“Settler madness.”
Sanity and psychosis in the West Bank.
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11 SEPTEMBER—I recently delivered a talk at the annual Mut zur Ethik conference in Sirnach, Switzerland. Held each summer at the end of August for the past thirty-two years, Mut zur Ethik, which translates as “courage to take a moral stance,” brings together independent journalists, historians, diplomats, activists, scholars, and thinkers to discuss ethical responses to current affairs.
“Reason and Humanity” was the broad topic of this year’s conference. I considered this theme using the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank to illustrate the fundamental irrationality embedded in the Western project—the apotheosis of which is displayed in the sadism and barbarity of the Zionist state.
What follows is a slightly modified version of the original PowerPoint presentation. My full report on the ethnic cleansing of the Bedouin community of Deir Alla is here.
—C. M.
I begin this presentation by showing you pictures of the community of Deir Alla. This was a small Bedouin gathering of seventeen families in the Governorate of Bethlehem. These families are the direct descendants of people who have lived as goatherds and shepherds in the same area for generations. One month ago, in the last week of July, Deir Alla was ethnically cleansed and completely destroyed.
What you are about to see are stark images of humanity and inhumanity, rationality and irrationality. I want you to consider these images in the context of our conference on reason and humanity. This is what the clash between reason and unreason looks like in the West Bank of Occupied Palestine.
Palestine—Gaza and the West Bank—is where the West comes face-to-face with who we are and what we’ve become, as Westerners and Western nations. And what we see, we Westerners, when we look at ourselves, is the fundamental irrationality embedded in the Western project since the beginning of colonialism.
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The Bedouins of Deir Alla are closely associated with the nearby village of Kisan, located 15 km southeast of Bethlehem. Kisan is now completely surrounded by settlements and outposts.
The settlement of Ma’al Amos is a couple of kilometers south of Kisan and is visible from the village. The Bedouin gathering of Deir Alla was roughly three kilometers south and east of Ma’al Amos. It was from Ma’al Amos that settlers staged their attacks on Deir Alla.
Throughout this talk I use the terms settlement and settler, but these are inadequate to convey the violence and criminality of Jewish settlers and the settlement project. This is a project of ethnic cleansing. Settlers are actively engaged in terrorizing, brutalizing, and displacing Palestinian communities in a process Jewish Zionists refer to as “renewing the land.”
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In November of last year, I met a community activist in the village of Kisan, a man named Adnan al–Abayat. Adnan has been documenting settler violence for the past several years. His family was from Deir Alla and much of this talk is based on his reporting.
The picture above shows Deir Alla as it was before it was destroyed. Adnan sent the following text along with the photograph:
I remember when I was young in Deir Alla. I was 5 years old, and my father used to tell me about their life in this place. They used to live in caves and in the summer they would build tents from plastic and sheep hair. Then life developed and our houses became mobile homes, and then concrete block homes with metal roofs. But unfortunately we did not get to have our dream to have homes like other people. It was a joy during the past 5 years. Then it became an illusion and was lost within days.
Next to us was the cemetery of the dead in Deir Alla, where our great-grandfathers were buried from the Turkish period, and where my uncles and my grandmother were buried, and all who died from the village of Kisan. Now, too, the settlers have taken it over, and we have no other cemetery.
The photo above shows Adnan’s father with his herd of sheep and goats. It was taken during the spring.
The man in the upper right is Adnan. The other pictures are of two of his children. After Deir Alla was destroyed Adnan texted me saying: “Our life was somewhat beautiful despite the Occupation. We made happiness out of nothing.”
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The upper right photo shows an illegal outpost near Kisan that was established in May. The young men pictures above parked their cars on a hilltop, set up a tarp, and began a campaign to terrorize local families and steal the surrounding land. This is typical of how an outposts begins. This gang almost certainly belongs to the Hilltop Youth, a violent settler group, whose members are often still in their teens.
