By UMAR Abdurrahman
The Israeli government has allocated 700 million shekels ($187 million) in support of Israeli Jewish settlers in the illegal settlements near the Gaza Strip, local media reported on December 3rd, 2018. The Times of Israel reported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that this allocation was meant for economic programmes that “strengthen the resilience” of the settlers.
Illegal Israeli settlements are civilian communities inhabited by Israeli citizens under the protection of the Israeli military, almost exclusively of Jewish ethnicity, built predominantly on lands within the Palestinian territories, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip since the 1967 Six-Day War, and partly on lands considered Syrian territory also militarily occupied by Israel since the 1967 war. Such settlements within Palestinian territories currently exist in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, and within Syrian territory in the Golan Heights.
Israel’s illegal settlements receive 144 million shekels ($39 million) in government funding for regional councils, a new Knesset report revealed in October, 2018. The report found that the Israeli government gives $39 million to regional councils located in the occupied West Bank, which amounts to 25 per cent of Israel’s regional council budget, Ynet reported. This is despite the fact that West Bank councils only account for five per cent of all Israeli regional councils.
The findings of the report come just days after it emerged that Israeli taxpayers’ money was used to give loans to illegal settlers through the World Zionist Organisation (WZO). An investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed scores of documents which showed the WZO’s Settlement Division had provided mortgages for 26 illegal outposts and construction inside Israeli government-sanctioned settlements over the past 20 years. Both outposts and settlements are illegal under international law.
According to the Israeli investigative reporter Uri Blau, settlements received funding by private tax-exempt U.S. NGOs of $220 million for 2009–2013, suggesting that the U.S. is indirectly subsidizing their creation.
The international community considers the settlements in occupied territory to be illegal, and the United Nations has repeatedly upheld the view that Israel's construction of settlements constitutes a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
In April 2012, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon, in response to moves by Israel to legalise Israeli outposts, reiterated that all settlement activity is illegal, and "runs contrary to Israel's obligations under the Road Map and repeated Quartet calls for the parties to refrain from provocations." Similar criticism was advanced by the EU and the US. Israel disputes the position of the international community and the legal arguments that were used to declare the settlements illegal.
In December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 confirmed the illegality of the settlement enterprise and renders Israeli citizens involved with settling the West Bank vulnerable to lawsuits throughout the world.
The presence and ongoing expansion of existing settlements by Israel and the construction of settlement outposts is frequently criticized as an obstacle to the Israeli–Palestinian peace process by the Palestinians, and third parties such as the OIC, the United Nations, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, the European Union, and the United States have echoed those criticisms. Likewise, hardly any peace treaty or mandate has been left on broken.
The ensuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict resulted from the refusal of Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians on the portioning of their state. After the termination of British
Mandate in 1947, the Partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel has seen been conspired before the first wave of Jewish migration to Palestine in 1880. And Britain promised the Jews a Jewish National Home in Palestine (Balfour declaration) in 1917 during the course World War I and colonization (partitioning) of the Ottoman caliphate ( Muslim world).
Today, the Palestinian state is left with only a fraction of its state and the disjoint strip of Gaza on the coast.
If Palestinians hadn't resisted, their story would have concluded right then and there, and they too would have disappeared.