Thursday, May 16, 2002

Israeli Settlements and the Threat of "Jewish Terrorism"?

B'Tselem released a report this past Monday on the impact of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. While the report acknowledges that the settlements constitute only 1.7% of the land, it claims that these Israeli municipalities have control over a whopping 41.9% of the entire West Bank. Titled, "Land Grab: Israel's Settlement Policy in the West Bank," the report goes as far as to compare the Israeli system of control with Apartheid in South Africa (a comparison that seems to grow more popular, each day).

Also check out the corresponding map of the West Bank, which Open Democracy has mirrored alongside Eyal Weizman's piece on the Politics of Verticality.

On a somewhat related note, War in Context made this conjecture following Noam Federman's arrest:

While some people will argue that many of the actions of the Israeli Defense Force amount to a form of "state-sponsored terrorism," as the promise of Palestinian statehood moves closer to becoming a political reality, the threat of Jewish terrorism - terrorism in the form of bombings and suicide attacks on innocent civilians - will steadily increase.
Should such "Jewish terrorism" become a reality, I wonder how the American media would respond. Would such a development paralyze them as much as the recent IDF incursions into the West Bank? How would they reconcile it with the reigning paradigm of the conflict?