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“In our neighborhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts,” proclaimed Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday during a tour of the Jordan Valley.

Netanyahu and his cabinet’s virulent animalistic race-baiting against Palestinians is nothing new—Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked called Palestinians “little snakes” earlier this year.

But Netanyahu’s gall is surpassed only by his current helplessness. Only two days before his tour of the West Bank, only two days before he pointed out across the entire Jordan Valley—home to some 60,000 Palestinians, themselves often victims of Israeli demolitions and indiscriminate military exercises—Netanyahu entered a fit of impotency over stagnant U.S. military aid. The same military aid that will fund the proposed 288 million Shekel fence extension in the Jordan Valley. The same military aid that will ostensibly keep out the “wild beasts.”

"[We] need to see if [we] can achieve a result that will address Israel's security needs or perhaps we will not manage to come to an agreement with this administration and will need to come to an agreement with the next administration,” the prime minister told his cabinet on Sunday. As the new memorandum of understanding on American military aid is negotiated, Israel may actually defer signing it, hoping for better terms from the next U.S. president.

"It's not yet clear that we will come to an agreement," added Netanyahu.

Remember, the United States has provided $30 billion in security assistance to Israel over the past decade.

Flanked by his highest military advisors, Netanyahu’s comments on Tuesday included a “multi-year plan to surround Israel with security fences to protect ourselves in the current and projected Middle East”.

“At the end of the day as I see it, there will be a fence like this one surrounding Israel in its entirety. We will surround the entire state of Israel with a fence, a barrier,” the prime minister added.

Despite the fact that he evidently takes advice from Medieval architects (walls, walls, walls), Netanyahu’s proclamations to keep out “infiltrators,” including Palestinians and citizens of surrounding Arab countries, is a farce.

He is not keeping anyone out; he is keeping them in.

Walls have proven a very effective policy both to incorporate illegal West Bank settlements into de-facto Israeli territory and to break up contiguous Palestinian territory, increasingly making the possibility of an independent state a fantasy.

According to Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem, there are currently 39 Israeli settlements, including nine illegal outposts, in the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea area. The population of Israeli settlers in this region was 10,738 in 2011.

In the greater West Bank there are some 200 Jewish-only settlements comprised of approximately 355,993 people, all of them illegal under international law.

But just as the settlements over the Green Line near Jerusalem such as Gush Etzion, Ma’ale Adumim and Giva’t Ze’ev have been closed in by the circuitous separation wall, so too can it be assumed that an entirely new fence infrastructure project will do the same in the rest of the West Bank.

The separation wall by the way, costs Israel, and thereby the United States, an annual average of $260 million to maintain.

There is a clear pattern here: U.S. military aid goes to walls, walls enclose settlements making them de-facto Israeli territory, and the U.S. continues criticism of expanding settlements. All the while, as Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy told Democracy Now in October, giving “Israel a carte blanche to go wild ... in the West Bank, again and again, build settlements ... and never [try] to push Israel and to put an end to all this.”

So indeed, Netanyahu might very well wait for what he hopes is a less critical White House administration. President Obama has failed to bring about any progress on the Israel-Palestine front, but at least to his credit he has been obstinate enough to cast doubt in the current Israeli administration.

But it seems the U.S. should take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook and stifle military aid, at least until a new Israeli administration.

Without funds, the walls fall down. And when walls fall down, people get free.