One has to wonder if the Israeli Ministry of Defense report documenting and detailing the extent of both ‘legal’ and illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank has not been deliberately leaked to the press considering that the Israeli elections are now less than two weeks away and knowing how supportive Benjamin Netanyahu, likely to be Israel’s next Prime Minister, is of expanding the settlements.
If and when Benjamin Netanyahu does become Israel’s next PM, (more likely to be ‘when’ rather than ‘if’, if the polls are anything to go by) it may well be that one of the first issues he’ll need to tackle will be the issue of the legitimacy of the West Bank settlements. The leaking of the report could be well seen as a move to expedite the issue soon after the elections in order to justify further settlement.
Such a move, together with a fervency that the extreme right-wing Zionist-Likud election win could bring, especially if Netanyahu gets a particularly big win, might then spark an avalanche of claims from ultra-Zionist/Nationalists to expand settlements further into the West Bank and also into the Gaza Strip.
Inevitably there would be a Palestinian backlash which, in turn, would result in demands from the settlers for Palestinians to be transferred to either Jordan, the Sinai in Egypt or to Lebanon.
Netanyahu has made it clear in the past that there will never be any Palestinian sovereign state as far as he is concerned, which leaves only what they have always believed is rightfully theirs in pursuit of a Greater Israel; ultimately the full annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into Israel.
AUSTRALIANS AT WAR
THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY is a compelling factual history of neoconservatism and its influence on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Click on image above for details.
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