Settlements
By Thomas
http://www.studentorg.vcu.edu/fpn
Free_Palestine_Now@hotmail.com

     Not one Israeli offer of statehood to the Palestinian people has included a complete withdraw and dismantling of the illegal Israeli settlements within the territories that would become the Palestinian state.  Under the Israeli designs, a Palestinian state would be dotted with Israeli settlements, defended by the Israeli military, and intersected with Israeli checkpoints and roads.  How could this be a sovereign Palestinian state?  No state in the world exists with another state maintaining settlements, checkpoints and army units within the formers national boundaries.  Why should it be any different for Palestine? It is and always has been the goal of the Israeli government to completely colonize the land west of the Jordan River for its Jewish only population.  This of course means transferring or killing all of the Palestinian peoples who currently reside there to make room for more settlers.  Ever since the Israeli government occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after the 1967 war with Jordan and Israel’s other Arab neighbors they have conducted a universally condemned and illegal policy of transferring its population from Israel into the territories that were designed by the UN charter to be a Palestinian state.  The Israeli government has encouraged the settlements, often conducted by racist extremists, by giving them tax breaks and tax incentives to move into the occupies territories.  These settlements continued even after the signing of the Oslo peace accords that guaranteed an eventual Palestinian state within the occupied territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.  The fourth Geneva Convention, which Israel signed states “the Occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”, in addition to ignoring the Geneva Convention Israel has also ignored United Nations resolution 465 of 1980 that states “5. Determines that all measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel's policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War and also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” The Rome statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) also states "the transfer directly or indirectly by the Occupying power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies" as a War Crime indictable by the International Criminal Court.” Thus, Israel, in pursuing it’s racist policy of setting up Israeli army protected settlements in the occupied territories is in violation of the Geneva convention and the United Nations as well as guilty of war crimes.  Israel’s complete disregard for International law and human rights should under any normal circumstance define it as a pariah state excluded from the international community in every aspect, but because of the United States unwavering support Israel has been able to laugh in the face of International law while continuing its program of genocide and deportations manifested in the policy of the settlements.  There will and can be no peace in the Middle East until every single settlement in the occupied territories is dismantled and every single settler returns leaves. Israel, by its continued occupation of the Palestinian lands and by its continued insistence to build settlements to this very day shows that it does not want peace, and all peace negotiations have been lies.  They will continue to be lies as long as the settlements remain.