Geva Binyamin, West Bank, Nov 27 (EFE).- Settler Ysrael Ganz, president of the Yesha Council, an umbrella group for Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, told reporters he was pleased with Donald Trump’s election victory and that he hoped the future United States president would listen to Israel’s demands.
«I think we will see a change with the Trump administration because he will ask the State of Israel what it wants, what it thinks, and we will be able to have a more serious conversation about the future,» Ganz said to a media gathering in Binyamin, the largest West Bank settlement complex near Ramallah.
Regarding the plans for Israeli annexation and sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territories (promoted by radical finance minister and settler Bezalel Smotrich), Ganz said they would depend on whether Israel was able to controlling the entire West Bank or just the so-called Area C, which it already controls.
The West Bank has been divided in three administrative areas since the Oslo Accords: Area A, under Palestinian military and administrative control, accounting for 18% of the Palestinian territories; Area B, under Palestinian administrative control but Israeli military rule (22%); and Area C, under Israeli control, accounting for the remaining 60%.
For Ganz, if Israeli «sovereignty» is extended to Area C, the more than 200,000 Palestinians living there, along with more than 400,000 settlers, should be granted Israeli citizenship and the right to vote. But if Areas A and B are also included, he said Palestinians should be non-voting citizens.
«Palestinians living in Jerusalem have all rights except the right to vote,» said Ganz, citing Puerto Ricans, who cannot vote in US presidential elections, and expatriates in Saudi Arabia as examples.In mid-July, Israel signed two orders giving it the power to «execute, plan and build» in Area B of the West Bank, which NGOs such as Peace Now described as a quasi-annexation of 82% of Palestinian territory.
Detention without trial for Palestinians only
On Nov. 22, newly appointed Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that the controversial policy of detaining suspects without charge or for up to six months at a time would be used only against Palestinian terror suspects and not against Jewish Israeli settlers. A record number of more than 3,400 Palestinians are currently being held without charge or trial.
«This instrument should only be used against enemies,» Ganz told EFE. «We are a democratic state, and if someone commits a crime, we have to take them to court, and they will be punished, but putting someone in prison without a trial does not make any sense,» he continued.
«If they (Palestinians) don’t have Israeli citizenship, there is a different legal system, there are different forms of punishment,» he added.In recent years, Israel has placed no more than a dozen extremist Jewish settlers under administrative detention after they committed grave acts of violence, including murder, against Palestinians in the West Bank.
This legal limbo applies only to the occupied territories, and administrative detention without charge can be extended indefinitely as long as military prosecutors prevent the defense from knowing what their clients are accused of. EFE
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