Karys Rhea
Gatestone Institute, Apr. 2, 2025
“It wasn’t just about the Europeans throwing money at the Palestinians or teaching them to build single structures. It was about teaching them how to think about the other families so they could cooperate and share land. Fayyad had the vision. The EU led him by the hand and gave the vision a soul.”
Yesterday, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced their commitment to “foil what they said was the Palestinian Authority’s scheme to seize land across Judea and Samaria.” Most of this vast, lawless land-grab, it turns out, has been energized and financed by the European Union (EU).
For decades, members of the media, activist groups, academics, international organizations, NGOs, and countless politicians have insisted that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are the primary obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. These settlements, the assumption goes, represent an illegal and inhumane “occupation,” and until they are dismantled and the territory handed over to a Palestinian state, there can be no resolution to the conflict.
Beyond these power-broker narratives exists another dimension to the story that is deliberately neglected worldwide. It is a far more labyrinthine and sinister tale — one of stunning hypocrisy, moral bankruptcy, quasi-legal bureaucracy and colossal abuse of international law — that exposes the questionable motivations of quite a few bad-faith actors at the core of an Israeli-European alliance supposedly based on “shared democratic values.”
The deception begins with a 2009 document, “The Fayyad Plan,” and ends with the unlawful Palestinian takeover of hundreds of thousands of dunams of land, with direct subsidies and encouragement from the EU. This land, under the internationally recognized and mutually agreed to Oslo Accords, rightfully belongs to Israel. ….SOURCE