“The representatives of the settler organizations have recently declared their intention to establish 11 new settlements in the territories, including some, according to media reports, on privately-owned Palestinian land. The operation is being depicted as having been inspired by the 11 tower and stockade communities in the northern Negev that were established just before Yom Kippur in 1946. This is not the first time the settlers have compared their efforts to the settlement activities that provided the foundation for the establishment of the state. There is no basis for such a comparison, which is nothing more than an act of forgery and fraud.
The basic difference between the two undertakings is that the settlement project that preceded Israel’s establishment was intended to create the territorial basis for the future Jewish state. It wasn’t intended to deprive the Arabs of everything that was left or, for that matter, their right to a state of their own alongside the Jewish state.
The 11 settlements in the northern Negev, meanwhile, were meant to ensure the inclusion of the Negev in the Jewish state upon the expected partition of the Land of Israel into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
The current settlement campaign, on the other hand, like the unnecessary construction in East Jerusalem, is not designed to ensure the existence of the state of the Jews, but rather to deprive the Arabs of their state in the West Bank and their capital in Arab Jerusalem. That is precisely the difference between the just Zionism of self-defense and aggressive Zionism, which is totally dismissive of the Arabs and their human rights.
According to the settlers, the Jews have the right ‘to settle everywhere,’ and the Jews of course also have needs created by ‘natural growth.’ In their opinion, do the Arabs also have the right to settle everywhere, or is any construction by Arabs illegal for one reason or another? And don’t the Arabs have ‘natural growth’?
In the eyes of the settlers, the term ‘illegal’ only applies to Arabs, not to the settlers’ construction, because the source of their inspiration is divine and beyond the democratic context. According to this approach, the law only exists as a tool of the state, as the settlers’ subcontractor, to deprive the Arabs of what little is theirs.” (Read more from haaretz.com)