With the destruction of Gaza now being conducted with techniques — lethal thirst as a weapon — that put it in the category of the worst imperialist crimes against humanity, fundamentalist settlers on the West Bank are using Gaza’s bombardment as cover for a series of fresh land-grabs and the violent expulsion of Palestinian farmers. This follows a sustained period of murders of Palestinians by settlers over the past 12 months, conducted with near impunity, and which appear to have formed part of the provocation for Hamas’ terrorist break-out attack on October 7.
The Hamas attack has served as a pretext for land grabs with violent threats. Following the October 7 attack, settlers in the West Bank launched an offensive on the village of Wadi Siq, a Bedouin community east of Ramallah (Bedouins were among those killed in the Hamas attack). According to a Washington Post report, the village has been besieged every day since the attack, threatened with lethal violence, its inhabitants driven out and unlikely to return.
Settler violence has been on the rise since 2021, kicked off by the Sheikh Jarrah evictions in East Jerusalem, in which pre-1948 Jewish owners’ legal claims to the property were exercised by a property company that had bought up the rights, which were used to evict Palestinians and in some cases demolish their homes.
Since then, there has been increasing mainstreaming of the settler movement to Israeli politics and an increased sense of impunity by settlers, with Israeli police and military failing to intervene (Palestinian police are not permitted to intervene against Israeli settlers).
For some time this was blamed on “hilltop youth” — out-of-control settler teenagers. But as Ha’aretz noted of the 2021 outbreaks, video clips taken by Palestinian victims show:
“Masked Jews — it’s best to avoid the newspeak term ‘hilltop youth’ — behaving like the lords of the land: beating and threatening Palestinians, in some cases with the use of clubs.”
As this report goes on to say, these attacks are now systematically conducted against Palestinian farmers during the olive harvesting season as a deliberate attempt to destroy their livelihood and make the pattern of life impossible. Settlers disrupting the harvest have pepper-sprayed observers.
Israeli police and military forces have been utterly complicit in these attacks, according to a report by Breaking the Silence, a human rights group of forces veterans, who accuse military and police of perpetrating an “ecology of violence”, with soldiers being informed that their sole duty is to protect the settlers, told “you’re the gatekeeper of the settlements and you’re, like, the angel who guards the area”.
Equally, there has been violence by Palestinians against settlers, although, even the Israeli government believes it to be reactive, largely provoked by settlers.
The Israeli government, now composed of settler parties, has stated its determination to annex the West Bank. According to commentators, the settlers’ intent is now to clear West Bank Area C of non-Jews, something that the destruction of Gaza and the support of the government will give them cover to do. Area C constitutes about 60% of the West Bank, largely its eastern half. Clearing it of Palestinians would permanently deny them a potential border with Jordan.
In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack, settler violence in the West Bank has stepped up. More than 115 Palestinians have been killed, including 33 children, with Israeli military units participating in half the lethal operations. Bedouins and herders are being particularly targeted.
That last detail should leave no one in doubt as to what this is. This is systematic, annihilatory frontier war violence, directed towards an indigenous agricultural people by a fanatical settler movement, deriving from the hi-tech West, pursuing fantasies of origin, assuaging an anomic life in the West by stealing other peoples’ land. You’ll find ample coverage of this in Ha’aretz.
But you won’t find any of it in the Australian Jewish News. Despite the attempt by various Zionist community leaders to attach themselves to Indigenous causes here, there is silence about hunting parties going on in the West Bank in the 21st century, a hundred Conistons on the Jordan.
