The latest moves by the Israeli government seem to be directed at taking away the right of residency of Palestinians on the West Bank. Israel is restricting movement in and out of the West Bank. This is what Israeli democracy looks like. Israeli settlers, assisted by the Israeli army, are trying to drive all the Palestinians out of the West Bank to Jordan and Syria. Here is a article by Jeff Halper about what is happening on the ground. – Ian Curr, 28 Feb 2023
Settlers have descended in a rampage on the Palestinian town of Huwara near Nablus and have set it on fire — houses (more than 30), businesses, mosques, schools, every building they could set fire to, plus more than 40 cars and even the local fire engines so that the spreading flames cannot be contained. There are apparently many Palestinian casualties – one reported dead, 98 Palestinians have been treated for injuries so far – although the settlers are also attacking ambulances and the Israeli army is reported preventing the Red Cross from entering the town. (Now, three hours after the pogrom began, the settlers are still in the town and, according to the reports of Israeli Channel 12, are preventing Palestinian families trapped in the burning houses to escape – and no attacker has been arrested.)
Huwara is a Palestinian town of about 6000 surrounded by the most violent Israeli settlements in the West Bank: Itamar, Tapuakh, Yitzhar, Qdumim, Har Brakha and others. Attacks on Palestinians are commonplace and the perpetrators, well-known to the police (now under the control of Itamar Ben Gvir, a settler from Hebron who has been tried seven times for violent attacks on Palestinians), are never punished. This attack, however, is on a scale we have never seen; even Israeli TV is calling it a pogrom. And apparently other Palestinian communities in the area are being attacked as well, Burin and even Nablus.
This will lead, I believe, to a qualitative change in the political situation as we have known it – in one way or another. Many in the current Netanyahu government believe that this is the time to violently repress all Palestinian resistance. Bezalal Smotrich, a settler who has been appointed a government minister in charge of the Civil Administration, the Israeli military government in the West Bank, responsible for approving settlements, expropriating land and demolishing homes, has just posted a “like” to a tweet from an elected Israeli official in the West Bank calling for the “eradication of Huwara.”
The Israeli government believes – and not without reason – that “quietizing” the situation through violent repression, punishment and economic sanctions will, given the complicity of the US and normalization with the Arab world (based itself on the use of Israeli technologies of repression against their own people), pave the way for a normalized, permanent regime of apartheid.
But Israeli pogroms also open opportunities – tragically. They demonstrate the unrestrained violence to which Palestinians are submitted and highlight the unsutainability – and injustice – of “the situation.” We must demand that our governments hold Israel and its settlers accountable for their actions. Indeed, if only our governments would uphold their own international laws of which Israel stands in gross violation, the occupation would collapse by the very weight of its illegality.
Palestine represents the test of whether “the international rule of law” constantly invoked by Biden in regards to US support for Ukraine has any political or moral meaning, or if we in fact live in a Kissinger-arian dystopia of realpolitik. I think we know the answer, and that means we have to go beyond the “human rights approach” to meaningful political action.
Jeff Halper, 27 Feb 2023
I am a citizen of the US currently visiting Palestine. I’m 64 years old. On March 7, I and another international were attacked by Israeli settlers while standing on the outskirts of the Palestinian village of Tuba in Masafer Yatta. I was hit from behind, hard, with a large stick, and my companion was chased and threatened by a settler with an iron bar. The settler who hit me fractured my skull and caused a bleed in my brain.
This is what the colonialism of Israeli settlers looks like for Palestinian families living in Masafer Yatta in the southernmost end of the West Bank. Supported by Israeli military and Police, settlers from the many settlements and illegal outposts in Masafer Yatta are systematically stealing Palestinian land and violently forcing people from their land. To be here now in these 15 villages is to witness ethnic cleansing in real time.
In addition to daily settler threats, attacks, land theft, property destruction and violence, the area’s 1300 residents, more than half of them children, are facing imminent forced removal from their homes to make way for the use of their lands by the Israeli military as a firing zone.
An Israeli high court decision in May of 2022 ended a years long legal battle by residents for the right to remain, and now the largest forced relocation of Palestinians since 1967 could happen at any moment. Israeli forces have already demolished schools, homes, roads, wells, olive trees and agricultural buildings, and delivered demolition orders to every single structure.
As US taxpayers we contribute more than 8 million US dollars a day to the state of Israel. This is what we are buying. The strangulation of villages that are pinned down between illegal outposts. The shepherds forced to sell sheep to buy feed because they cannot access the land they planted a month ago. Women who face settler attacks while trying to reach a hospital in labor. Children who watched as their classrooms were demolished by Israeli forces with their desks and papers still inside. Families waking to the sight of entire olive groves burned or uprooted in the night by settlers. A young man about to be married shot and paralyzed by Israeli soldiers while attempting to save his village’s only generator from confiscation. The death of a beloved elderly man run over and dragged by a heavy equipment trailer during a police raid to confiscate cars in his village.
