Israel's Deputy Defence Minister Eliyahu Ben-Dahan
Ben-Dahan made the remarks in an interview with the pro-settler news outlet Arutz Sheva, and in particular, addressed the issue of demographics between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.
"The clear and absolute thing is that we are here in the Land of Israel and we are not afraid of any attempts to frighten us", he said. "They want to scare us, that maybe soon we will not be a majority and therefore we have to abandon Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. This is a grave mistake".
© BtselemWest Bank illegal settlements and areas controlled as of 2008
"Sovereignty [formal annexation] must be applied in Judea and Samaria as soon as possible", he continued.
Yet even in the case of formal annexation, the deputy minister continued, there would be no need for Palestinians to have the right to vote in Israeli elections.
"Even if we apply Israeli law in Judea and Samaria, full civil rights are not just given, and certainly not on the first day. We will have to wait several years as is customary in every country", he said.
Separately, a senior settler leader made similar remarks on Israeli television.
Yigal Dilmoni, deputy CEO of the settlement movement's Yesha Council governing body, told Channel 10 that Israel could deny Palestinians the right to vote, even if the latter were a majority.
"I truly believe that our right to the Land of Israel holds true whether or not [there is a majority]", Dilmoni said. "It is just as when Ben-Gurion established the state and there were 600,000 [Jewish] people facing one and a half to two million Arabs".
He continued: "Our right to the land of Israel was strong and present then. And it exists now as well...Therefore, the majority is not meant to be the deciding factor in our decision making".
"We have the following three requests from the Palestinian president” On November 7, the pro-Hamas Filastin al-An daily carried the following piece by Fayez Abou Shamaleh: “We are the people who suffered from the scourges of the occupation and are waiting in the grey zone where the only weapons controlling Gaza are the weapons of the Resistance and all its organizations, and where the only weapons controlling the West Bank are those of the settlers and the Israeli intelligence services. In this situation where the Authority is so absent, we request that three positions be taken by the Palestinian president, three positions that will make us support him, cheer for his life, walk behind him and weave the letters of his name into a Palestinian flag.
“First: The president must tell the whole world: there will be no acknowledgment of Israel. Israel is practicing terrorism on a daily basis and it is not acknowledging the Palestinians’ rights and has turned its back on the Oslo agreement, which included the clause of the acknowledgement.
Second: The president must tell the entire world: There will be no security coordination and I will commit to the decision of the PLO’s central council. We, Palestinians, won’t serve as guardians of the Israelis security while Israel is violating the land.
Third: The president must tell the whole world: Yes to all forms of Palestinian resistance. The people living under the occupation have the right of resisting to the occupiers using all available means of self-defense.
“The above three requests reflect the roots of the Palestinian people’s suffering, and the roots of the division. These are the main elements of all the Palestinian differences, differences in points of views, conflicts and sensitivities. These three positions will be sufficient to push the Palestinian arena away from division and into agreement, and from differences to reconciliation, and from confusion to straightness, and from ignorance to piousness, and from dismantlement to unity.