Amid the Mourning, Israel's Settlement Enterprise Celebrates a Great Victory - Opinion - Haaretz.com
Under cover of the collective shock and horror at Hamas' pogrom on October 7, under cover of bereavement, mourning, pain and the anxiety over the hostages' fate, settler militias are accelerating and expanding their attacks on Palestinian shepherd communities in large parts of the West Bank. They're also chasing Palestinian farmers from the lands, orchards and olive groves – often with backing from the army.
A gradual three-decade process has received its window of opportunity to near its logical conclusion: expulsion in broad daylight in preparation for the full “cleansing” of around 60 percent of the West Bank of its indigenous people.
It's happening at every house, tent and road that the Israeli Civil Administration's discriminatory bureaucracy failed to destroy, and wherever military orders have failed to prevent people from remaining in their villages that existed before 1948, or from cultivating their land. Settlers are now coming armed and committing acts of violence to fulfill the official goal: expanding living space for Jews at the expense of the Palestinians.
- Israel's expulsion of Palestinians in the West Bank amid the fog of war
- Settlers are trying to drag Israel into war in the West Bank
- Israeli settlers aren’t pausing the expulsion and dispossession in the West Bank
On Saturday morning, a settler who is an off-duty soldier shot dead a Palestinian, 40-year-old Bilal Saleh, as he harvested olives with his children on his land in the village of Al-Sawiya south of Nablus. About two hours earlier, settlers forced harvesters out of an olive grove between the villages of Jalud and Qusra east of Al-Sawiya. The settlers beat up and injured one of the Palestinians.
On Saturday afternoon, as I began to write this piece, residents of the ancient village of Zanuta in the South Hebron Hills packed their belongings and left their cave dwellings and homes. In recent weeks, more intensely than ever, the residents have been harassed and threatened by settlers from nearby outposts. They had already been denied access to their grazing land – which depleted their flocks and jeopardized their livelihood. Now the settlers' threats have become too direct for them to stay.
The following are the other real-time reports that I received on Saturday. In the morning, settlers with their flock invaded one house in the southern village of Qawawis. The terrified woman and children fled. At noon, settlers and soldiers entered the village of Jinba in the Masafer Yatta area went up onto the roof of the mosque and smashed its loudspeakers. Settlers attacked families living in the hamlet between the Metzudat Yehuda checkpoint and the Green Line and took phones from people. A 16-year-old girl had her arm broken, and three of the people assaulted were arrested. It's still unclear whether this was by settlers who handed them over to the army or by the army itself.
At about 10 P.M., settlers were spotted chopping down olive trees in the villages of Qabalan and Talfit south of Nablus. At the same time, soldiers and settlers confiscated a security camera from the chicken coops in nearby Qusra. In Jalud, a group of Israeli Jews, some of them armed, danced and sang near Palestinian homes.
At around 11 P.M., settlers entered the village of Susya and warned several families that they had 24 hours to leave their homes. In the village of Tuba, armed settlers broke into homes and vandalized them. Personal items and equipment disappeared. At around 1 A.M., Israeli Jews loaded six sheep belonging to an elderly widow onto a pickup truck and also took an electric hob, a gas canister and a phone.
All the above is just a partial list, because immediate detailed documentation doesn't exist for all areas where similar incidents took place.
Contrary to what the settlers’ advocates would have us believe, these aren't acts of “vengeance” or self-defense against “Hamas pogromists.” The incidents are part of a planned, calculated and well-financed program with a clear pattern that exposes its existence.
For years the police either didn’t look for the assailants, or they closed the cases or tampered with the investigation. The soldiers just stood back and watched; sometimes they even joined in. The prosecution didn’t really care and certainly didn’t lay down the law. Ministers came for a visit that was all smiles. That’s the way the authorities have handled similar attacks since the '70s, and it remains to be seen how the detention of the suspect in the killing of Saleh will evolve.
Thousands of Palestinians are left to face this violence that aims to expel them. The militias block routes that lead to the people's villages, they sabotage their water supply and conduct daytime raids with off-road and all-terrain vehicles. They conduct nighttime raids and threaten people in their tents, huts and caves, demanding that they leave. They attack people and their vehicles, they detain and “arrest” people, they damage solar panels and agricultural buildings – and they do this over and over again, just in case the message wasn’t understood the first time.
Everything they used to do bit by bit and undercover – and then more openly and undisturbed – they're now doing on steroids. The army has been trained to protect the settlers and thus neglected the communities near Gaza. And even now, the soldiers are accompanying the settlers on their raids – or even finishing the job for them. The soldiers too destroy buildings and crops, threaten, shoot, wound and kill.
The settlement enterprise – which is based on the systematic destruction of Palestinian human and national rights and on viewing the Palestinians as inferior and superfluous – is celebrating its spectacular victory as we mourn and bereave.
Will the settlement process that has been expanding under the auspices of the Oslo Accords and the process of expulsion from the West Bank's Area C spread to areas A and B? Maybe the question is when this will happen. When will armed settler militias begin to raid rural and urban neighborhoods (and not just Nablus, Awarta or the outskirts of El Bireh) and threaten their residents?