All Arabs are terrorists (say friends of Israel)

GlobalPost interviews some radical, West Bank settlers, supported, funded and protected by the Jewish state:

Other than two friendly dogs and some iron bars, the kids on the hill have few weapons. Gottlieb keeps a small can of pepper spray in the pocket of his cargo pants in case of attack by people he calls his “enemies.”

“The people over there,” he said, pointing to a Palestinian village across a valley to the west. He looked around him, pointing to other Palestinian village. “The people over there. The people over there. The people over there. The people over there.”

Like most settlers, he doesn’t call them Palestinians. The name Palestinian implies, to them, that there ever was or ever will be a country called Palestine. Sometimes they’re “Arabs,” but mostly he calls them “terrorists.” Gottlieb said he was not afraid of them.

“God’s with me,” he said. “We’ve been here forever. This land has been ours forever. This land has been promised for God.”

And the threat is real:

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Tuesday published a report listing Palestinian communities that are especially vulnerable to the settler strategy known as the “price tag.”

The document includes 83 villages, hamlets and neighborhoods that appear to be particularly vulnerable to retaliatory attacks by settlers in response to army operations to dismantle illegal structures built by Jewish residents in the West Bank. In the past, such attacks have included rock-throwing and setting fire to Palestinian property.

According to the report, “the ‘price tag’ strategy entails the exertion of systematic, widespread and indiscriminate violence against Palestinian civilians and Israeli security forces, following attempts by the Israeli authorities to evacuate settlement outposts.

“The overall objective of this strategy is to deter the Israeli authorities from removing such outposts. In the immediate term, the ‘price tag’ strategy aims at diverting Israeli forces and troops from the scene of an outpost evacuation into other areas, requiring the intervention of those forces to contain violent incidents.”