Speaking at Likud-backed conference, Weiss says thousands of settlers are ready to move to Gaza, and Palestinians have 'lost the right' to be there

An Israeli settler leader has told a conference on Israel’s frontier with Gaza that Palestinians will “disappear” from the territory and said that thousands of people stand ready to move there "from north to south”.

Addressing a conference on Monday also attended by Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Knesset members from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, Daniella Weiss called for Palestinians living in Gaza to be relocated to other countries.

“We came here with one clear purpose: the purpose is to settle the entire Gaza Strip, not just part of it, not just a few settlements, the entire Gaza Strip from north to south,” said Weiss.

Weiss, the leader of Nachala, an orthodox settler movement which organised the conference, said there were six settler groups and more than 700 families looking to settle in Gaza, where more than 42,600 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its war against Hamas in October last year following the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel.

Weiss’s comments were echoed by Ben Gvir, who later told the crowd: “We are the owners of the land”. Ben Gvir also called for Palestinians in Gaza to “voluntarily” transfer to other countries.

Monday’s conference, which was billed by organisers as “a celebration for the preparation of settling Gaza", took place near Reim kibbutz, with the sound of Israel’s ongoing bombardment of northern Gaza audible in the background and with smoke rising over the horizon a few kilometres to the west.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 month ago

    Yes, we shouldn’t blame all Jews, but I’m a little confused, isn’t the concept of a promise land pretty central to Judaism?

    I don’t really like any religion but I think there is a religious “justification” here.

    I guess my question is, how is Zionism different than the concept of the promise land?

    • @KeeponstalinOPEnglish
      3•1 month ago

      Ilan Pappe discusses the difference well. There were/are a few reasons, one being:

      They viewed Zionism as meddling with God’s will to retain the Jews in exile until the coming of the Messiah. They totally rejected the idea that Jews should do all they can to end the “Exile.” Instead, they had to wait for God’s word on this and in the meantime practice the traditional way of life.

      Chapter 2 and 3 tackle your question pretty comprehensively

      Quotes

      More serious analysis came from biblical scholars who were not influenced by Zionism, such as Keith Whitelam, Thomas Thompson, and the Israeli scholar, Israel Finkelstein, all of whom reject the Bible as a factual account of any significance. Whitelam and Thompson also doubt the existence of anything like a nation in biblical times and, like others, criticize what they call the “invention of modern Israel” as the work of pro-Zionist Christian theologians.

      In the particular case of the claims of nineteenth-century Zionism, it is not the historical accuracy of those claims that matters. What matters is not whether the present Jews in Israel are the authentic descendants of those who lived in the Roman era, but rather the state of Israel’s insistence that it represents all the Jews in the world and that everything it does is for their sake and on their behalf. Until 1967, this claim was very helpful for the state of Israel.

      The third critique on Zionism in its early days came from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish establishment. To this day, many ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities vehemently oppose Zionism, although they are much smaller than they were in the late nineteenth century and some of them moved to Israel and are now part of its political system. Nonetheless, as in the past, they constitute yet another non-Zionist way of being Jewish. When Zionism made its first appearance in Europe, many traditional rabbis in fact forbade their followers from having anything to do with Zionist activists. They viewed Zionism as meddling with God’s will to retain the Jews in exile until the coming of the Messiah. They totally rejected the idea that Jews should do all they can to end the “Exile.” Instead, they had to wait for God’s word on this and in the meantime practice the traditional way of life. While individuals were allowed to visit and study in Palestine as pilgrims, this was not to be interpreted as permission for a mass movement. The great Hasidic German Rabbi of Dzikover summed up this approach bitterly when he said that Zionism asks him to replace centuries of Jewish wisdom and law for a rag, soil, and a song (i.e. a flag, a land, and an anthem)