[Salon] BIDEN ADMINISTRATION SHOULD CONFRONT GROWING ANARCHY ON THE WEST BANK——AND THE ASSAULT ON CIVILIANS IN GAZA



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


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