In the lower right photo, the group is sitting on a hill above and near a Palestinian home. They’re spying on the family and letting their presence be known. In the photo on the left, they’re sitting in the remains of an old car that was left in a yard next to a house. This behavior marks the beginning of an escalation. These gangs typically break into homes, steal and destroy things, and threaten to kill the families. The harassment and violence increase until families are forced to leave.
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The settler pictured above routinely harassed the families of Deir Alla by driving his animals into their yards. On the right he’s ducking behind a rock from where he spies on the family. The family knows he’s there. The settler wants the family to know he’s there. This is a cat and mouse game, a form of psychological harassment and bullying.
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I’m going to show you two videos of a settler attack on Deir Alla that took place on 24 May. At the beginning of the first video settlers can be seen throwing rocks at a building where animals are kept. And indeed, numerous animals were killed during the attack.
The camera then moves to the right and focuses briefly on the valley below. Israeli soldiers stand near an armored vehicle protecting settlers as they attack the Bedouin homes. The soldiers fired live ammunition into the community as the attack began in order to force families inside their homes and to prevent them from defending themselves.
In rural areas, settlers form part of the front line in a war on West Bank Palestinians. The Israeli army operates through them. It arms the settlers and provides military cover.
The following video shows the same attack from another vantage point.
Attacks on Deir Alla continued to escalate. In mid-July, settlers threw molotov cocktails into one of the homes in the middle of the night while the family slept. Children were present. By this time, settlers were threatening to kill the families if they continued to stay. Finally, the decision was made to leave.
The community was evacuated over two days in the final week of July. Everything was removed from the homes and the doors were locked in the hope that one day the families would be able to return.
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On 26 July the last families left Deir Alla. That night, in an event that was reported by Haaretz, settlers burned four of the houses including the home belonging to Adnan’s parents. The next day settlers brought in a backhoe and destroyed all but one of the remaining houses.
I will now read several of Adnan’s texts from that day:
Like all Bedouin communities, the families of Deir Alla were displaced after continuous attacks by settlers who tightened the noose on the people.
Memories of the past and the toil of years all wasted. Homes were destroyed and razed to the ground. We dug a well, land was planted with olives, figs, and other trees. We built sheep pens and purchased equipment. The value from years of toil exceeded 100,000 shekels. All of that is gone, as if it were a dream that passed in a few moments.
The people of Deir Alla left after a long period of harsh suffering, were forced to leave for a dark destination with no less suffering ahead than what they recently went through. They left behind memories swallowed in a land they never thought they would leave in this painful and hurtful way. We can only say, ‘God is sufficient for us, and He is the best Disposer of affairs.’
In a separate text he wrote:
“An hour ago, I was with my mother. I saw her tears running down her cheeks, and she was asking me about the smallest things there, at her home. Are they still the same? Is there hope that we will go back?”
And in a final text he said,
“The settlers are keen on destruction and devastation so that there is no hope of return. But loss of home is not what hurts our hearts. It is also the land that we have loved and still love since childhood.”
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One house that was still under construction, and that had not been lived in, was stolen by the same settler who had harassed the families for months with his herd of animals.
This is what the irrationality of the Zionist project looks like. This man (see photo above) is celebrating and thanking God for his success in destroying the lives of other people. This picture alone is why I’m talking to you in the context of this theme. There is no discussing Zionism or Israel as if it is a rational defensible project.
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Now I want you to think about children and what happens to children in this kind of environment.
One week after the evacuation of Deir Alla I had a text exchange with Adnan’s wife, a woman named Sabah. I wanted to know how the children were doing. She sent me pictures of three drawings, one of which I share here with you.
This drawing (see photo above) shows a large yellow backhoe and a demolished house. Numerous dead animals are also depicted. The Arabic says, “The houses were burned and people were sad. They cried because they were powerless.”
The following week, Sabah gathered the children of Deir Alla at the small library in Kisan, were they spent several hours drawing together. She texted me afterward to report that the children were doing better.
