Democratic US Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia
Democratic US Representative
Hank Johnson says Israeli settlers living in illegal settlements are
destroying Palestinian homes like “termites.”
“There has
been a steady [stream], almost like termites can get into a residence
and eat before you know that you’ve been eaten up and you fall in on
yourself,” the Georgia lawmaker said Monday, according to The Washington
Free Beacon.
He made the remarks during an event in Philadelphia, sponsored by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
Johnson
criticized the Tel Aviv regime’s continuation of building new
settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying the issue
has reached an “alarming” stage.
The ongoing occupation, he noted,
undermines the notion of a sovereign Palestinian country, the
congressman said. “We’ve gotten to the point where the thought of a
Palestinian homeland gets further and further removed from reality.”
“The
home their [Palestinian] ancestors lived in for generations becomes an
Israeli home and a flag goes up. The Palestinians are barred from flying
flags in their own neighborhoods,” said Johnson, a member of the House
Armed Services Committee.
The lawmaker was forced to apologize
later in the day, after becoming under fire from various pro-Israeli
figures and organizations.
“Poor choice of words – apologies for
offense. Point is settlement activity continues slowly undermine 2-state
solution,” he wrote in a tweet. Bedouin
makeshift tents and structures are seen in front of buildings of the
Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem al-Quds in the
occupied West Bank, July 4, 2016. (AFP photo)More
than half a million Israelis live in over 230 illegal settlements built
since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the
West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds.
Washington has slammed
Israel’s plans to build new illegal settler units in the occupied
Palestinian territories as part of a “systematic” land expropriation
policy.
The units would “be the latest step in what seems to be a
systematic process of land seizures, settlement expansions and
legalization of outposts that is fundamentally undermining the prospects
for a two-state solution,” US State Department spokesman John Kirby
said earlier this month.
The presence and continued expansion of
Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine has created a major obstacle
for the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East.
Palestinians
regularly fall prey to hate attacks by Israeli settlers, who either
subject them to injurious or fatal assaults or vandalize and set fire to
their properties.
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