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Israel seeks to seize entire West Bank: Activist

Israeli security forces monitor the area where a Palestinian man allegedly tried to stab Israeli soldiers before being shot dead at a checkpoint near Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, February 26, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

Press TV has interviewed Bruce Katz, the co-president of Palestinian and Jewish Unity in Montreal, to discuss Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to deport relatives of alleged Palestinian attackers from the occupied West Bank to the besieged Gaza Strip.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: How do you feel about Prime Minister Netanyahu’s proposal?

Katz: Well there is certainly nothing surprising about it. It has been decades now where the … [regime] of Israel provokes violence on the part of the victim and calls the victim the aggressor. That is a lot like a mugger robbing a person at gunpoint, beating him up and then saying that the victim should go to prison for being beaten up and robbed which is basically what has been happening to the Palestinians over decades now.

It certainly would be one more incident in the long incidents and in long series of incidents that go under the title of war crimes and crimes against humanity but I think it also is part of the larger scheme to transfer Palestinians out of the West Bank because Israel has its eyes on seizing the entire West Bank and so the violence that is provoked is not an accident and as far as the settler violence which is a daily thing now.

As I have said in previous interviews on Press TV these settlers run the state of Israel now by way of the fact that basically they control the coalition government and as a matter of fact a few weeks ago was an opinion piece in Israeli newspaper Haaretz that said as much that these settlers run the state of Israel.

I think that this situation has simply gone too far. I think that there has to be a change in the power structure of the Palestinians. I have said for some time that it is the PLO that has to take over the reins of power that all of the different groups that make up the Palestinian political structure have to be included in the PLO and I think that is for the purpose of dealing with Israeli aggression.

I believe that strategically the Palestinians should shut down the Palestinian Authority and think about moving the Palestinian leadership out of Ramallah into Jordan, leave the entire burden, financial security burden for this illegal and brutal occupation entirely on the shoulders of Israel. Another thing would be is that if the Palestinian leadership were in Jordan would no longer have to accept funds from the United Nations through Israel as a middleman. Those funds could be channeled directly to Palestinian leadership in Jordan.

The situation is out of hand, cannot depend on Western puppet governments such as the one in Westminster, United Kingdom, in France, here in Canada when the parliament voted against BDS, cannot depend on them to enforce the rule of law and international law. That is going to have to come by way of pressure, external pressure exerted on Israel through Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions and also through the Palestinians doing something about their own power structure which can no longer be …, in my opinion be concentrated in the hands of the Palestinian Authority.  It has to be in the PLO, it has to be a revamped Palestine Liberation Organization.


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