Israeli Press
In Haaretz, Nadav Tamir calls Qusra a transfer test that Huckabee whitewashes
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The siege of Qusra is not another passing settler harassment but a deliberate first stage toward actual transfer, Nadav Tamir argued in an opinion piece in the Israeli daily Haaretz on Wednesday — and if it succeeds, he wrote, many more stages will follow.
Tamir heads J Street Israel, the liberal pro-Israel lobby's local arm, and served as an Israeli diplomat; Haaretz published his argument as opinion, and the paper's own voice it is not.
In his telling, the settlers besieging the village are running a test of tools, and the army offers little hope: its West Bank commander, Avi Bluth, promised the trapped Palestinian families the raiders would be removed, and nothing happened. At best, Tamir wrote, the army stages a show of evacuation; at worst its soldiers pray alongside the raiders, signaling that the settlers act in the government's name.
His sharpest words fall on Washington's ambassador, Mike Huckabee, who tweeted that the army and police removed the "Israeli terrorists" at the embassy's request — and omitted, Tamir noted, that they returned in greater force immediately after. An ambassador who represents the settlers to America as much as America to Israel, he argued, will give President Trump a picture nothing like the reality of Qusra and Area C.
The West Bank explosion can still be contained, Tamir concluded — but not if Washington's envoys keep looking only at Gaza and Lebanon.
