Santorum: ‘All The People Who Live In The West Bank Are Israelis…There Is No ‘Palestinian”

Republican Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum
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In an exchange in Iowa on Friday, Rick Santorum defended Israel’s right to build settlements in the West Bank — saying that it is fully part of Israel, having been conquered in the 1967 war, and that as a result all of the people in the West Bank are Israelis, not “Palestinians.”

This would, however, differ from Israel’s actual policy in the West Bank since 1967, which does not extend Israeli citizenship to the territory’s Palestinian inhabitants.

Santorum likened the West Bank’s situation to how the United States gained the West in the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. “So we should have given it back – we should have given New Mexico and Texas back 150 years go?” Santorum asked defiantly in the CNN Web feed, picked up by Think Progress.

He later added: “The bottom line is that that is legitimately Israeli country. And they have a right to do within their country just like we have a right to do within our country. If they want to negotiate with Israeli — with Israelis — all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians. There is no ‘Palestinian.’ This is Israeli land.”

If that premise is true, of course, then this would mean that Israel is by definition a single state that accords the full rights of citizenship (voting, freedom of travel, access to public resources, civil liberties, etc.) to one particular ethnic group — while denying those same rights to millions of other native inhabitants, on the basis of ethnic background.

Indeed, the two-state solution, which Santorum appears to be contradicting, has often been touted in order to extricate Israel from that very moral quagmire.

By contrast, to use Santorum’s example of the United States gaining the American West through war, the Latino inhabitants of those areas and their descendants did indeed become citizens. In fact, as early as 1875 California elected as its governor Romualdo Pacheco, who had been born to a prominent Mexican family in the pre-U.S. era. And over the years, there have also been many other Hispanic high-level government officials from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas.

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