THE SET-UP: Today the Biden Administration announced new sanctions targeting Israeli “settler violence” in the West Bank. According to The Guardian:
The targeted group was Hashomer Yosh, which provides security for illegal settler outposts, including some which have already been sanctioned by the US. The group has been particularly active in the south Hebron hills, at the southern end of the West Bank, which has been a focus of Israeli settler violence against local Bedouin inhabitants.
Hashomer Yosh is officially a non-government organisation, but it has been funded and supported in recent years by Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing coalition.
Therein lies the rub.
Netanyahu’s government is not just “friendly” to the settler movement … it is the settler movement.
As The Economist pointed out today, Netanyahu’s government “depends on settler-backed parties to form a majority in parliament.” His current Finance Minister Belzalel Smotrich predictably champions religious Zionism’s “from-the-river-to-the-sea” vision of a “Greater Israel” by approving illegal settlements. And their “Greater Israel” is emerging from the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the West Bank as settlements continue to sprout up and grow while, at the same time, Palestinian cities, towns and villages are increasingly encircled. Palestinian territory is being rendered dis-contiguous, thereby transforming the West Bank into a patchwork of de facto reservations under Israeli military control.
The simple truth is that the West Bank has already been functionally annexed.
The IDF operates at will in and around “Judea and Samaria,” which is how Israeli officials now refer to the West Bank. The use of the Biblical nomenclature is itself an admission that the dream of so-called “extremist settlers” is already a reality. The Israeli government sustains the fiction of daylight between itself and “extremist settlers” because the Biden Administration desperately needs them to sustain the fiction that there is a Two-State Solution somewhere over Netanyahu’s rainbow.
So, the Biden Administration sanctions settlers and “threatens” more sanctions should the violence continue. The IDF investigates the violence and slaps a couple soldiers on the wrist to appease the source of the weapons they’re using to produce a generation of orphans and amputees in Gaza. And on the same day the State Dept. scolds “extremist settlers,” Netanyahu’s Foreign Minister proposes replicating the destruction and displacement of Gaza in the West Bank. The truth is that the destruction and displacement are already underway.
TITLE: Israeli settlers are seizing Palestinian land under cover of war - they hope permanently
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624qr3mqrzo
EXCERPTS: Since the outbreak of the war, settler violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank has surged.
It had already been on the rise, but in the past 10 months the UN has documented around 1,270 attacks, compared with 856 in all of 2022.
According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, during the same period Israeli settler harassment has forced Palestinians out of at least 18 villages in the West Bank, the Palestinian territory between Israel and Jordan that was captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and has been occupied ever since.
Many settlements have the legal support of the Israeli government; others, known as outposts, and often as simple as caravans and corrugated iron sheds, are illegal even under Israeli law. But extremists build them regardless in a bid to seize more land.
They have rapidly expanded their control over the territory, with the support of the most far-right government in Israel’s history. These extremists are advancing annexation plans in the West Bank and also openly call for settling Gaza once the war is over. Settlers now serve at the heart of Israel’s government, in key ministries.
At the very time that world leaders opposed to settlements are voicing renewed enthusiasm for a two-state solution - a long-hoped for peace plan that would create a separate Palestinian state - Israeli religious nationalists, who believe all these lands rightfully belong to Israel, are vowing to make the dream of an independent Palestinian state impossible.
Analysts think this is why some politicians are refusing to accept any ceasefire deal.
“The reason they don’t want to end the conflict or go into a hostage deal is because they believe that Israel should keep on fighting until it can reach a point where it can stay inside Gaza,” says Tal Schneider, political correspondent for The Times of Israel.
“They think for the long term their ideology is more righteous,” she adds. “This is their own logic.”
Israeli authorities, meanwhile, have announced plans for five new settlements, including the one in Battir, and declared a record area of land, at least 23 sq km, for the state. This means Israel considers it Israeli land, regardless of whether it is in the occupied Palestinian territories, or privately owned by Palestinians, or both, and Palestinians are prevented from using it.
By changing facts on the ground, as the settlers describe it, they hope to move enough Israelis on to the land and build enough on it to make their presence irreversible.
TITLE: Hardliners violently expel Palestinians to expand Israeli settlements in West Bank
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/hardliners-violently-expel-palestinians-to-expand-israeli-settlements-in-west-bank
EXCERPT: As war rages on, long before the dust has settled on thousands of destroyed homes in Gaza, these Israelis are calling to be allowed to build Jewish homes amidst the rubble.
No Israelis have been allowed to live in Gaza since the government pulled out nearly 20 years ago. There was violent protest at the time. Those who called it a mistake now feel vindicated by the October 7 Hamas attacks. And as the world watches the war in Gaza, extremist settlers have taken advantage of the distraction.
Armed mobs have descended on ancient olive groves on multiple occasions, burning them to the ground, accelerating their harassment of Palestinian villagers and violent land seizures, shooting Palestinians who stand in their way. Last week, a Palestinian man was shot dead after a group of armed settlers stormed the village of Jit, setting homes aflame.
