With US backing, Israel has already set in motion de facto annexation of lands in the West Bank

Banner: The hilly city of Hebron with the walled Tomb of the Patriarchs at the center. Photo: Zarni, Jan. 2025

The “transfer of people out of Gaza is, for them, the perfect precedent because what they really want is to transfer 3 million more Palestinians out of the West Bank,” said the prominent American diplomat Richard Haas, former director of Policy Planning at the US State Department, a presidential adviser and ex-President of the Council on Foreign Relations who spelled out what the increasingly Far-Right Israel desires to do with the Palestinians living on their own land. Haas uttered these chilling words during his appearance on CNN’s GPS show with Fareed Zakaria.

On the New York-based Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman this week, the Palestinian journalist and writer Mariam Barghouti stressed that Israel is annexing de facto Palestinian lands, in northern parts of the West Bank. In the last 35 days, Israel has violently expelled more than 40,000 Palestinians from Jenin, Tulkarm, and Tubas while the heavily armed settlers in Jericho and Hebron in the south are threatening the Palestinian natives to leave their homes by killing 57 Palestinians including 8 children.

On 23 February, the Financial Times quoted Israel’s defence minister Israel Israel Katz as saying he ordered the Israeli military “to prepare for an extended stay in the camps that have been cleared for the coming year, and not to allow residents to return”.

These illegal moves towards, in effect, the annexation of lands is being justified on the bogus claims of destroying “terrorist infrastructure” while Israel’s expanding scheme of land grab is framed in the biblical narrative of the Jews returning to their biblical homeland. In the CNN interview mentioned above, Richard Haas added that the Israeli chose to call the West Bank by its biblical name Judea and Sumara.

On this subject of Israeli floating their expansionist vision openly, increasingly in the international arena, using biblical references, the eminent American scholar and activist on Palestine, Emeritus Professor of International Law Richad Falk of Princeton University, further explained thus:

“The Biblical references, Judea and Samaria, has long been used in Hebrew discourse about the future of the West Bank, especially internally by Israeli leaders, but was not previously used internationally in deference to the broad consensus among state and at the UN on treating the areas of Palestine West of the Jordan River by English language names in the period of the British Mandate. Reference to the biblical names within.

Israel conveyed to Israeli public that the governing leadership had not given up its resolve to incorporate the West Bank within the boundaries of its territorial sovereignty whenever political conditions were favourable to such an enlargement of Israel. although the claim, regardless its status in Jewish religious tradition had no modern legal or moral standing.”

Some years ago, Noam Chomsky was absolutely blunt on the insanity of Israelis and other Zionists’ attempts to use the Hebrew bible as if it were a land deed for Palestine. [See What Does The Bible Say About Palestine?]

In Chomsky’s words, “Biblical rights have absolutely no status. None. Nobody in the world can say two thousand years ago here is my story of what happened. Therefore, I have a right to do it now. You can’t live in the world like that. Nobody in the world ever make such a claim.”

In the same YouTube address, Chomsky stressed that every relevant international institution has long agreed that “Israel is the occupying power.”

As such, it is 100% bound by the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

The article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949 spells out that “(i)ndividual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

On 19 July 2024, in its advisory legal opinion, the International Court of Justice, the UN’s principal judicial organ based in the Hague, responded officially to the legal questions posed by the General Assembly on the legal consequences of Israel’s continued occupation of Palestine. Among the 7 conclusions are: “the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful; the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible; and the State of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

In blatant disregard for international law and the world’s court’s judicial advisory, Donald Trump un-presidentially declared that he wanted to move the entire 2.3 million survivors of the 15-months long genocide out of Gaza, which he callously termed “the demolition site.”

Trump’s words are indeed music to the ears of Messianic Israeli leaders represented by the likes of Bezalel Smotrich, “a lifelong settler” and the Finance Minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet. Born in a settlement in Syria’s Golan Heights under Israeli’s illegal occupation, Smotrich believes that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are part of biblical Israel and therefore rightfully belong to the Jews.

Another Messianic Israeli politician with extremist settler root is Itamar Ben Gvir, who resigned from his position as the Minister of National Security from Netanyahu’s coalition regime in protest of the Gaza ceasefire deal. Gvir hails from the settlements around the Old Hebron, a biblically important city to the Jews as the place of Abrahim, Isaac, Rachel etc., where Israel has deployed 4,000 troops to guard several hundred Israeli settler families, after having forcibly removed the city’s native Palestinians – numbering over 100,000.

