GIVEN Israel’s track record, there is nothing surprising about the latest UN report which speaks of the “alarming” rate at which the Likud government has stepped up its demolition of Palestinian homes.

As Robert Piper, the UN coordinator for Palestinian territories, wrote in response to a query, the number of Palestinian homes destroyed by Israel in the first nine weeks of the current year has overtaken the total figure for last year.

Those homes and structures, including a school, were built by international donors, and as a Norwegian official involved with the project said “tens of millions of dollars of donor assistance” were at risk of demolition.

The eventual aim behind these demolitions is to deny the Palestinians the right to a state of their own on their land.

Against this background, the State Department’s reaction last week was commendable. Reacting to the spike in demolition activity, the department spokesman said such acts call “into question the Israeli government’s commitment to [the] two-state solution”.

The truth is that in utter disregard of denunciation by the UN and world opinion, Israel has continued its Lebensraum policy by ejecting Palestinians from their ancestral homes and building more and more settlements, which the International Court of Justice has already declared illegal.

Israel has annexed the Golan Heights, which belong to Syria, and the much-publicised ‘disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip is a hoax, for it continues to control its air, land and sea exits.

As for the West Bank, which it calls Judea and Samaria, it aims at changing the territory’s Arab-Islamic character by razing Palestinian homes and by nibbling at Arab territory. The number of Jewish settlers on the West Bank now stands at 800,000.

Will American Vice President Joe Biden’s coming visit to Israel make a dent in the Likud government’s hard-line policy?

Let us note, this is an American election year. Which means none of the hopefuls in the race for the White House will say a word that could annoy America’s powerful Israel lobby.

Published in Dawn, March 10th, 2016