In the end the sanctions, long blocked by Orban’s Hungary, have arrived. «EU foreign ministers have just given the green light to sanctions against Israeli settlers for violence against Palestinians. They also agreed to new sanctions against senior Hamas figures. It was time we moved from impasse to realization. Extremism and violence have consequences». The High Representative for Foreign Policy, Kaja Kallas, relaunches the decision with a post byattacking people verbally and otherwise, preventing them from harvesting olives and even putting up barbed wire to block children’s way to school, the European Union has intervened with a customs blockade that will affect the main Israeli organizations and their leaders who support the extremist and violent colonization of the West Bank.
«Israel has always defended, defends and will continue to defend the right of Jews to settle in the heart of our homeland. No other people in the world have such a documented and consolidated right to their land as that of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel”, was the response of the Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who declared the European sanctions “unacceptable”.
The prime minister’s latest interview was not enough to avert the decision Netanyahu who had minimized the behavior of the settlers against the Palestinian community, including the Christians of the Holy Land, and of the Israeli soldiers who mock religious symbols.
From the crucifix being hammered to the Madonna with a cigarette in her mouth to the destruction, with bulldozers, of a school run by nuns in Lebanon and the nun pushed and kicked in the heart of Jerusalem, it is a continuum of abuse and intimidation. And while Netanyahu continues to maintain that Christians are protected and prosper in the Holy Land, the data says that 200 Christian families have already left Bethlehem alone, 700 people in totalexperienced by years of lack of tourists and checkpoint closures with very little possibility of moving to go to work in Jerusalem.
The growing violence of the settlers, who last January also threatened two of our carabinieri and made them kneel down, is also explained by the impunity that the Israeli government guarantees. In fact, if in words, international protests are responded to by minimizing and declaring that light will be shed on what is happening, in facts new settlements are authorized, 34 in the last few weeks alone. «The settlers we knew as civilians», he recently said in an interview with the monthly magazine Una Città sociologist Guy Aznar, Israeli activist of the Ta’ayush Association (“Lived together”) engaged in the defense of human rights and resistance against the occupation of the Palestinian territories, «who came to harass and attack the Palestinians and us too, now they are equipped with uniforms that make them in some way official figures; they also have weapons and are using them.
Today they are the ones who dictate the law. The law is in their hands. In some cases they present themselves openly saying: “We are the law” and actually do what they want.”
