Jewish Settlements Are The REAL Story In The Paris Attacks

By Saeb Erekat

The mainstream media are missing the point of the recent shooting attacks in France. It isn’t about rising Islamism, or the failure to integrate hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants. It isn’t about the availability of guns, or even about the apparent incompatibility of liberal values with Islam. It’s really about Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. It’s so plain as to be obvious, and it troubles me that I need to point that out.

Jewish settlements are the real story in other developing situations, as well, but the Zionist-controlled media will never tell you that. I’m not even talking about wacky conspiracy theories regarding the Mossad being behind the Charlie Hebdo shootings – that’s just too unbelievable. I’m talking about the basics, such as looking at who stands to gain from all this tragedy: Israeli settlements. All this violence will move more French Jews to emigrate, and some will inevitably end up where Israel encourages people to live: in settlements built on land stolen from Palestinians, who have always been here no matter what the archaeologists and so-called family trees say.

In fact Jewish settlements are always the bottom line. Any events that divert international attention from the worst crime against humanity imaginable – Jews living where they want – must perforce be approached with the question of why anyone would seek to divert the world’s attention from that. This holds true regardless of whether the event in question is the work of humans or Nature. Since, as we Palestinians have always maintained, the rape of Palestinian land by Zionists is a crime against the natural order, it stands to reason that Nature would show her displeasure with humanity every now and then for not doing more to combat this scourge.

That, incidentally, is why President Abbas signed a number of ecological and environmental treaties last week in addition to the Rome Statute. The only way to stop natural disasters is to remove their root cause, and we Palestinians know there’s only one root cause: the Occupation. If we show Mother Nature we’re on her side by using those environmental treaties as a cudgel with which to beat Israel, we can spare ourselves the typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, dust storms, climate change, floods, and other catastrophes that occurred much more rarely before Zionism. You can look it up.

All the people and groups reacting to the killings in Paris are barking up the wrong tree. The hashtags and placards we should be seeing are #JeSuisPalestine. Who do those Frenchpeople think they are, usurping our cause to promote an issue of only marginal importance? The real story is Jewish settlements. If France is made part of the story it is only relevant insofar as one might ask whether France has advanced or hindered the anti-settlement cause.

Let us, then collectively resolve as societies to keep the issue of Jewish settlements at the top of our agenda. Other causes, such as the actual prosperity and liberty of Palestinians, can wait. The longer, the better. Because if the issue of Jewish settlement is resolved, that means it can no longer be the world’s top priority. And that would be tragic.