WHAT TRUMP AND NETANYAHU DIDN’T TALK ABOUTEnding the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank wasn’t on the agenda
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington this week, ostensibly to pay his respects to the memory of Senator Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly of natural causes on July 11. Of course there was another purpose for the trip: to convince President Donald Trump of the need for another round of all-out bombing in Iran. We’ll learn soon enough whether the president was persuaded that Iran remains a significant nuclear threat despite the repeated US and Israeli air strikes against nuclear facilities there. That question, unresolved for many, has been at the center of US foreign policy in the Middle East for more than two decades. Probably not discussed was the continuing tragedy in Gaza, where Israeli troops, planes, and drones continue to kill Palestinians at will, in violation of a ceasefire set last October. On Wednesday, six Gazans were killed and thirty-four injured by Israeli air strikes that were largely ignored by the major media. The surviving Palestinians there have been squeezed into a sliver of Gaza along the Mediterranean Sea that Israel now deems to be their tent-city home while the larger territory may become the future site of a glorious Trumpland beach resort that remains very much on the agenda of Jared Kushner, Trump’s avaricious son-in-law, and his clique of investors. Nor is it likely that the crisis in the West Bank was on the agenda at the White House meeting. The territory has been under increasingly violent attack by religious settlers, who are safe in the knowledge that Palestinian homes and farms, many held by families for generations, are up for grabs. The media of the West has gone quiet, with only a few exceptions, when it comes to the travails of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Since the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the occupied West Bank has become a much more active Israeli killing zone, as the Israeli settlers, often backed up by religious fanatics in the Israel Defense Forces, have increased the pace of their attacks on the homes, crops and livestock of Palestinians The killings and beatings have reached the point that on Monday António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, saw fit to release a statement reminding the world that Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which began after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, are “a flagrant violation” of international law. The numbers, as tracked by the UN’s human rights office, tell the story. Settler violations have reached an all-time high, climbing to a rate of 460 violent incidents per month. More than 2,200 Palestinians have been forced from their homes in recent months by what the UN called “continuous intimidation and violence.” Over the decades the illegal settlements and killings in the West Bank have never come close to becoming a significant bipartisan issue for US presidents and most members of Congress. But there is an election coming this fall that may bring a different breed of Democrats to the House of Representatives, members who might insist that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank be treated as human beings. There is a new method of investigating international crimes known as Forensic Architecture, developed more than a decade ago at the University of London by an architect named Eyal Weizman, who has won prizes for his work. It uses all available data supplied by a team of architects, film makers, scholars, journalists, archeologists, and so on to investigate specific cases of violence around the world, including the kind of state violence that the Israeli leadership has mastered and is rarely tracked down: the random murders, for example, of Palestine sheep herders or olive farmers in the West Bank whose land is coveted by extremist settlers who believe that they are doing God’s work. A Forensic Architecture study released early this week presents an astonishing reconstruction of the murder last July of a thirty-one-year-old unarmed Palestinian named Awdah Hathaleen who was protesting the Israeli leveling of land—owned by Palestinians for generations—adjacent to the site of a new settlement outpost in the southern West Bank. In more than forty pages of dense reportage, the study unpacks the sequence of events from myriad sources, including open source data, that led to Hathaleen’s execution by pistol by Yinon Levi, a fanatic settler who owned the excavation company. Whether knowingly or not, Levi had brought his machinery onto privately owned land that belonged to nearby Palestinian residents. After killing Hathaleen—who before he was shot by Levi was struck in the head with the hydraulic hammer of an excavator controlled by Levi’s employee Rony Avraham—Levi was allowed to walk away by the IDF soldiers at the scene, with his gun still in his possession. The editors of the study note that its investigators “collected and preserved publicly available audiovisual material and media reporting referring to acts of intimidation violence and property destruction attributed to Yinon Levy. These materials were treated as unverified allegations unless corroborated by official documents or reliable secondary sources. Where possible, the information was crosschecked against contemporaneous reporting and publicly available official statements to assess consistency and reliability.” In its conclusion, the study makes the obvious but still important point that Levi’s and the IDF’s casual response to the murder of a Palestine protester “must be understood within a broader system that enables and supports such practices. . . . The IOF”—the report refers to the IDF as the Israel Occupying Forces—“and police did not treat Levi or Avraham as criminal suspects following the incident. Footage from the scene shows that Levi was not restrained or arrested in a manner consistent with standard arrest procedures. Instead, IOF gathered Palestinian residents in a house yard, where Levi, under their protection, was observed indicating specific individuals who were subsequently detained.” You could say it was a scenario out of the murderous playbook of an earlier era. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2026 Seymour Hersh |