The fraud of Gush Etzion, Israel's mythological settlement bloc

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://972mag.com/the-fraud-of-gush-etzion-israels-mythological-settlement-bloc/102133/

Destroyed by Arab armies during the 1948 War, Gush Etzion was repopulated after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967. Since then, successive Israeli governments have done everything they can to magnify the mythology of the bloc, while settling Israelis on its privately-owned Palestinian land.

All American children learn the battle cry, “Remember the Alamo!” at some point in their schooling. The story of the Alamo starts in 1836, when white colonists began settling in northern Mexico. They finally drove the Mexican army out, but the army eventually returned and slaughtered all the whites in the Alamo Mission, refusing to even take prisoners. The white army, infuriated by the slaughter of the heroes of the Alamo, returned with a taste for blood. They beat back the Mexicans and subsequently annexed all of northern Mexico, which then became the state of Texas – the largest in the contiguous United States.

Israeli children do not learn about the Alamo, but they do have their own heroes to remember. In the 1940s, four kibbutzim (Kfar Etzion, Masuot Yitzhak, Revadim and Ein Tzurim) were established southwest of Bethlehem in an area later designated for a Palestinian state by the 1947 UN Partition Plan. It turned out that their location was excellent for intercepting Arab military traffic between Hebron and Jerusalem, so the Haganah and Palmach (pre-state Zionist militias) sent troops and supplies to do just that in the last days of the British Mandate. The battle of Gush Etzion was one of three battles lost by the Jews during the war, and its heroes are part of the Israeli pantheon. Even Prime Minister Ben-Gurion said that he could “think of no battle in the annals of the Israel Defense Forces that was more magnificent, more tragic or more heroic than the struggle for Gush Etzion.”
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This crawling land grab continues today. In late 2014, 1,200 acres to both the south and west of Bethlehem were declared “state land” in order to create an Israeli axis that would connect the eastern settlements of Gush Etzion to the Green Line. The expropriation of such a large area is expected to significantly increase the number of Israeli settlers in the area.

[guillaumeb]

1. words matter

Expropriation is a polite term for land theft in service of creating an Arab-free state in all of what was west Palestine. That such land theft is a crime under International Law does not matter for the Israelis or their American patrons. No matter how many war crimes the Israelis commit, no matter how many international laws they violate, the Americans will back them up. American politicians constantly talk about the possibility of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon, the mere possibility mind you, but they ignore the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Yet another Israeli violation of International Law.