Recently, the head of the Zionist regime’s Regional Settlements Council, Benhas Valerystein, warned Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon against dismantling the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. He said if Sharon attempts to remove the settlements he will wage a war against the regime.

Valerystein told Radio Israel that dismantling the settlements is not acceptable under any condition.

The Zionist official made these remarks after some of the residents of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip visited Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz to discuss the future of the settlements.

In this regard, the secretary general of the Jewish Settlements Council, Ze’evi Liberman, said that the decision to dismantle the settlements would be a violation of Sharon’s earlier pledge to legalize the settlements that have been constructed over the past ten years in the territories occupied in 1967.

According to an Israeli peace activist, the Zionist regime’s policy on settlements is just a ruse in which settlements are dismantled and then reconstructed.

In fact, some 400 Jewish settlements have been constructed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since the Zionist regime occupied the area in 1967.

The population of the settlements is estimated to be about 500,000. Most of the heavily subsidized settlers are armed and are regarded as the Zionist gendarmes of the outposts in the occupied lands.

Actually, most of the settlers are agents of the Israeli security and intelligence services who attack Palestinians while pretending to be ordinary people.

As a matter of fact, the settlements function as the Zionists’ forward bases during military actions against the Palestinians.

However, according to the 1993 Oslo Accords, all the settlements should have been removed by 2001, but the Zionist regime not only refused to do so, but actually doubled the number of settlements over the past eight years.

The settlers are so powerful that the Zionist prime minister makes no decisions on the future of the settlements without consulting them. About half of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) members have very close ties and relations with the settlers. Some Israeli MPs are settlers themselves and strongly support the expansion of the settlements.

At the end of the day, the Zionist regime is unwilling to remove the settlements because it uses them as a pressure lever in its dealings with the Palestinian Authority as well as in international political haggling.

In reality, due to vast government subsidies and huge investments, the settlements have become a powerful government within the Zionist government and a cancerous tumor in Palestine.