The girls, aged 14 to 16, have come for settler training to learn how to occupy Palestinian land — breaking international law. “God promised us this land and told us if you don’t take it, bad people will try and take it and you will have a war,” says Emuna Billa, 19, one of the camp supervisors. “Why do we have a war in Gaza? Because we don’t take Gaza.”
Their guru is Daniella Weiss, a 79-year-old grandmother in a long skirt and patterned headscarf. Founder of the Nachala or Homeland movement, she has been setting up illegal settlements for 49 years and was recently put under international sanctions. “You will be the new emissaries,” she tells the 50 or so girls at the camp. “I call it redeeming, not settling and this is our duty.”
She unfurls a map of Israel and the Palestinian territories dotted with vivid pink house symbols to represent existing and proposed Jewish settlements. Not only are these all across the West Bank, but also in Gaza. Already 674 people have signed up for beachside plots there, she tells me, and “many more want to join”. When someone asks her about settling Lebanon she smiles and says, “Yes, there too”.
And this isn’t even the first time we’ve realized this either. Look at Ireland, and how they only achieved peace when they enforced equality with their power sharing agreement. Heck, look at the entire EU. Instead of Germany and France invading each other every 30 years, they just said “fuck it”, and let their citizens live on both sides of the border. Trying to create ethnostates and encourage division never works.
At this point the only serious solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict is the “one state solution”.
Two states with some kind of federation or union is a more realistic idea.
A one state would only result in civil war and we end up right back where we are. The failure of one state in the Mandate for Palestine is of historic record.