‘Israel policy rooted in genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians’

A former US Senate candidate and political analyst says Israeli policy is rooted in genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Mark Dankof, who is also a broadcaster and pastor in San Antonio, Texas, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Tuesday while commenting on US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro’s recent statement.

Speaking at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) conference in Tel Aviv on Monday, Shapiro condemned the Tel Aviv regime for unjustly treating Palestinians, saying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu applies separate “standards” of justice for Israelis and Palestinians.

“Too many attacks on Palestinians lack a vigorous investigation or response by Israeli authorities; too much vigilantism goes unchecked; and at times there seem to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Israelis and another for Palestinians,” Shapiro said.

Dankof said Shapiro’s comments in Israel to the effect that the American government is perplexed about Israeli settlement policy is “absolute nonsense - it’s not perplexing at all. The fact of the matter is that it’s all about money.”

“The United States bankrolled Israel with direct bilateral military aid in 2015 to the tune of 3.7 billion dollars which works out as 10.2 million American dollars every day going to Israel, and that’s on top of all this non-governmental organizational American money that is subsidizing these settlements illegally to the tune to approximately 220 million dollars over a four year period of time - that has been analyzed recently by the Israeli Haaretz newspaper,” he noted.

“And this is on top of all of this Jewish and Zionist money that is   bankrolling American political elections. This is both true of  the Congress of the United States – where Israel not only owns the majority  of people in the United States House and Senate but owns… all of the relevant committees in both houses of Congress that have anything at all to do with Israel, and then we get into the presidential sweepstakes,” he added.

Dankof said, “The fact is this - and I’ll say this bluntly: the Jews own these presidential elections in the United States, just as they own American policy coming out of the Congress, just as they own the six major American media conglomerates, and the bottom line is as long as this continues, and the American public allows it to continue, Dan Shapiro can engage all the moralizing that he wants in Israel  talking about how the American government is ‘perplexed’ about Israeli settlement policy, but it boils down to this:

“This is land thievery clearly that’s going on in the West Bank, that’s going on in East Jerusalem, not to mention the genocide going on in Gaza;  but guess what, the entire state of Israel has been rooted in land thievery, genocidal ethnic cleansing and theft.”

The analyst said “as long as Israel is being bankrolled - in terms of American money alone to the tune of figures I have just cited - they are going to continue to do anything they want to do, because money is the ultimate leverage.”

“Until the people of the United States throw out these Zionist politicians, until the people of the United States insist that they have independent and fair elections, that are reasonably financed, and get all of these Israeli agents out of the American Congress, out of the American national security establishment, and out of the people who are running for the American presidency in both of the major political parties, and start looking towards folks who want to have an ‘America first’ foreign policy and a foreign policy that avoids entangling foreign alliances - especially with the Zionist state of Israel -  this sort of thing is going to continue,” he argued.

More than half a million Israelis live in over 120 illegal settlements built since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds in 1967.

The United Nations and most countries regard the Israeli settlements as illegal because the territories were captured by Israel in a war in 1967 and are hence subject to the Geneva Conventions, which forbids construction on occupied lands.

The presence and continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine has created a major obstacle for the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East.

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