Israeli settler violence

While Israel continues its assault on Gaza, the army in late August also launched its largest military assault on the occupied West Bank in twenty years.

Al Jazeera reported that as of September 1 at least twenty-four Palestinians were killed with dozens more inured or detained. Israel’s focus has been upon Palestinian refugee camps near or adjacent to urban areas. Spokespersons for the Israeli Defence Force described all these actions “counter-terrorism operations.” Typically, and this is true in Gaza as well, the Israelis carefully tailor events and dates to suit their desired way of describing reality, and they seem always to be hunting terrorists.

Context matters

But context matters. The IDF will not provide it, but various mainstream media outlets do. On August 29, Associated Press provided the following background in reporting on the Israeli incursions:   

“The raids have focused on refugee camps that date back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation, in which around 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of what is now Israel. Many of the camps are militant strongholds.

Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war, and the Palestinians want all three territories for their future state.

The three million Palestinians in the West Bank live under seemingly open-ended Israeli military rule, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority administering towns and cities. More than 500,000 Israelis live in well over 100 settlements across the territory that most of the international community considers illegal.”

In an article published in The Globe and Mail on the same day, Mark MacKinnon wrote: “While Israeli authorities said the incursion was aimed at destroying Hamas and Islamic Jihad cells that were believed to be plotting attacks on Israel, it comes in the context of Mr. Netanyahu’s government backing an unprecedented surge in Jewish settlement of the West Bank, which has been accompanied by a series of violent attacks by armed Jewish settlers targeting Palestinian civilians.”

Deep context

So, the deep context here is that in 1948, when Israel declared itself unilaterally to be a state, 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes and fields in what can only be described as acts of terrorism. In 1967, Israel launched a “pre-emptive strike” against neighbouring Arab countries and defeated them decisively. The Israelis captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The West Bank has lived under military occupation for the past 57 years. During that time, Israeli governments of all stripes have supported a relentless expansion of settlements in the Palestinian territory that they occupy militarily.

Those settlers believe it is their sacred right to control the entire West Bank, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu encourages them in their belief. Mackinnon described “a series of violent attacks” carried out by those settlers against Palestinian civilians.

A “bitter season”

I subscribe to the New York Review. In the edition of December 21, 2023, David Shulman, a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published an article called, “A Bitter Season in the West Bank.”

While it was written months before the latest Israeli military strikes, the article provides valuable context about the situation on the ground, something we will never receive from the military spokespersons who habitually lie on behalf of their government. I will quote Shulman at length because the New York Review does not permit free online access to its articles:

 “As war rages in Gaza and the Middle East as a whole is skittering on the brink of a wider conflagration, the fate of thousands of Palestinian shepherds and farmers on the West Bank looks grim. Neither the government nor the army has done anything to stop rampaging Israeli settlers who are hell-bent on driving these people—some of whom are my friends—off their lands. By now the situation has been reported widely in at least some of the Israeli media as well as in the international press. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have both warned that this settler violence has to be curbed. On November 8 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an empty public gesture: ‘There is a tiny handful of people,’ he said, ‘who take the law into their own hands…. We are not prepared to tolerate this.’ So far he seems able to tolerate it quite easily. The same day he reassured his supporters, including the hundreds of thousands of settlers in the territories: ‘I told President Biden that the accusations against the settlement movement are baseless.’”

Armed with M16 rifles

“If you happen to be a Palestinian shepherd in the South Hebron Hills or the Jordan Valley, that ‘tiny handful’ are terrifying thugs who can invade villages and hamlets at any moment (with a certain preference for late at night). They are heavily armed with M16 rifles, pistols, butcher knives, and often all three, and they take obvious pleasure in causing pain: beating people; breaking anything breakable; stealing; torching cars and homes; destroying food, water tanks, and solar panels; and shooting in the air—and sometimes not in the air. They have a standard formula that has been repeated in village after village: ‘You have twenty-four hours to leave. If you don’t, we’ll be back to kill all of you.’

On November 13 [2023] the shepherds of Wadi Tiran, in the far south of the West Bank, were subjected to this threat. The Palestinians of Umm al-Khair heard it on October 29; the people of Susya and its outlying hamlets a few days earlier; Mu‘arrajat in the Jordan Valley for several consecutive days in mid-October; Wadi a-Siq on October 12. In At-Tuwani on October 13, an innocent Palestinian was shot in cold blood by a settler while an Israeli soldier simply looked on. Bilal Muhammad Saleh, from the village of As-Sawiya, was harvesting olives from his trees when a settler-soldier on leave shot and killed him on October 28. The complete list is much longer. According to UN figures, there were 591 settler attacks on West Bank Palestinian villages in the first half of 2023 alone, averaging 95 per month, the highest monthly average on record; the number has undoubtedly skyrocketed and the attacks have become even more vicious over the last few weeks.”   

Violent setters

“Who are these violent settlers? Many of them are young men, even adolescents, who shouldn’t be carrying guns in the first place; they had no military training, although they often wear uniforms. They have been armed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s shameless minister of national security, a follower of the racist Meir Kahane and a pyromaniac who loves nothing more than fomenting havoc in mixed Jewish-Arab cities such as Lod, Ramleh, Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Ben-Givr has been handing out rifles – some eight thousand in the past few weeks — to whoever wants one (provided the recipient is Jewish, of course). They may come in handy in the civil war that Ben-Givr is conniving to bring about. Some of these settlers are now organized into paramilitary units supposedly under the aegis of the Israeli army. In reality there is no longer any clear distinction between the settler militias and the army unites, mostly manned by settlers from the area, that are stationed in South Hebron and only too eager to join the hunt.”    

Explosive situation

Regarding the latest military move into the West Bank, The Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon wrote: “United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on Israel to halt its military operation in the West Bank, saying it was “fuelling an already explosive situation.”

“That won’t bother Mr. Netanyahu, who has served as Israel’s Prime Minister for all but 18 months of the past 15 years, and currently heads a coalition government that includes hard-liners who believe Israel should not only settle the entire West Bank, but do the same in Gaza.”

A crime

This is a crime of international proportions, a colossal injustice, and it cannot be allowed to continue.