Jasper Nathaniel (43:25)
Exactly. Yeah. Final Solution had been used by somebody else who I'm blanking on. So they went with Decisive Plan, and it's become a canonical document for the settlers. And when you read it, and I've read it like 40 times, it's truly awful to read. But you see where all of the moves are coming from. And so specifically, what I want to just point to is what Smoter says is that there's no room for two national longings, nationalist longings, in what he calls Judea and Samaria. There can only be one. And he's actually very careful in this particular document to not frame it as violent towards Palestinians. He tries to make it a really practical document. He's like, look, let's just be real. There's no way we could have a Palestinian self determination here while also having a Jewish state here. So what are we going to do about it? And what, what his solution amounts to is three different options that they're going to provide to what he calls the Arabs of Judea and Samaria. The first one is subjugation. And it basically means that the Palestinians commit to being colonial subjects of Israel. They literally have to swear their allegiance to the Israeli state and declare that they're not interested in any sort of self determination. And if they do that, they are then allowed to live there as sort of subjects. So that's option one. Option two is emigration. And he's very generous in the document and saying, we'll pay you to leave, we'll make it easy for you, we'll grease the wheels on your way out and it'll be voluntary and it'll be natural because people will want a better place to live. And then the third option is just brute force. He basically says, for anybody who does not give in to one or two will fight you to the death. And we're the ones with the bombs and the jets and the tanks and stuff. And so most people know about everything in the west bank is it's all domination, it's all subjugation. So the first one is very clear. The third one, brute force. Also it's clear how the Israeli military is using brute force against the Palestinians, particularly in the refugee camps in the north, which they have carpet bombed. But it's the second option, the immigration, that I think that these real estate policies, the new real estate policies in the cabinet decisions, it's the second one that they focus on. And so what I mean by that is Israel has done a really effective job of making life completely miserable for Palestinians in the West bank for 60 years, really. But specifically over the past three years, they've made it. They've revoked 100,000 work permits for people who actually were working in Israel. They have strangled the financial system and the economy. They have put up checkpoints everywhere, they've hemmed communities in, they've made it really miserable for people. And now what they want to do is, is make it really easy for them to leave. Not that dissimilar from what they're doing in Gaza, where they talk about this emigration, or what I think we would call ethnic cleansing, as if it's humanitarian initiative. They want a better life somewhere, so we should give them a better life. And then once they're gone, we'll turn Gaza into the Riviera. In the west bank, what these new real estate laws do is it makes it really easy for Israelis to go directly to Palestinians in the west bank and buy their land from them. And that is significant for a number of reasons. The main thing is that since 67, there's been. Well, since before 67, actually, from Ottoman times, it was illegal for Arabs in the west bank to sell land to non Arabs, to sell their land to non Arabs. And then that also was law in the Jordanian rule period. And once the occupation began, the occupation actually has to uphold the laws of the occupied people. And so what that means is that the Jordanian law around Palestinian land not being able to be sold directly to Israelis has been in effect for all these years now. There's been a workaround, which is basically that settlers can go and register a company inside of the west bank, get what's called a transaction permit, and go through these sort of bureaucratic steps, and then they can use that to then buy land directly from a Palestinian, since now they're doing it as, like, a company. But what those bureaucratic steps did was, number one, it made it much more difficult to pull off fraud and forgery, which is really common when Palestinians don't want to sell their land. Settlers will sometimes just forge documents. But notably, what it did was it gave the Israeli military the ability to basically veto any of these purchases. And the reason that's significant is because, remember, the Israeli military, for all of its cruelty and brutality, does not necessarily have the same agenda, or up until recently, I should say, has not had the same agenda as a settlement move. They're more concerned with maintaining stability and, frankly, ruling with an iron fist. But what that means is that for settlers to go deep into a Palestinian city, for example, in Area A, where they're not supposed to be at all, that creates a problem for the military. They then have to go in there and protect them, and they're obligated to protect settlers wherever they go. And so before these new laws, what you've been seeing is settlers peeling off from their settlements, going deep into Palestinian territory, setting up what are called illegal outposts, which means they've not gotten Israeli approval for them. And then from those outposts, they go and terrorize communities, they provoke you know, a response. Sometimes the Israeli military comes in and you know, the area is eventually cleared out and then it becomes an Israeli settlement. What they've done now is created a legal route to do all of that. So anybody can now go through the records which have now been opened up. So this is another thing. They opened up the public registry so you can see who owns plots of land anywhere in the west bank, including in area A. You can go directly to these people and offer to buy it from them. And now the military can't step in and say you can't buy it there because that would create a problem for us.
