Israeli settlers seek to confiscate more land: Academic

Press TV has conducted an interview with Saeed Nimer, a professor of political science at Birzeit University in Ramallah, to discuss the ongoing Israeli settlers’ attacks against Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: We are seeing an increase; it appears to be an increase in attacks by settlers against the Palestinians themselves and also their property. Why do you think this is happening? Do you think that the settlers want to see a conflict take place between the Palestinians and themselves?

Nimer: As a matter of fact the settlers are now accustomed to what they are doing mostly in these areas and especially in Nablus area where you can find those ideological settlers. Today it was the burning of land and a huge amount of land was burned connecting three Palestinian villages - Burin, Arak Burin and Einabus. The whole idea from the settlers is to attack these areas, to burn everything including the olive trees in there and then the land will be empty and in this case they can claim it or they can enlarge their settlements or confiscate more and more land.  

So it is a kind of a calculated event from the settlers to do that in order to first of all, aggression against the Palestinians and to retreat the Palestinians back into their villages and at the same time to annex this land to the settlements or to confiscate it and to take it over.

All these acts by the settlers recently, it became really out of order. It is quite clear that all the encouragement done by the right-wing Israeli government to the settlers had encouraged them to attack the Palestinians and to attack villages and to do burning and all kind of atrocities against the Palestinians. On one hand the Israeli government is condemning the Jewish terror as they said according to Netanyahu and on the other hand they are giving them millions of Shekel every year to develop their settlements. It is quite clear that the Israeli government policies in the West Bank is encouraging those settlers to do more even than that.

Press TV: It seems to be that the sense of basically that nothing is going to happen to them is very much a part of the psyche of the settlers because we have seen now two Palestinians from that one house who have died now. We have seen people outraged and in the middle of all this now we see actually land being attacked.

What do you attribute this type of what it appears to be arrogance that even in the middle of this they continue to actually commit this type of terrorism against the Palestinians?  

Nimer: Yes as we said earlier these are what we call them the ideological settlers and they believe that the whole of Palestine is theirs. As a matter of fact from their point of view Israel should be from Euphrates to Nile so they claim the land and they are doing everything according to their ideology and their understanding that they want to kick the Palestinians out and to take all their land.

Now we need to confront these settlers and that should be on at least two ways. One concerning the Israeli government and pressurizing the Israeli government internationally and also locally and on the other hand we have the settlers and we have to deal with the settlers. The Palestinians had to develop a kind of a strategy now to confront these two elements - the Israeli government whether going to the ICC or the international community on the one hand but at the same time we need to take more measures locally against the settlers and against the Israeli occupation whether that will be in a popular kind of movement to boycott and to have guardian committees in all villages and to start really do something against these settlers. It is not just only taking the hits by the settlers and not doing something in return.

To remind you that in both Intifadas - the first one and the second one - number of settlers dropped dramatically in the occupied territories so usually when there is a kind of violence or there is a kind of retaliation by the Palestinians to the settlers, the settlers do not even come to the settlements. They live inside Israel and they do not even bother to come to the settlements. So we need to develop this kind of strategy to put back and to fight back these settlers and to end all their atrocities.

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