Daniella Weiss, 78, the grandmother of Israel’s settler movement, who says she already has a list of 500 families ready to move to Gaza immediately.
“I have friends in Tel Aviv,” she says, “so they say, ‘Don’t forget to keep for me a plot near the coast in Gaza,’ because it’s a beautiful, beautiful coast, beautiful golden sand”.
She tells them the plots on the coast are already booked.
Mrs Weiss heads a radical settler organisation called Nachala, or homeland. For decades, she has been kickstarting Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, on Palestinian land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
Some in the settler movement have cherished the dream - or pipedream - of returning to Gaza since 2005, when Israel ordered a unilateral pullout, 21 settlements were dismantled and about 9,000 settlers were evacuated by the army. (Reporting from Gaza at the time, I saw many who were literally dragged out.)
Many settlers saw all this as a betrayal by the state, and a strategic mistake.
I see what you mean, but settlers aren’t really extremists in Israel. Over there “All of Judea belongs to us, the chosen people, so we have the right to chase out and murder the subhuman Arabs” is a pretty common idea.
The fact that it’s widespread isn’t mutually exclusive with it being extreme. That’s a pretty extremist point of view
extremist /ĭk-strē′mĭst/ noun
A person who advocates or resorts to measures beyond the norm, especially in politics.
I would argue that’s how most extremists think… they’re superior to some other group they have defined subhumans. It’s disgusting