Reply #85: Oh, and the creation of the settlement movement in the West Bank

[Ken Burch]

was, in itself, incitement to hatred, since the Israeli government deliberately recruited right-wing Arab-hating crazies and territorial revanchists to be settlers. A good number of those people moved in with the INTENT of starting confrontations with the Palestinians and taking land away from them-you could put anyone who kept using the inflammatory terms "Judea and Samaria" in that category.

(And yes, there are some settlers who don't fit that category as individuals, but the whole put of putting even them there was to incite violence and pointlessly exacerbate tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, thus giving the government an excuse to delay negotiating with the Palestinian side for decades).

After 1967, the Israeli government had no right and no legitimate argument for doing anything other than have troops at the borders between Israel proper and the territories. There was never an actual security justification for intentionally moving what ended up being 250,000 Israeli citizens into the West Bank. If they had to move anyone else in, it would have been enough to ask for the repatriation of the indigenous pre-1948 Jewish population of the West Bank. THOSE people had a legitimate claim to a right to live in those lands...none of the others who were brought in as "settlers" did.