It is a colonizing and far-right movement, and one might think it is also marginal. Perhaps that is the case, but their ideas can be rapidly disseminated, especially in Israeli society where the settlers’ movement is gaining strength today. There is nothing more to do with how the settlers are invading more and more land in the West Bank, how much impunity and how much support they have from the Israeli Government, and much of Israeli society.

The idea of the recolonization of Gaza is getting stronger and stronger, and its first step would be to dismantle the north of the Palestinian Gaza Strip. That step would be taken first with military objectives, with the aim of definitively defeating Hamas; then, however, the objective of strong sectors of Israeli society is the recolonization of Gaza.

The Israeli Government carried over 1,000 citizens from northern Israel as a result of the attacks on Hezbollah on 7 October last year. Some 500 hotels are currently distributed by Israel and the government wants to force them to return to the northern countries. To that end, it has sold the attack and the invasion of Lebanon, which has lasted tens of years.

Colonization of the Upper Golan as a model

For the Uri Tzafon movement, it makes no sense to argue militarily with Hezbollah; or yes, but not in the form that has been done so far. In his view, Hezbollah must fight to expel southern Lebanon and colonize the territory. To do so, they use two main arguments: one of security, “if the soldiers do not leave, if there are no settlers, the Lebanese return”; and another Bible, because for them the south of Lebanon is the north of Galilee. The Palestine of the time of Jesus Christ was divided into three regions and the Jews called it Galilee the North.

The West Bank is today Israel’s most colonized territory and has over 700,000 settlers. However, for Uri Tzafon, this is a “weak colonization model”, because millions of Arabs live there, with all the problems that this entails for the colonizers. In his view, the model is the occupation and colonization of the Upper Golan. Israel occupied the territories of Syria during the Six-Day War of 1967, evacuated them over time by Syrians, and Israeli settlers are now living. The UN does not accept this occupation, but neither does the West Bank, where the colonial movement is growing.

The programme, moreover, is not that of now, the Zionist movement already has one of its eyes laid there from its inception. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Zionists presented at the Versailles Peace Conference a document for the entire territory of the southern Litani River to be included in the British Mandated. Although this was not the case, Uri Tzafon recalled that the territory of the Upper Golan was also not within the British Mandate and that the Israeli settlers are there at present. Zionism has not set the idea and the dream of Great Israel is still alive in the minds of many. Wikipedia tells us that when the Zionist movement speaks of history and speaks of northern Galilee, it refers to the territory located south of the Litani River in Lebanon. In recent decades, however, it has become Northern Israel with that name, but the old name is gaining strength.

That is the way, therefore, for Uri Tzafon: to empty a territory of its inhabitants, take it militarily and colonize it. Who knows what is at the forefront of Prime Minister Netanyahu, but, for the time being, southern Lebanon has been evacuated and a military procurement session has been initiated. The Israeli Army began the invasion of Lebanon on Tuesday and, due to the resistance of Hizbollah, was forced to reverse the attempted military coup. On Wednesday, Hezbollah also killed eight Israeli soldiers in an ambush and wounded many more.

To Parliament

The Uri Tzafon movement has clothed the peoples of Northern Israel with their colonizing messages, but it has not been limited to that and has shown sufficient strength to enter the Israeli Parliament. Last June, the Gaza recolonization movement dispersed its ideas in a Knesset commission in which members of Uri Tzafon also participated. Israel's Minister of Communication, Shlomo Karhi, thus spoke of Gaza: “As God commanded, Gaza is ours.” Former parliamentarian and far-right member Moshe Feiglin added: “I hope that the Lebanon agreement will reach Litani.” And the minister of the Israeli Government and leader of the racist party of the Jewish Power, Itama Ben Gvirr, rounded off the mention of the river Litania: “The Prime Minister is not yet related to the issue, but to God’s help.”

The information axis of this article is found in the portal of the media Jewis Current, an exhaustive report that bears the title within the colonizing movement of South Lebanon, published as of August.