The humans living in Masafer Yatta desperately need the world to witness the bitterness of colonialism in their fields and olive groves. They desperately need for us to pay attention.
Link to photos and video
https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=kZTL6CVZSR3AitM44bB7WtlQ9o3c67DBqMwk
The West Bank was under a two-pronged attack last week.
The first was carried out by the Israeli state’s army in a massive military invasion of Nablus that killed 11 Palestinians and injured over 100. The second was carried out by its nominally civilian wing — gangs of colonial settlers that went on a rampage last night in response to a resistance attack that killed two Israeli settlers in Huwwara, just south of Nablus.
The raid on Nablus was one of the bloodiest in recent months, aiming to assassinate wanted resistance fighters from the Lions’ Den, Muhammad Juneidi and Hussam Isleem. Israeli special forces killed them and their comrade, Walid Dakhil, a cousin of one of the co-founders of the group. Four other fighters from armed resistance groups around Nablus were also killed in the fighting, in addition to four bystanders in the city (three elderly men and a teenage boy).
Nablus was in mourning, and the Lions’ Den put out a call asking the people to show their support at midnight, February 23:
“Do not despair and fall into sorrow, we need you all, as you have accustomed us…to take to the streets if you can, to come out in every major square, in every city in the West Bank, Jerusalem, the beloved [Gaza] Strip, and in every refugee camp in the homeland, to hear those who would pledge loyalty to the blood that has been spilled.”
Everyone responded to the call of the Lions’ Den. From Ramallah to Hebron, to Nablus and Jenin, to Bethlehem and its camps and Tulkarm and Jericho, people were out in the thousands at midnight, in a show of mass support unknown to any Palestinian political faction.
Neither Fatah nor any other faction has been able to muster this kind of spontaneous mass support since the First Intifada. Political legitimacy, it has become clear, is not to be found in summit halls and security deals, but rather sprouts from the barrel of a rifle when pointed at the colonizer.
In other words, the Lions’ Den has captured the imagination of Palestinians in a way that the political “leadership” has failed to do for decades. What’s more, it has long since stopped trying.
Yet it recognizes its increasingly tenuous hold over the West Bank cantons that it calls a state, pushing it to attend a meeting mediated by Jordan with top Israeli officials in Aqaba on Sunday, February 27. Billed as aiming “to bring an end to the bloodshed,” according to Fatah, the Aqaba Summit was held with the express purpose of calming the brewing storm of Palestinian resistance.
And on the same day as the Summit, an unidentified Palestinian gunman carried out a resistance attack against a settler vehicle in the Palestinian town of Huwwara, south of Nablus. Two settlers were killed, and with them the stillborn.
Palestinians saw the attack as retribution for the invasion of Nablus, much like Khairi Alqam’s Neve Yaacov shooting, which was regarded as retribution for the massacre in Jenin several weeks ago.
According to reuters, one of the settlers killed in Huwwara was in the Israeli military, and both settlers were reportedly from the illegal Israeli settlement of Har Bracha, 8km away from the site where they were killed. Har Bracha is one of many notoriously violent Israeli settlements in the Nablus area, from which Israeli settlers routinely launch attacks on Palestinians.
And that is precisely what the settlers did following yesterday’s shooting in Huwwara.
The settler riot has been widely described as a “pogrom,” and with good reason. The rabid settler gangs rampaged through Huwwara and many other towns throughout the West Bank, completely burning down 35 Palestinian homes, damaging 40 others, and killing a Palestinian in Zaatara, 37-year-old Sameh Aqtash.
All the while, the Israeli army accompanied the settlers as they were out for blood, ensuring their safety and freedom to lynch and burn as they pleased. Israeli forces also imposed a closure on the Nablus area, as Wafa News Agency reported closures at the checkpoints of Huwara, Awarta, al-Muraba’a road, Za’tara, and entrances to Beita. On Monday, February 27, Wafa reported that an Israeli settler attempted to run over a group of journalists covering the Huwwara news.
Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is now in charge of the Civil Administration in the West Bank, reportedly liked a tweet from the Samaria Regional Council Deputy Chief that called for the village of Huwara to “be erased” (see tweet by Edo Konrad of 972), while his political bedfellow and Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, made a visit to the illegal settler outpost of Evyatar on Monday as it was being evicted, vowing to “crush our enemies” and declaring that the settlers are in a state of war that “is not going to end in one day.”
In that, Ben-Gvir is correct. The Zionist forever war against the Palestinians is as old as Zionism itself, and so is Palestinian resistance.
And as we write these words, reports stream in of the death of an Israeli settler in another operation in Jericho.
Amid Israeli army assassinations and settler terror, Palestinians rally around armed resistance in a showing of spontaneous mass mobilization that has not been seen in decades.
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/02/between-army-invasions-and-settler-pogroms-the-west-bank-rises/