In the photo above, a large backhoe is in the process of demolishing a home from which the Palestinian flag flies. An Arab family is gathered below the home. On the right side of the drawing, above an Israeli flag, an olive tree has been cut down and a sheep has been killed.
Israel routinely uses backhoes to demolish Palestinian homes in the West Bank. For that reason they appear frequently in drawings done by children. Imagine the fear these monstrous machines provoke in a child whose home has been destroyed.
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Now I want us to consider how the irrationality of Zionism is instilled in and expressed by Jewish children.
The following video shows three settlers harassing a Palestinian family and forcing them to leave their home. The man is dressed in military uniform and carries a military-issue weapon, he is accompanied by two teenaged boys. International volunteers are with the family to provide a protective presence.
The armed settler tells one of the international activists the family must leave their home or he, the settler, is going to [he makes a violent gesture]. The activists says, “Explain why, this is their house.” The settler replies, “Because of the violence.”
Another activist says, “Who is doing the violence towards a woman? Towards women? Why are you doing this? Why are you supporting this? How can you support this? Do you think this is normal?”
The settler replies, “Yes.”
The activist says, “It’s completely disgusting. It’s abnormal, this behavior. Are you serious?” At that point the youngest Jewish boy puts a camera into her face.
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The following three images are screenshots from a video of another incident in which settlers harassed the same family. The boy with the side curls holds a stick. He’s the same boy who was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood in the previous video. I’m showing you these pictures because settlers use their boys as attack dogs. The armed man stands back and tells the boy what to do.
This is called rage-baiting. The settlers are trying to provoke a reaction so they can call the I.O.F. and escalate the violence. Here the Jewish boy is focusing his aggression on the smaller Palestinian boy.
This is sociopathic behavior. This boy’s mind has been damaged if not destroyed. He’s been force-marched into a state of complete irrationality. He’s been taught to hate Palestinians and to take pleasure in tormenting and bullying them. In a few years he’ll go into the army. As a civilian he’ll carry an assault rifle.
How will he raise his children? How will peace be possible when each generation of Israeli Jews has been taught to fear and hate Palestinians and to see them as animals?
The pictures of Deir Alla show a people living a simple life, but also a meaningful and dignified life. This is a life connected to the land, culture, and traditions of Palestine. It is also a fundamentally rational life. Rational because it’s a way of living that relates to reality as it presents itself from day to day and over the course of generations. Rational also because it relies upon and expresses an inherited body of wisdom and knowledge.
By contrast, the videos and pictures of Jewish settlers show a people living and behaving in ways that are profoundly irrational and inhumane—to the point of criminality and madness.
This is the irrationality and madness of minds possessed by religious and ideological fanaticism: Messianic Judaism and Zionism, racism and Jewish-supremacism.
The settler project in the West Bank—and indeed the very creation of Israel—is irrational because it rejects established facts, history, and moment to moment reality. Instead, it uses brute force and violence to impose an imagined reality on the land and people of Palestine—a fantasy of European Jewish indigeneity in Palestine, a fantasy of a Jewish right to the land of Palestine, a fantasy of a right to a Jewish state. Indeed, a fantasy of a “greater Israel” that includes most of the Levant.
Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank embodies the quest for supremacy that infuses the Western project and in which “reason and humanity fall by the wayside,” to quote from this year’s Mut zur Ethik invitation. The very worst traits of the Western world, as led by the United States, are distilled and concentrated in the Zionist state and enacted on the bodies and lives of Palestinians. But also quite clearly on the hearts and minds of Israeli Jews.
There is a path to peace but the world will not walk it until there’s a fundamental change in the West. In Palestine, the full force of Western militarism and imperialism has been deployed against a people who are stateless, who have no military, and no means to defend themselves. And for this very reason, it is in Palestine that the West will redeem itself or, failing, as it now does, condemn itself, its history, and its future.
Published previously at Winter Wheat and West Bank Alerts.
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