2023-12-14 18:02:14
Before starting the interview, Nadia Matar approaches with a voluminous The Bible in one hand and a little book on the palestinian history in the other. “The world has to choose which of the two it prefers,” she says before opening the Palestinian book and showing that all its pages are blank. “Palestinian history is an invention. All those who want a Palestinian state “They want the destruction of Israel,” he adds without blinking. Matar is one of the most active figures in the national religious movementthe ideological umbrella that encompasses the most radical sector of the Jewish settlersa mix of Zionist ultranationalism e religious fundamentalism. She is also a key activist in the movement’s plans to return to colonize Gaza with Jewish settlements once the war is over. “This time we will build big cities and repopulate them with 300,000 Jews,” he says from a nature reserve in the Occupied West Bank.
The devastating war waged by Israel and Hamas has opened a window of opportunity for Israeli expansionist rightwho has been dreaming of return to Gaza since Ariel Sharon dismantled the Jewish colonies of the enclave in 2005 and withdrew the Israeli troops that protected the more than 8,000 settlers who populated them. “After eliminating all the terrorists, we will offer the remaining Arabs to go to other countries. If the world cares so much about them, let them take care of them because Gaza will never be under them again. Arabic control. It is part of the land of Israel“, he says, repeating the brs of the plan proposed by the former Israeli ambassador to the UN and Likud deputy, Danny Dannon. An à la carte ethnic cleansing. He who does not want to leave, he adds, will be able to continue in the Strip as long as he accepts Israeli control.
Matar was born in Belgium and emigrated to Israel When I was 18. Today she has three of her six children fighting in Gaza and the lebanon borderwhile she co-leads an organization that advocates for annexation of Gaza and West Bankuntil now only occupied, so that they remain under Israeli sovereignty. A day after Hamas brutally killed hundreds of civilians in southern Israel, the Movement for Sovereignty which he heads sent a letter to Binyamin Netanyahu’s government urging it to pulverize the Strip. “The destruction of Gaza it’s a moral imperative“, he said in the line expressed by several political and military leaders of the country. “There are no innocents over there. You have the murderers, the mothers who raised them and those who celebrated the murder of Jews with candy,” she says, now firing her flamethrower. “We have to do the same thing that the allies did with Dresden e Hiroshima”.
A divided government against recolonization plans
The viability of his plans to recolonize Gaza after the war is still a mystery. The president of the United States, Joe Biden, has said that it would be “a big mistake,” while Netanyahu He maintained weeks ago that “it’s not realistic”. The military in its government of national unity, as Benny Gantz y Yoav Gallantthey don’t seem to be up for the job, but all the far right and the bulk of Likud of Netanyahu. Everything could depend on the new balance of forces that emerges from the presumed elections that will be held when the bombs fall silent, as well as what happens next November in the US presidential elections. “I don’t think we can do it without American support, so I hope that Trump go back to the White House,” Matar admits.
In another of the colonies of the settlement block of Gush Etzion all of them illegal under international law, lives Danny Halamish, another of the activists at the forefront of the movement. “Nothing that has happened to the Jewish people in their history was realistic, but it ended up happening,” he says in a coffee shop in Act. “He appeasement It hasn’t taken us anywhere. But this crisis is different. “Not only because of the number of Israelis killed in the terrorist attack, but because we have reached the end of the road.”
Although he is now 53 years old, Halamish considers himself part of the call Youth of the Hills (Hilltop Youth), the cubs of the movement who are dedicated to terrorizing Palestinians into leaving, burning their fields or avenging the deaths of settlers killed by armed resistance. For almost three decades he lived on one of those hills, specifically in Maale Rahavam, a proto-caravan settlement built on private Palestinian lands. But his members all ended up fighting and he chose to leave. “We Jews are like ‘The Life of Brian’“We fight to the death all the time over any stupid thing.”
His aspirations, however, have nothing banal. “We have to get rid of the arabs. First in Gaza, where not a single one can remain, and then in West Bank” Halamish says with as much restraint in tone as if he were talking about the weather. He doesn’t care that what he proposes may be a war crime or against humanity. “The solution to this crisis is to return to our Jewish identity. Our problem is that we have tried to assimilate by following the European criterion of what is right and wrong. The Bible urges us to take this land by force and it is our obligation to fulfill its command.”
Accelerate the ‘solution’ to the Palestinian problem
The current Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrichone of the leaders of the movement, has been advocating for years accelerate ‘the solution’ al palestinian problem, as Halamish also claims. But, for now, the priority is to recolonize Gaza. A dozen organizations, supported by politicians, rabbis and figures in the Army, have divided up the functions to make lobi in parliament, mobilize the population and lay out plans for what the new settlements in the Strip.
Nadia Matar’s organization is one of them. “We all have the same goal: to fulfill the zionist dream from a Jewish homeland from the Jordan River to the sea. And that is what we are going to do,” concludes the settler movement activist.
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