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The Zionist Conspiracy

A clandestine undertaking on behalf of Israel, the Jets and the Jews.

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Thursday, May 06, 2004
 
More Jerusalem Post Mistakes

I don't mean to go after The Jerusalem Post, but this week's column by Calev Ben-David makes yet another significant mistake. Ben-David wrote:

In the days immediately following the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in the Six Day War, the government approached the building of settlements as the logical fleshing-out of a country that was dangerously thin in the mid-section.

Thus the early focus by then-Labor governments on settling such areas as Gush Etzion, the Jerusalem suburbs, the Jordan valley, and the central Samarian hills region hugging the Green Line.

That relatively sensible "eating approach" was subsequently abandoned by the Likud, which under the influence of Gush Emunim went on a settlement-building binge whose raison d'etre was to simply render impossible any future attempt by Israel to reduce any of the territorial weight it acquired in 1967. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Gaza settlements.


In fact, it was Labor - not Likud - that formed the Gaza settlements. For example, Kfar Darom, one of the more isolated Gaza settlements, was formed in 1970 by the government led by Golda Meir. Kfar Darom had originally been established in 1946, but was destroyed by Arabs in the 1948 war. Labor later formed five other settlements in Gaza.

Certainly, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon are responsible for the significant expansion of the Gaza settlement enterprise, but Ben-David's suggestion that Labor pragmatically only established settlement in places like Gush Etzion, the Jordan Valley and western Samaria, and not Gaza, is completely inaccurate. Indeed, Labor leader Yigal Allon, who served us Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, called for annexation of Gaza.