Thursday 27th of August 2026
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wavelets of immigrants welcome according to extreme rightwing....

Israel will continue building illegal settlements in the West Bank in preparation for a “major” wave of Jewish immigration, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said. Israel’s most recent settlement expansion triggered rebukes from its Arab neighbors and Western partners.

“Today, many of our brothers and sisters around the world understand: This is our land and it will remain ours,”Netanyahu said in Jerusalem on Tuesday. “And when I say our land, every Jewish man and every Jewish woman, the door is open. We are waiting for you. We are preparing the door for major Aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel).” 

It is unclear whether the “major Aliyah” predicted by Netanyahu is actually coming. Israelis have emigrated in growing numbers since Hamas’ 2023 attack and the subsequent war on Gaza. More than 150,000 Israelis left the country from 2024 to 2025, according to a report by 972 magazine.

The Israeli prime minister spoke at an event organized by the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs 47 Jewish settlements in the West Bank. All of these settlements, which are located outside Israel’s 1967 borders, are considered illegal by the UN, and Israel’s transfer of population to them has been deemed a breach of the Geneva Convention by the International Criminal Court.

Although the Israeli state sometimes pre-authorizes the construction of settlements, they typically begin as outposts on Palestinian land, until they are retroactively legalized by the Israeli government. During his speech on Tuesday, Netanyahu boasted that his government has established and regularized “104 settlements and 160 farms and we continue to do more.”

“It isn’t easy, it’s never easy,” he continued. “The land of Israel is acquired through suffering. Sometimes also through smiles, sometimes also through arguments, but it is being acquired by us. We are not giving up, we have a vision, this is our land, and it will remain ours.”

Last week, Israel opened bidding for the construction of more than 1,200 homes in the E1 settlement project, located east of Jerusalem. Named after its designation on Israeli planning maps, the project will comprise more than 3,400 homes, and was green-lit by Netanyahu’s government last year.

The E1 plan will establish a land corridor between East Jerusalem and the existing settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, both of which are built on Palestinian land. It will also sever road links between the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem, located to the north and south of Jerusalem, respectively. 

Eight Arab and Muslim states, including Mecca Pact members Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Türkiye, “categorically” rejected the plan, describing it as “a dangerous escalation.” The UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, European Commission, and 15 European states also condemned the project.

“The E1 settlement will undermine the prospect of the two-state solution by driving a wedge through the West Bank,”they said in a statement last Thursday. “At a time of grave instability in the West Bank with unprecedented levels of violence by settlers against civilians, and serious restrictions on the Palestinian economy, this decision is even more concerning.”

Netanyahu has suggested for years that he intends to annex the entirety of the West Bank, describing the option as “on the table” even as he signed peace accords with Arab states in 2020. Netanyahu’s hardline coalition partners have been more explicit, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich urging the prime minister in June to “apply sovereignty here in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] before the elections” in October.

https://www.rt.com/news/644673-netanyahu-west-bank-settlement-expansion/

 

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

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deportashun....

 

Abul Rizvi

Debunking mass deportation hype

 

Both One Nation and the Coalition have been talking up their mass deportation target of around 75,000 – with zero details of how that would be implemented or what it would cost. Abul Rizvi looks beyond the hype.

While One Nation and the Coalition often refer to ‘overstayers’, the bulk of people in Australia without a visa are in fact unsuccessful asylum seekers.

It is thus useful to understand how the current record number of unsuccessful asylum seekers came about; who the unsuccessful asylum seekers are likely to be; and what would be involved in a program to deport these people.

The surge in the number of unsuccessful asylum seekers started around 10 years ago when former minister Peter Dutton and department secretary Mike Pezzullo were in charge . Two people who sought to develop an (undeserved) reputation for strong border control and immigration integrity.

The surge started with asylum applications from Malaysian nationals in 2015-16 and then extended to nationals from China. In 2017-18, around 67 per cent of the record 27,931 asylum applications were from Malaysian and Chinese nationals. A large part of that was a labour trafficking scam supplying cheap labour to the agricultural sector.

That slowed significantly during Covid-19, but the very large backlog of asylum applications and associated slow processing led to a resurgence of asylum applications after the virus. While primary asylum applications from China remain high, there has been an increase in asylum applications in recent years from:

  • India, Nepal and Bangladesh, partly associated with an increase in student visas.
  • Colombia, associated with a temporary surge in English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) students from that country.
  • Pacific Island nations, associated with growth of the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility stream (PALM) visa.

A surge in asylum applications from Vietnamese and Filipino nationals during the 18 months after Covid appears to have subsided. A similar surge out of Indonesia also appears to now be subsiding.

There has also been an odd increase in asylum applications from UK and Irish nationals, possibly associated with the large number of working holiday makers from those two nations. That appears to be continuing.

The new Labor government tried to deal with the post-Covid-19 surge in asylum applications by investing more resources in faster processing at both the primary and review stages. That has helped marginally to reduce the asylum application rate, falling from 25,210 in 2022-23 to 21,656 in 2025-26. It has also reduced the backlog of primary-level asylum applications from over 39,000 in February 2020 to just over 20,000 in July 2026.

The asylum backlog at the Administrative Review Tribunal has also fallen from just under 42,000 in March 2024 to under 37,000 in July 2026.

While faster processing has helped, it is not a comprehensive solution without targeting the organisers (usually migration agents, both registered and unregistered) and a viable removals policy. The Labor government has been taking some actions against unscrupulous migration agents but has done relatively little on removals.

The number of asylum seekers still in Australia who have been refused at the primary stage now sits at over 110,000 (growing at about 1,000 per month). Those refused at both primary and review stages and not departed is over 74,000. The bulk of these are likely to be from Malaysia, China, India, Colombia, the Pacific Islands, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia.

But developing a cost-effective removals policy is not simple. Donald Trump is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on his mass deportation program, including building huge detention centres, and achieving only a marginal increase in the deportation rate (Trump’s self-deportation numbers are highly questionable). Along the way, the Trump administration has made huge mistakes of wrongful detention and deportation, which will lead to massive compensation cases.

A well-designed removals policy is essential, but copying Trump would be a costly disaster.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/08/debunking-mass-deportation-hype/

 

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PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….