BIDEN ADMINISTRATION SHOULD CONFRONT GROWING ANARCHY ON THE WEST BANK——AND THE ASSAULT ON CIVILIANS IN GAZA
BY
ALLAN C.BROWNFELD
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For
more than fifty years, the Israeli government has occupied the West
Bank in violation of international law. It has built an increasingly
large number of Illegal Jewish settlements on this land. These settlers
have full legal rights and the right to vote. Indigenous Palestinian
residents have no legal rights—-and no right to vote. This has been
called “apartheid” by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Members of the current Israeli
government call for annexing this territory and expelling its
Palestinian residents.
None
of this could be happening without the silence of the Biden
administration and its continuing provision of massive financial aid to
Israel. There has, quite properly, been support for Israel in the wake
of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas. But that attack has stimulated
growing acts of Israeli terrorism on the West Bank, and the killing of
thousands of civilians in Gaza.
Consider
what has been happening in recent days. The assault by Israeli settlers
on the Palestinian village of Al-Mughayyir was described by The
Washington Post as “the worst anyone here could remember. There were
pools of dried blood on the rooftop where assailants shot a man
dead…Hundreds of settlers roamed the hillsides…eyewitnesses said,
throwing stones and firing on residents. They set homes and vehicles
ablaze…members of the Israel Defense Forces made little effort to stop
the violence, according to eyewitnesses.”
Video
filmed by a local journalist and obtained by B’Tselem, the Israeli
human rights group, shows Israeli troops in al-Mughayyir during the
attack on April 12, military vehicles drive along a smoke-filled road as
masked attackers look on.
Violence
by Israeli settlers, aimed at depopulating the area, increased last
year after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power with a
coalition that included far-right settler activists who have been
convicted of anti-Arab incitement and have advocated the annexation of
the West Bank. Since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, there have been an
average of seven settler attacks per day on Palestinians, the highest
figure since the United Nations began keeping statistics in 2006.
This
year the Biden administration imposed sanctions on a handful of
individual settlers connected to attacks on Palestinians as well as on
two illegal outposts. “There is no justification for extremist violence
against civilians,” the State Department said in March. Since then,
the violent attacks continue and massive U.S.aid to Israel continues as
well.
Yesh Din, an
Israeli group that monitors settler attacks, reports that in the most
recent assault, at least 60 homes were attacked and more than 100
vehicles burned. Emergency responders say that both settlers and
soldiers obstructed their work. Yesh Din reports that several families
lost homes they had built with their life savings. The sheep killed in
this farming community left shepherds without a source of income.
Hundreds of farm animals were slaughtered across several villages.
Of
course, the increasing violence on the West Bank does not compare with
what has been occurring in Gaza. There, hospitals have been destroyed,
aid workers have been targeted, and more than 30,000 people have been
killed, thousands of them children. In an article headlined “I’m Jewish
and I’ve Covered Wars, I Know War Crimes When I See Them” (Washington
Post, April 14, 2024), Peter Maass, who has covered the Bosnia war and
the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, writes, “How does it feel to be a
war-crimes reporter whose family bankrolled a nation that’s committing
war crimes? I can tell you. I covered children. The victims of
genocide—-which Jews were in the Holocaust—-are not gifted with the
right to perpetrate one.”
Maass
points out that, “My ancestors were key funders of Jewish immigration
to British-controlled Palestine. The Warburg and the Schiffs donated
millions of dollars to that cause…When Golda Meir made an emergency
fundraising visit to the U.S. , one of the philanthropists she met with
was an uncle of mine who headed the American Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee….As Israeli forces grind through Gaza in what the
International Court,of Justice defines as a ‘plausible’ case of
genocide, my family’s history of philanthropy runs into my familiarity
with war crimes. When Israel bombs and shoots civilians, blocks food
aid,attacks hospitals,cuts off water supplies, I remember the same
outrages in Bosnia.”
Maass
notes that, “Millions of Jews in America feel connected to Israel’s
creation. ..What’s a Jew to do now?…My experience of war crimes taught
me that being Jewish means standing against any nation that commits war
crimes.”
More and more
Jewish voices such as Peter Maass are being heard. But it is U.S.
military and financial aid which gives Israel the ability to act as it
does in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel
is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since
the end of world War 11. Israel now receives more than $3.8 billion in
aid annually. This aid includes numerous provisions that are not
available to other recipients. According to the Congressional Research
Service, these include providing aid “as all cash grant transfers, not
designated for particular projects, and transferred as a lump sum in the
first month of the fiscal year, instead of in installments. Israel is
allowed to spend about a quarter of the military aid for the procurement
in Israel of defense articles and services…rather than in the U.S.”
If
President Biden wants to advance peace in the region, the U.S. should
stop financing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, which is in
violation of international law, and should bring U.S. aid to attack
civilians in Gaza to an end. As the views of Peter Maass make clear,
there would be widespread support from Jewish Americans for such an
approach.
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Allan
C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of
ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism (
www.acjna.org)