Israel steals another 1000 acres of the West Bank

[Indy Texas]

Waiting for dead0man to give some schpiel about how we can't criticize poor defenseless Israel because they really do feel bad about doing this but they have no choice because the Big Bad Palestinians etc etc.

[Indy Texas]

No one can't deny that Israel is trying to make moderate Palestinians irrelevant. Abbas and the PA keep being backstabbed. Israel should now better, they keep humiliating the PA while the Hamas gets what it wants. It's going to blow up in their face at some point, figuratively and maybe literally...

They don't want a Palestinian government that is willing to negotiate because that would require them to actually negotiate with them. So Abbas et al sits in Ramallah cashing US checks while having no wherewithal to actually do anything (supposedly the Abbas family has left the country and is in Jordan) while Israel insists it won't negotiate with Hamas politically but engages them militarily constantly.

If they want to weaken Hamas, they have to strengthen their rival. That would require giving more autonomy to the West Bank and more power to the PA. But that would require giving up the West Bank.

It appears that having rockets fired at their civilians constantly is the price that Israel is willing to pay for clinging to a racist and revanchist conception of what Israel should look like.

[Indy Texas]

It's not than the Israeli government doesn't want to negociate. It can't.

Settlers + nationalists + theocrats have too much political weight (and a much higher birth rate).

And whose fault is that? Israel didn't have to allow their citizens to settle in "Judaea and Samaria." Israel didn't have to allow any and all people with a Jewish great-great-grandmother the unconditional right to immigrate there. In democracies, people get the government they deserve and governments get the constituencies they deserve.

[Indy Texas]

Israel claims they did this to "get back" at the murderers of the abducted seminary students.

I agree that comparisons to Nazi Germany are inappropriate. Not even South Africa works in this particular case.

This is more like Zimbabwe's confiscation of white farmers' land. No justice or rule of law. Just collective punishment designed to appeal to the majority's most base emotions. Mugabe wanted to "stick it to The Man." Israel wants to provoke the "Big Bad Arabs."

It's more proof that try as it might, Israel isn't the Western liberal society it pretends it is. It's just another post-colonial state built on the resentment of identity politics.