A number of far-right Israeli parliamentarians called for the permanent annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories during a Knesset plenary session on Tuesday, June 6, to mark the 50-year anniversary of the Six-Day War. The Israeli invasion and occupation of the West Bank — including East Jerusalem — Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights that began on June 5, 1967 during the Six-Day War, displacing some 300,000 Palestinians, as well as 90 thousand of Syrians, from their homes.

The front page of the Communist weekly Zo Haderech: “50 Years of Occupation is enough!”

“Fifty years on and there are those who say the (1967) victory only complicated things for us; that the ‘occupation’ corrupts our society,” Knesset speaker MK Yuli Edelstein (Likud) said, before calling Israelis residing in illegal settlements across the occupied Palestinian territory “pioneers of our time.” Edelstein added, “We will continue to support the settlers, even when it is ‘complicated.'”. Meanwhile, MK Moti Yogev from the extreme right-wing Jewish Home party called for the establishment of a Jewish state in all of historic Palestine.

The far-right MKs’ statements came on the same day as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to do “everything to protect the settlement enterprise” in “all parts of Judea and Samaria.” However, other parliamentarians expressed concerns over the impact of half a century of occupation on Israel, and its potential to jeopardize a future two-state solution.

Hadash MK Dov Khenin (Joint List) denounced the Knesset’s making the Palestinians invisible in its celebration of the 50 years of occupation. “Today I saw many pictures in the corridors (of the Knesset), but the big picture was missing. Where are all the millions of people who live under occupation? Where are the pictures of the checkpoints and the (Palestinian) farmers who lost their fields?” Khenin asked.

“The only option is peace. The path to peace is simple, on a basic level. What we ask for ourselves — independence and justice — is what the other nation deserves as well,” Khenin added. “There are two options — we can either learn to get along in our surroundings or not. If we do not, there will be more wars and more people will be killed, until there will be a war which we will not win and the state of Israel will cease to exist.”

While the Palestinian Authority members and the international community have rested the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the discontinuation of illegal Israeli settlements and the establishment of a two-state solution, Israeli leaders have instead shifted further to the right, with more than 50 percent of the ministers in the current far-right Israeli government publicly stating their opposition to a Palestinian state.