Israel has said it will establish 22 new settlements in the occupied West Bank, including the legalisation of outposts already built without government authorisation, after a security cabinet vote held in secret last week.
Israel occupied the West Bank, capturing it from Jordan, in the six-day war of 1967. Since then, successive governments have tried to permanently cement Israeli control over the land, in part by declaring swathes as “state lands”, which prevents private Palestinian ownership.
The motion was said to have been put forward by the far-right defence minister, Israel Katz, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who lives in the West Bank settlement of Kedumim, which is considered illegal under international law.
There shouldn’t be a need for a two state solution in the first place, Israel was created in 1948 as a response to the Holocaust under the guise of the need for a “Zionist State” in response to the horrors of the Holocaust, when in reality it was just a power play to insert a friendly puppet government to act as a seat of power to exert influence over the middle east using the Jewish people as a scapegoat to call any westerners who opposed it “antisemitic”.