“You see one home after another being appropriated by Jewish people who come in to claim that land just because somebody did not spend the night there”, Johnson said.
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His office also claimed that the Beacon headline (“Congressman: Jewish Settlers Are Like Termites”) was misleading.
Johnson will cast his vote Tuesday to formally nominate Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.
The effect of this deliberate misreading was to distract from the important observations made by Representative Johnson regarding the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise and what life is like for millions of Palestinians living under Israel’s almost 50-year-old repressive military occupation regime.
Additionally, Johnson’s office told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the congressman did not call Israelis termites, and that he did not intend to insult or speak derogatorily of the Israelis or the Jewish people.
The Anti-Defamation League called on Johnson to rescind his comments, pointing out in a Tweet, “We call on you to apologize and retract this unhelpful characterization”.
They included a home under construction and an auto fix business in the Issawiya area as well as a residential building in Ras al-Amud, the NGO said.
Johnson criticized the Tel Aviv regime’s continuation of building new settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying the issue has reached an “alarming” stage.
“When using the metaphor of termites, the Congressman was referring to the corrosive process, not the people”, the statement read, in a final bid to clarify Johnson’s intentions.
Johnson, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, took his complaints a step further.
The news website also reported that Johnson, who is in Philadelphia this week as a super delegate at the Democratic National Convention, compared Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman to controversial Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. However, he doubled down on his criticism of Israeli settlers, who he said “undermine [the] two-state solution”.
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Others were shot dead during protests and clashes, while some were killed by Israeli air strikes on the Islamist-controlled Gaza Strip. “We must work to promote policies that support a two-state solution and encourage trust between both sides”.