In late October, three of Yasser Audi's family members were killed when a group of young settlers stormed through their village of Qusra on a shooting rampage. The next day, as they drove to the graveyard to bury them, their car was surrounded by armed settlers.
Fifteen-year-old Yasser's father and brother were executed in front of him.
Israel's right-wing coalition, led by pro-settlement hard-liners, has ignored Western entreaties to intervene.
Last month, the Israeli government announced it would officially recognize five more illegal settlements in the West Bank, and says it plans to allow settlers to expand into a record amount of further West Bank land this year.
Adding fuel to the fire, many reservists called up to fight from settler communities have joined IDF units in the West Bank. Human rights groups have documented multiple cases of uniformed soldiers seen providing military protection to the settler attacks.
The IDF says it is investigating the accusations. Critics say the IDF's past form shows it cannot be trusted to investigate itself. Of more than 1,200 complaints of Israeli soldier violence against Palestinians from 2017-2020, fewer than 1 percent were charged.
Eiyar Segal lives in one of those communities, Giv'at Arnon, built strategically directly above a Palestinian village, as most settlements are. Several months ago, two settlers were shot and injured on the main road here. More than half the residents here are fighting in the reserves.
Eiyar wants immediate resettlement of Gaza, and says Palestinians should not be allowed to live there.
Eiyar insists the violence is caused by Palestinians refusing to accept what she sees as her biblical right to live on this disputed land, which they call Judea and Samaria, and that the only solution is for as many Israelis as possible to move here.
These settlers are breaking international law, which prohibits Israelis from building in the West Bank or parts of East Jerusalem.
More than three million Palestinians live in the occupied West Bank. The 1993 Oslo Accords ruled 60 percent of disputed West Bank land off-limits to settlers, in hopes that it would one day form the bulk of a Palestinian state.
But in the decades since, Oslo collapsed into memory, and settlers have slowly and increasingly publicly expanded their outposts, despite international outcry. Some 700,000 Israelis now live on this land.
TITLE: ‘Inheriting the land’ – an outpost settler explains her drive to seize the hilltops
https://www.timesofisrael.com/inheriting-the-land-an-outpost-settler-explains-her-drive-to-seize-the-hilltops/
EXCERPT: Tamar Ahituv, 29, lives in Sde Ephraim with her husband Amiel and their two young children, including a baby a few months old.
Sitting on the wooden porch in her rudimentary three-room home overlooking central Israel, Ahituv recounted that the spot for Sde Ephraim was found in 2018 by Eitan Ze’ev, a settler activist who had already established several other illegal outposts with his wife Leah — the granddaughter of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the founding fathers of the settlement movement.
Ze’ev’s modus operandi, Ahituv said, was to go to an uninhabited place in the West Bank with a herd of goats, create an outpost, bring in families, and once it was settled and established move on to create a new outpost elsewhere.
Sde Ephraim was established on state land, West Bank land which is not registered as being privately owned by anyone. Such outposts are nevertheless illegal if they do not have state approval — which Sde Ephraim lacked until this June — and they are not zoned for residential purposes and have no planning permission for construction.
Eitan Ze’ev began by planting olive trees on the hillsides below the site where he would eventually establish Sde Ephraim. He obtained the assistance of three young men to guard the trees in shifts during the day, one of whom was Ahituv’s brother.
Repeated protests by Palestinians from surrounding villages ensued against the presence of the settlers and their nascent outpost, resulting in clashes with Israeli security forces.
Residents of the nearby village of Ras Karkar maintain that land on the ridge on which Sde Ephraim was built belongs to various families in the village who they say have cultivated it for generations.
Palestinians living close to illegal outposts often view them as a threat to their ability to access and use land in the West Bank, be it private or state land, while in general seeing them as a serious obstacle to their goal of sovereignty in the territory.
“In their blood they don’t want us here. They will always hate Jews. Ishmael always hates Yaakov and Yitzhak,” she said, in reference to the figures seen as the biblical forefathers of the Jewish and Arab nations. “There is no dialogue of give and take and then they’ll be satisfied. They will always want more. They want it all.”
She argued that Israel’s response to Palestinian terrorism has not been strong enough to deter violence.
Asked what could happen if Israel one day fully succeeded in halting Palestinian terrorism, and if it would then be possible for Israelis and Palestinians to live alongside each other, Ahituv answered simply.
“To tell the honest truth, I believe that the entire land will be ours and that they won’t be here,” she said. “One way or another. There’s no lack of countries for them to go to.”
She asserted that the Palestinians remain in the West Bank “because they have the best conditions,” which Israel “enables” and which “encourages” the continued growth of the Palestinian population.
“So they shouldn’t have good conditions… They really have enough countries to go to. If they want a developed place, [they can go to] even the US and London. Do a relocation.”
Asked if Israel should encourage this migration, Ahituv said the Palestinians “should flee.”