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.
That’s one hateful grandma.
Read an interview with her a while ago. She’s all about “We don’t want violence. We just want the land.”
I don’t want a genocide, I just want lebensraum
Now where have we heard that one before… No, no, don’t tell me, let me think, I’ve hear this somewhere…
Canada?
Close, close…
I didn’t want violence, either. I just wanted my neighbor’s PlayStation 5.
I remember when Nazi Germany said they didn’t want to harm Jews, they just wanted them out of Germany, then they decided that all of Europe should belong to Germany, and then blamed the Jews for forcing their hand to violence by continuing to exist.
Hmmmm I wonder what those people would do if they were on the other side of the equation.