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”.

  • Silverseren@fedia.ioOP
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    3 months ago

    I honestly feel like if the national powers at the time had been actually serious about the Jewish people deserving a homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust, then Israel should have been created out of a portion of western Germany.

    • Danquebec@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      Make space in Europe for the JEWS?! When there’s plenty of land that has only brown people in it?!

      The reasoning was that, I think.

    • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 months ago

      Zionists would not have wanted that. Establishment of a Jewish state around Jerusalem is a core idea of Zionism and Jerusalem is not in West Germany.

      The plan to realize this ideology is much older than the Holocaust.

      It is not about having a safe place to stay, it’s about religion.

      • WanderingVentra@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        It is pretty funny that they discussed a bunch of other places, too, including Uganda, and shot down a bunch of them because they were inhabited and weren’t sure how the locals would react or there were already white settlers in the area. The irony 🙄

    • oberstoffensichtlich@feddit.org
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      3 months ago

      The Jewish people have a right to self determination and had many good reasons to leave Europe for their ancestral homeland. Offering Jews a different homeland failed with the Jewish Oblast in the Soviet Union.

      Herding European Jews into a new Ghetto while displacing Germans would not have gone well.

      • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Now do Palestinians. Did they not have a right to their own land they were already on?

        • oberstoffensichtlich@feddit.org
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          3 months ago

          Sure Palestinians have a claim to the land as well. That’s what this whole conflict is about: competing claims over the same land.

          • WanderingVentra@lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            They can’t both have a right to the same land without sharing it. This is the problem with ethnostates.

            • oberstoffensichtlich@feddit.org
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              2 months ago

              Israel is less of an ethnostate than many other European and Asian countries.

              Sharing the land in some kind of two state solution, federation, Emirates/Kanton system, is possible.