Middle East Monitor / December 23, 2022
Palestinian political writer and a citizen in Israel, Muhammad Watad, yesterday warned that the upcoming Israeli government led by Prime Minister-elect Benjamin Netanyahu will target the Palestinians in Israel as well as in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem.
Speaking during a conference organized by Al-Resalah Media Foundation, Watad said successive Israeli governments view the Palestinians living in Israel as a “fifth column”.
He believed that the new government is no different from Netanyahu’s five successive governments since 2009, as all are governments of the extreme religious right, which controls decision-making centres in Israel, and have the final say in Tel Aviv’s political life.
According to Watad, many of the internal conditions in Israel are suffering from disintegration, and will explode, but there is now a consensus among them to liquidate the Palestinian struggle from existence, adding that what happened in the Negev desert and in Jerusalem is proof of this.
He explained that 300,000 Palestinians in the Naqab/Negev no longer have more than one million dunams out of the 11 million dunams of land in the area.
He emphasised that 40 unrecognised villages in the Negev are threatened with demolition, which is another chapter of Al-Nakba (the 1948 Catastrophe) in the Negev.
Watad indicated that the Palestinian presence worries the Jewishness of the Israeli state.
