OMING on the heels of President Donald Trump`s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel`s capital and to shift the embassy later to the holy city, the resolution by Israel`s ruling party on illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank shouldn`t surprise the world. On Sunday, the central committee of the hardline Likud party demanded that the settlements should be annexed by extending Israeli sovereignty to the colonies, built over the last 50 years in violation of UN resolutions and international treaties. Not only that: Likud demanded that settlement activity should continue.

Though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Likud member, was himself not present at the meeting, the fact that the party in power should go public with its land grab greed so brazenly betrays the Zionist state`s designs to exploit to the maximum Mr Trump`s stay in the White House. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas`s denunciation of the Likud move was understandably harsh, and he hit the nail on the head when he said Likud couldn`t have acted without `the full support of the US administration`.

The late and lamented two-state solution had always been a theory. The only time a Palestinian state appeared a distinct possibility was in September 1993 when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed the Declaration of Principles on the lawns of the White House, which laid down a programme for ending Israeli occupation.

However, Rabin was murdered, and successive Israeli governments sabotaged the DoP with full American backing. The truth is that since European Jewish settlers began occupying Palestinian lands in the wake of the Balfour Declaration more than a century ago, they have pursued the Zionist version of lebensraum ruthlessly. Congress is in the Zionist pocket, and Israeli leaders have made no attempt to hide their contempt for America`s chief executives. The insult which Ehud Olmert heaped on George Bush Jr is a matter of record.

As President Abbas said, the Israeli aim `is the consolidation of an apartheid regime in all of historic Palestine`.