Mohammad Shtayyeh, a member of the Central Committee of Fatah, has accused the Israeli government of seeking to reduce the Palestinian population in occupied Jerusalem in order to turn it into a Jewish city, Anadolu news agency reported on Sunday.
During the ceremony for the commemoration of late President Yasser Arafat in Berlin, Shtayyeh said that Israel “has been trying to Judaise Jerusalem ever since it occupied it back in 1967; when it plunged 230,000 settlers in the city and its environs to reduce the number of Palestinians to represent only 25 per cent of the population by the year 2020.”
According to Anadolu, he continued by saying that, “Israel has to choose between either a two-state solution or continuing with its racist policies which are much worse than the former apartheid regime in South Africa,” adding that, “this would mean a change in the dynamics of the conflict and the dynamics of the struggle.”
The Fatah leader explained, “We say yes to the two-state solution; but we do not reject the one-state solution,” pointing out that the on-going Israeli violations in occupied Jerusalem and other Palestinian cities are evidence that there is no place for the two-state solution.
“Jerusalem has erupted and riots will continue on a daily basis until Israelis say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has lost Jerusalem. But Netanyahu does not have Jerusalem to lose; Jerusalem is ours, Al-Aqsa Mosque is ours and the land is ours,” he said.
Over the past several weeks, occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank have witnessed a series of incidents involving Palestinians driving cars overs soldiers and settlers in response to the escalation of Israel’s violations in Jerusalem and the daily storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Arafat died on 11 November 2004 in a French hospital after the Israeli army imposed a siege for several months of the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority’s leadership in the city of Ramallah, in central West Bank.