Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was asked in an interview on 94FM on Monday what would happen on the day after the war, and responded: “Without the settlement enterprise it would be very difficult to control the territory.”
Needless to say, by “settlement enterprise” Minister Smotrich was referring to the 17 uprooted communities along the Gaza northern shore and on the southeastern part of the Strip.
“What we have done in the last thirty years is to run away from reality, and my opinion is that we must control both the security and civil aspects of the Gaza Strip,” Smotrich stated.
At that point, the interviewers asked: “Including settlements?”
And Smotrich responded, “Without the settlement enterprise it would be very difficult to control the territory.”
With that, Netanyahu’s finance minister essentially declared his desire to reverse an 18-year policy that views Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip as the mother of all evil.
Smotrich also said, “I’m not sure that giving the Palestinians an independent economy is something that will boost security. And transferring money to Gaza is a complete hallucination.”
“Even if we currently have cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, it doesn’t change the fact that they are an enemy,” said Smotrich, who is one of a very small group of right-wing politicians claiming that letting the PA collapse is much preferable to supporting this political fiction that’s mired in corruption and is openly pushing a terrorist agenda.
Smotrich, who also objects fiercely to the Biden administration’s plan to reinstate the folks from Ramallah as the rulers of Gaza, said, “Our soldiers are now fighting in the Strip and sacrificing their lives so that we will later hand the Strip over to the enemy? Not going to happen.”
“There are still a few tokens that have not yet dropped in the security apparatus,” said Smotrich, using the Israeli parallel to the “lightbulb moment,” which is when the token drops in your payphone.
Yours truly firmly believes that metaphors that use ancient technological references should be avoided at all costs.