One week before his resignation on 19 January, Itamar Ben Gvir, the leader of the Jewish Power Party, openly talked about his Ministry’s issuance of over 200,000 semi-automatic submachine guns – and doubling the munition allowance from 50 bullets per gun to 100 – among 800,000 Jewish settlers in hundreds of settlements that have come to dot the entire West Bank.

All settlements which are scattered all throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem are without doubt fully backed by all branches of the Israeli state while they are known to be subsidized by the government. The expansion of settlements is not in opposition to Israel’s policies. But rather, they are an integral component of Israeli’s state’s long-term plan to swallow up the officially UN-mandated Palestine (West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem) rending the emergence of an independent Palestinian state completely non-viable.

This past January I saw myself the conditions of the occupation for 30,000 Palestinians who resist by refusing to leave their ancestral homes or simply seek to move back in them, in the vast un-holly ghostly city.

In the occupied Old City, Issa Amro, the well-known non-violence Palestinian resister who received a 2024 Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award, told me, “Israeli authorities simply make our life here impossible, so that we would choose to leave our houses and land. The logic is that our abandoned homes, businesses and neighbourhoods would become available for Zionist Jews from the United States, Canada and elsewhere in the diaspora would move in.”

Ninety percent of the settlers are said to be American Jews.

A glimpse of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation in a place like Hebron is representative of life under occupation throughout the West Bank.

Palestinians in Hebron are not allowed to identify themselves as Palestinians when they go through checkpoints, which are ubiquitous throughout Hebron. No outward or visible symbols of Palestinian identity or nations can be seen anywhere in the Old City. Instead, the entire place is dotted with signs of Jewish historical and archaeological sites, blue Israeli flags, images of ultra-Orthodox rabbis, checkpoints with portable barbed wire road barriers, surveillance cameras and sniper booths.

Additionally, Israeli security troops in Hebron typically humiliate, physically abuse, throw verbal insults, confiscate cell phone or clothing, strip-search, seek to provoke, arbitrarily detain Hebron’s resident Palestinians, young and old, and simply subject the resident Palestinians, young and old, to numerous degrading treatments. All their misdeeds are carried out routinely with blanket impunity not just in Hebron but across the Occupied Territories.

Palestinians are subject to the occupier’s military “law” while the Jewish Israelis are subject to normal civil law one finds in functioning democracies around the world. In the categorically apartheid system which Israel has built, all Jews, Zionist or not, in Israel and in the diaspora, are accorded incomparably greater rights – including the right of return – political and civil rights, and full and equal citizenship rights vis-à-vis millions of Palestinians, in various zones of occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel, living in the 1948 territories of Israel.

As a student of genocides, I see a chilling parallel between Israel’s illegal but dogged pursuit of “Greater Israel” and the Third Reich in the 1930’s with Hitler’s expansionist scheme for Lebensaum or living space for the “pure blooded” Germans).

As antisemitic as it may sound, there most certainly exists a parallel between Nazi Germany and Zionist Israel insofar as the nature of the two regimes, their mono-racial political states and the modus operandi towards land and the “inferior” populations.

But then again in the delusional minds of the Zionists and their diasporic patrons in USA, Canada, Australia and Europe, “the world hate us (Jews) because they are all anti-Semitic… Nothing is their fault; everything is someone else’s fault”, as pointed out by Noam Chomsky in his conversation with Ilan Pepe (See On Palestine by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, Penguin, 2015, p. 99).

On Israel’s genocidal brutality and sinister discourses around the 21st century land theft, no self-respecting intellectual will tiptoe around this suffocating charge of “antisemitism”, even in this kind of ultra-delusional ideological climate, particularly in the Anglo-European world of USA, Canada, Australia, UK, and Germany.

Whatever their differences in justificatory discourses – state’s chosen Aryans vs “God’s chosen people”, today’s Isreal and 1930’s Germany share a commonality: the ever-expansive land via wars of choice for the growth and development of their respective nations, pursued as mono-ethnic political states.

In his seminal essay on genocide, Ralphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish legal scholar and activist, turned to Hitler’s writings and Nazi declarations to articulate his original conception of genocide as a coordinated plan of destroying identity-based populations whose land perpetrators lust after.

Lemkin quoted Hitler thus: “We are obliged to depopulate,” (italics original), he went on “… emphatically, as part of our mission of preserving the German population. We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. If you ask me what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of the entire racial units. And that is what I intend to carry out….”

Those were Adolf Hitler’s words as quoted verbatim by his guest and writer Dr Herman Rausching, uttered as early as 1932, a year before the Nazis came to power.

Many commentators including a small number of highly respected Israeli scholars and journalists including Ilan Pepe and Gideon Levy, have lamented Israel’s far-right turn, embracing the non-existent biblical rights over Israel’s security and peace for everyone in the region.

