on this : " Whether it mollifies Arab Palestinians doesn't matter, and whether it will or won't doesn't concern me. It is purely a question of Israel abiding by its obligations as an occupying power. "....... " on October 6 " .
The Israeli Left is a small minority who have always campaigned against the occupation and for a Two State Solution which we think is our only chance for Peace .....but on October 7th everything changed.
Now the average Israeli is beginning to understand that there is a price to pay for ignoring the injustices towards the Palestinians living in the Wild West Bank .
Why ?........because now all of us are suffering from this governments policy .
See :
The West Bank Occupation Outweighed Israel's Defense of the Gaza Border on the Eve of October 7
The Israeli military's principal aim was defending the settlements in the West Bank – that is, maintaining the occupation and enforcing it on the Palestinians. The enemy understood quite well what an opportunity had fallen into its lap
Reading the numbers is physically painful, but it's both wrong and impossible to ignore them.
On October 7, the Israel Defense Forces had 400 combat soldiers and a dozen tanks stationed on the border of the Gaza Strip facing thousands of Hamas fighters. A larger force, four or five battalions, was deployed on the Lebanese border, but it was also numerically inferior to Hezbollah (Amos Harel, Haaretz, February 16).
Yet the force stationed in the West Bank on that day was much larger, 21 or 22 battalions. It was even bolstered at the last minute with two companies from the Southern Command's reserve due to tensions over the sukkah that MK Tzvi Succot built in Hawara.
You don't have to be the IDF chief of staff or head of the army's Operations Directorate to understand that defending the borders was a secondary mission for the army on the eve of the war. The military's principal aim was defending the settlements in the West Bank – that is, maintaining the occupation and enforcing it on the Palestinians.
The occupation was allotted a force five times larger than the one in the north and 10 times larger than the one in the south. And the relative strength of these forces reflected the national order of priorities. The settlements came first, and communities in the Galilee and along the Gaza border barely made it into last place.
This massive diversion of forces to the West Bank began in March 2022, under the "government of change" led by Naftali Bennett, which was worried by a wave of terror attacks that had reached Tel Aviv and Hadera. It responded by doubling forces in the West Bank and along the "seam line" between Israel and that territory, from 15 battalions to 28 or 29 (an operation the IDF dubbed Break the Wave). This force was later thinned out a bit, after the attacks in Israel died down.
At the end of that year, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power at the head of a fully right-wing government. The government's guidelines declared that the Jewish people had exclusive rights to "the entirety of the Land of Israel," and then Netanyahu appointed Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key posts. From then on, it was clear that protecting the settlements was the supreme military mission.
In retrospect, it's clear that the army's enslavement to the protection of the settlements and the fact that the north and south had been emptied of combat troops were among the main causes of the catastrophe on October 7. The enemy understood quite well what an opportunity had fallen into its lap.
Continued @
https://archive.md/kjwZR#selection-1119.0-1786.0
Source : Haaretz
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