land.”
Read more at http://www.defenddemocracy.press/israeli-defense-minister-seeks-million-settlers-in-west-bank/