In On Palestine (2015, p. 100), in his recorded conversation (dated 17 January 2014) with Israeli historian Ilan Pepe and the editor Frank Barat, Chomsky noted “a very strong shift in Israeli mentality and politics toward the right, nationalism”, before proceeding to observe its manifestations.

However, it is Rev. Dr Munther Isaac of Bethlehem, the renowned Palestinian liberation theologian and Christ at the Checkpoint Conference Director, who nailed it. In his face-to-face conversation with us a group of international scholars and activists, the Rev. identified “ethnic cleansing” as Israel’s fundamental character – and modus operandi, irrespective of which party (– parties) is in power.

In his own words, “Israel is a settler colony. (Israelis) did not come here (to Palestine) to seek refuge. They came here to build their country on someone else’s land. This by definition necessitates ethnic cleansing.”

In his substack of It is Dark Before the Dawn (21 February 2025), Professor Ilan Pappé of Exeter University in UK, himself a Jewish Israeli, and the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) echoed strongly Rev. Isaac’s observation. All scholars and observers of such criminal projects originating in Europe, also the engine behind “franchise colonialisms” (for instance, the Dutch in the Indies, the French in Indochina, the British in the Indian sub-continent), connect the dots between the settlers on the ground and the Empire in some distance metropole.

It is worth quoting Ilan Pappé at length:

“Zionism is a similar phenomenon to the movement of Europeans who created the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. This idea helps us to understand much better the nature of the Zionist project in Palestine since the late 19th century until today, and it gives us an idea of what to expect in the future.

 The settlers followed the most important logic adopted by settler colonial movements, and that is that in order to create a successful settler colonial community outside of Europe you have to eliminate the natives in the country you have settled. This means that the indigenous resistance to this logic was a struggle against elimination, and not just liberation. This is important when one thinks about the operation of the Hamas and other Palestinian resistance operations ever since 1948.

The settlers themselves, as was the case of many of the Europeans who came to North America, Central America or Australia, were refugees and victims of persecution. Some of them were less unfortunate and were just seeking a better life and opportunities. But most of them were outcasts in Europe and were looking to create a Europe in another place, a new Europe, instead of the Europe that didn’t want them. In most cases, they chose a place where someone else already lived, the indigenous people. And thus, the most important core group among them was that of their leaders and ideologues who provided religious and cultural justifications for the colonization of someone else’s land. One can add to this the need to rely on an Empire to begin the colonization and maintain it, even if at the time the settlers rebelled against the empire that helped them and demanded and achieved independence, which in many cases they obtained and then renewed their alliance with empire.”

Donald Trump’s Representative to the United Nations Elise Stefanik and his Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee both share biblical Zionist views. In her Senate Confirmation hearing, Stefanik emphatically stated that she embraced Israel’s “biblical rights” over post-Holocaust international law and norms. US Ambassador to Israel, the Christian Zionist preacher and former governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee reportedly even dismisses the existence of Palestinians as a people.

In a recent Zoom meeting with international supporters of a Free Palestine, which I participated in, Dr Mustafa Barghouti, the Palestinian doctor, activist and member of the Palestinian Council since 2006, has not only confirmed these worrying assessments that the Far-Right Israelis and their American have already embarked on the depopulation scheme in the West Bank sub-regions of Jenin and Tulkarm.

Earlier this week on Instagram, the well-known British activist and journalist Sarah Wilkinson posted Israeli’s chilling message via loud speakers indicative of the Zionists’ planned ethnic cleansing at one of the two largest refugee camps named Nur Shams, in Tulkarm district, north west of Ramallah: “Whoever remains in the camp will die”.

As has been typical of all European colonizing projects, the justification for land theft, property loot and “elimination” of the natives on the land (mass murder, planned, not spontaneous or even retaliatory) is rooted in the language of God and Civilization.

In my visit to the Old Hebron last month as part of the international delegation of conscience, I saw a large billboard that presents Zionist Jews’ settlerism in the city as an act of restoring historical justice. Hebron is considered holy by all three Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Ilam and Judaism.

Israel as a settler colonial project which began a little over one hundred years ago has entered an extremely vicious, fanatical and mass-murderous stage. It is chilling to observe that Zionists’ stars seem to be aligning with the rise of Donald Trump’s version of American Fascism which paradoxically accommodates different strains of deadly ideologies including a very influential Christian Zionism in the United States, far-right white nationalism of MAGA and Messianic Political Zionism which dismiss international law, the United Nations judicial organs and the global opinions of the moral majority in favour of the Hebrew Bible.

Maung Zarni