Israeli law distinguishes between informal – or illegal – settlements, and others built with the consent of the Israeli judiciary. However, international law considers all settlements to be illegal. On my behalf and the behalf of some friends, I say that all of Israel is an illegal settlement on Palestinian land. Israel will never be deemed legitimate by any authority in the world. To be sure, the only side that can grant it this legitimacy is the Palestinians, only after their independent state is established alongside Israel. I am talking about Israel because many Arabs are now talking about Iran. They are geniuses, heroes and emperors who ignore an existing nuclear arsenal that is a threat to their peoples and their lands, and focus instead on a faltering Iranian nuclear program and a nuclear weapon that only exists in the imaginations of the Arabs of these latter days. To them, I want to say that the Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Benny Gants recently ruled out that Iran possesses a nuclear bomb. I am now hearing claims that Iran is a bigger ‘danger to us' than Israel. It does not suffice to say that I reject this, but I would like to also challenge the proponents of this claim to poll the Arabs and Muslims, in order to learn their opinion, and whether those who are scaremongering against Iran have any credibility among our peoples today. With this backdrop in mind, I remind the Arabs and Muslims of what Israel and its supporters are perpetrating, both in the east and the west, but especially in the United States – and which we yet hear nothing about, because there is something more important, as those who do not feel threatened by Israel are claiming. The war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu has approved the construction of four informal settlements that the Israeli courts had ruled to be illegal. Meanwhile, the settlement policy in Jerusalem, Hebron and in all of the West Bank will end up with the Holy Sanctuary itself being settled, even though there are no Jewish traces there, and certainly no traces of the Temple of Solomon or Solomon himself there. Haaretz itself said that Lt. Col Shalom Eisner, who assaulted a Danish peace activist named Andreas Las when he hit him with his rifle butt in the face, represents the image of the Israeli society of today. Despite this, there are those amongst us who do not want to see this image. In the United States, there are many who fail to notice Israel's crimes, including a pro-Israeli organization at the University of California that attacked associate professor David Shorter, because he linked a course he teaches to a campaign for boycotting Israel. In other words, Likudnik American university professors want to stifle the opinion of their own colleague. The campaign against Israel in American universities is known by its initials BDS, which stand for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. But even the Israel lobby and the entire Likudnik American media cannot ban the BDS campaign, which exists in nearly every university campus in the country. Last month, the largest Hispanic student association in the U.S. endorsed the BDS campaign, and this month, the association's chapter in the Northwestern United States followed suit. Meanwhile, a student government at the University of Massachusetts decided unanimously to boycott Boeing because it has military ties with Israel and because it benefits from it. Furthermore, there is an ongoing legal battle in Minnesota, and the plaintiffs include moderate Jews, calling for prohibiting the State from investing in Israeli government bonds, because they are used in funding settlement and other activities prohibited by international law, in the West Bank. I do not exonerate the Iranian regime at all from the occupation of three islands that belong to the UAE, and I support the liberation of these islands by all possible means - bar military ones so that Muslims do not fight among themselves. I also accuse the regime in Tehran of promoting Persian nationalism, even when it was us who had guided them to Islam. But Iran is nothing compared to Israel and its crimes. Recently, Israel's fascist government banned an Israeli book, even though it was approved for the school curriculum by the Ministry of Education, because it recounts how the Palestinians were displaced from their lands in 1948, and how lands were confiscated to build settlements in the seventies. Today, the criminal government of Israel is preventing the Palestinians from accessing their farm lands in the West Bank, according to Human Rights Watch. Settlement is expanding every day, homes are being seized in Jerusalem, and all is left for us is to one day hear that Al-Aqsa has fallen in their hands, while we are obsessing with a nonexistent threat from Iran, and perhaps tomorrow from Bhutan. [email protected]
