For months, Israeli settlers have pillaged across the occupied West Bank and attacked Palestinian towns and villages with impunity.
Events in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus, where Israeli settlers have besieged three Palestinian families since Sunday, have even led to an unusual condemnation of the settlers’ actions by the Israeli government, with spokesman David Mercer calling the settlers’ actions “deplorable” and “unacceptable” and promising that Israeli authorities would investigate and arrest those responsible.
Recommended stories
list of 4 itemsend of list
Analysts, campaigners and Israeli parliamentarians who spoke to Al Jazeera reacted with disbelief and disbelief, pointing to the Israeli military’s inability to stop the siege in which settlers cut off water and electricity to Khusra. Initially, Israeli soldiers were seen interacting with and even praying with the settlers in Qusra.
collusion
“The government’s attempts to distance itself from the violence are ridiculous,” Aida Touma Suliman, an Israeli lawmaker representing the left-wing Hadash party, told Al Jazeera. “They can say what they want, but they are accomplices.”
“If you look at the West Bank, there is no longer a distinction between military and settlers,” she said, adding that many settlers were allowed to serve in the military defending the same illegal settlements from which they came. “The government is supplying them, protecting them, arming them. It’s not against them. The policy is to support them,” she added.
“There is nothing new about what is happening in Qusra,” said Yair Dovil of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. “We’ve seen this for decades: When there’s international criticism of violence, governments condemn it, settlers retreat, and as soon as attention shifts, they come back.”
“Let me be clear: settler violence is state violence,” Deville added. “They both have the same goal: to drive out the Palestinians and take their land.”
The speed and ferocity of the Israeli government’s incursions into Palestinian land have increased in recent months, contrary to both international law and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that illegal settlements on Palestinian territory should cease. Monitoring by the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs shows a weekly increase in settler violence as Israel approaches October elections and the possible end of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government.
“We are certainly looking for an escalation in violence in the occupied West Bank, east Jerusalem, and other areas such as Gaza in the lead up to the election,” said Neve Gordon, a professor of international law at Queen Mary University of London and author of “Israeli Occupation.”
“This vote is like a rallying cry to the entire (settler) constituency that we must do everything we can while we still can,” he said of concerns among settlers and the Israeli radical right that they would lose what many see as allies in Netanyahu’s coalition.
Unchained payment
The Israeli government has done little to distance itself from the settlers’ actions. Instead, prominent members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netaniv’s Likud party attended high-profile settlement conferences, including one explicitly focused on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Prime Minister Netanyahu himself responded to the recent violence in the Palestinian village of Tar – which prompted a warning to the United Nations that the entire West Bank was reaching “breaking point” – by pledging to admit more illegal settlements.
At the center of the government’s policy on reconciliation are the polarizing figures of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Smotrich has proven to be one of the most influential Israeli politicians in history in promoting the cause of illegal settlements.
Mr. Smotrich normalized political references to the annexation of Palestinian territory and made granting partial administrative control over the occupied West Bank an important condition for joining Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition government. Since then, he has overseen the expansion of illegal settlements at an unprecedented pace.
Mr. Smotrich also boasted that a two-state solution was no longer realistically possible when he announced the E1 settlement plan last August, which would combine occupied East Jerusalem with the Mare Adumim settlement.
But Mr Gordon argued that focusing on just two of the Coalition’s more controversial figures was missing the point.
“It’s too easy to say it’s all because of these few people and we’ll be okay without them,” Gordon said. “It’s much broader in scope.”
“The ethnic cleansing that we are seeing in the West Bank, and that the military is carrying out in Jenin and other refugee camps in the region, requires the complicity of the police, the attorney general, the military, and ultimately the people,” he said. “Without the umbrella they provide, none of this would be possible.”
