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Press TV has conducted an interview with Ralph Schoenman, author of Hidden History of Zionism from Berkeley, about Israeli plan to demolish dozens of houses belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank.

Press TV: First of all this act of punitive demolition has been used by Israel in the past as well against the Palestinians and they have brought it up again as we are seeing more and more homes get demolished in the coming days.

What do you make of this action? It is against international law but what does the Israeli regime hope to achieve from this?

Schoenman: Well you have to keep in mind that the fundamental character of the Zionist invasion and occupation of Palestine was the massacre of its people and the destruction of 475 towns and villages which were razed to the ground and reduced to rubble. That is the Nakba. That is the devastation of Palestine by the colonial occupation of the Zionist movement.

What we are witnessing now has a very specific dynamic. Just recently on July 1 Mondoweiss which is a progressive Israeli publication disclosed that all the time that Israeli military and police were maintaining that they wanted to find the boys and were mobilizing public opinion for this ruthless invasion of the West Bank with the killing of five Palestinians and the arrest of hundreds of other Palestinians and the destruction of home after home, all this was done with the knowledge in advance by the Israelis that these Israeli youth were in fact dead.

In fact on June 12 immediately after the presumptive kidnapping, the police received a call from one of the Israeli youngsters and shots were fired while the telephone call was on and they concluded that these boys were in the hands of others who were harming them. There is no evidence that they were Palestinian.

On July 25, Mondoweiss disclosed that the Israelis knew that the boys were dead but lied and continued to maintain the fiction that they did not know where they were, that they were hoping that they could be found and liberated and the entire occupation and destruction in the West Bank was based upon this fiction and this lie.

We have to bear in mind what this is really about because it has been declared by Peres, Netanyahu and Lieberman that the West Bank must retain Israeli security right up to the Jordan river that there will never be any form of self-determination or any Palestinian authority representation in the West Bank and further more that Gaza has to be reclaimed, invaded and destroyed.

This is really what the dynamic of this is. This operation with these youngsters who have been used by the Israeli military for all we know is a false flag operation. All the signs and indications are just that.

One thing is a hundred percent certain. Every bit of the Israeli representation of this event is a lie. The boys were dead and they knew it, they were witness to it and they lied about it and pretended they were still alive to provide the rationale for this invasion and occupation which is ongoing and it has been escalated as we speak.

This is what we have to bear in mind. This is a Zionist campaign to escalate the suppression of the Palestinian people and they are using every device they can to provoke a response to provide a further justification for a new and more drastic repression and invasion.

Press TV: Mr. Schoenman, as you have just pointed out what we know about these three Israeli settlers that were found dead just a few days ago is only a version of events presented by Israel. There is no proof of anything presented so far.

However as this plan, this false flag operation as you have called it, goes ahead with punitive demolitions, killing more Palestinians, more bombardment of the Gaza Strip and threats against Hamas, how do you see this silence on the part of the international community and letting Israel get on with it as part of basically allowing this to happen?

Schoenman: Well we have to be clear as we have often discussed that the major capitalist and imperialist powers deployed the Zionist … [entity] as a shock troop against the peoples of the region to further imperial aims, to fragment each country, to destroy the sovereign nations that are in the region and to prepare for further imperial predations and underlying all this is the intent to remove the Palestinian people from their land and from history.

Wherever they are driven out, in whatever refugee camp, in whatever arena, they are further attacked, further destroyed and further targeted ...This has been ongoing on an escalated basis, it does not stop. United Nations is implicated, the major powers are implicated. The apologia for the status quo are constantly succumbing this and supporting it and providing cover for it. That is the reality.

There has to be on the part of the people of Palestine and all those who defend self-determination and rights of peoples, a resistance, a struggle to remove the Zionist … [entity] from its own occupation of all of Palestine just as in the case with South Africa, with the French and Algeria. The anti-colonial revolution is crystallized in the faith of the Palestinian people and that struggle cannot be resolved no matter how much repression is visited by the Israelis, time and the logic of the history are against them. The people of Palestine will resist and everybody who has any understanding of rights of people will support them.