Violent settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank are up nearly 50%

[yankeedoodle]

Violent attacks by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank are up nearly 50% from last year
https://www.jta.org/2021/12/15/israel/violent-attacks-by-settlers-against-palestinians-in-the-west-bank-are-up-nearly-50-from-last-year

(JTA) — Violent attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank are nothing new. But the phenomenon has reached alarming new level of frequency this year.

Violent attacks perpetrated by settlers agains Palestinians in the West Bank exceeding last year's attacks by nearly 50%, according to a report by The Times of Israel.

In 2021, there have been 397 attacks so far, compared to 272 in 2020, The Times of Israel reported based on data from the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security agency. According to a report in Haaretz, there have been 135 stone throwing incidents targeting Palestinians this year compared to 90 in 2019.

The violence was especially evident during the annual fall olive harvest this year, often a time of violent attacks on Palestinians who spend their days harvesting from trees located outside of their villages, which are often close to settlements. Dozens of videos of violent attacks and photos of bloodied farmers and shepherds and the Israeli activists who sometimes accompany them were shared to social media this year.

While Defense Minister Benny Gantz has said he will assign more soldiers and police officers to the West Bank to stem the violence, the issue of how to deal with the settlers remains an area of little consensus for the current government, which is composed of a broad coalition of right-wing settler leaders, left and center-left parties, and Arab parties.

In a meeting Monday with U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, Israeli Minister of Public Security Omer Barlev discussed the issue of settler violence. After Barlev, who is a member of the Labor party, tweeted about the meeting with Nuland, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who was a leader in the settler movement before becoming prime minister earlier this year, appeared to respond to Barlev's comments without naming him. In a tweet of his own, Bennett expressed support for settlers on the receiving end of violent attacks.

"The settlers in Judea and Samaria have been suffering from violence and terrorism, daily, for decades. They are the protective wall for all of us and we must strengthen them and support them, in words and deeds. There are marginal elements in every society, they need to be addressed by all means, but we must not generalize about an entire community," Bennett wrote.

[abduLMaria]

"The settlers in Judea and Samaria have been suffering from violence and terrorism, daily, for decades.

The Jew cries out in Pain - as he steals a Palestinian's home.

[yankeedoodle]

In reset to pre-Trump norm, State Department terrorism report includes extensive reporting on West Bank settler violence
https://www.jta.org/2021/12/17/united-states/in-reset-to-pre-trump-norm-state-department-terrorism-report-includes-extensive-reporting-on-west-bank-settler-violence

(JTA) — The U.S. State Department has included extensive reporting on West Bank settler attacks on Palestinians in its annual terrorism report, a sign of how seriously the Biden administration is treating the phenomenon.

The 2020 report on terrorist violence, released Thursday, includes three paragraphs reporting settler violence, the most it has included in years. The attacks have become a point of contention between the Biden administration and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, disrupting efforts by both sides to keep relations on an even keel.

Violent attacks by both Jewish settlers and Palestinians have increased over the past year. A 25-year-old settler was ambushed and killed in his car by Palestinians on Thursday.

The Israel-West Bank section of the 2020 State Department report begins, as it has for years, with an accounting of Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis and notes the cooperation between Palestinian Authority and Israeli forces in preventing the attacks. Then it shifts to reporting on settler attacks.

"Israelis living in the West Bank also committed a variety of physical attacks and property crimes against Palestinians, some of which caused serious injury, according to Israeli human rights organizations and media reports," the report said.

The reports on settler violence under the Trump administration were never longer than a paragraph, sometimes only two sentences. Moreover, the Trump administration stopped citing human rights groups in its second report, for the year 2017.

The report issued last year, for the year 2019, removed the word "settler" entirely. Trump administration officials, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former ambassador to Israel David Friedman, sought to bring State Department nomenclature in line with that used by the Israel's right wing.

The Biden administration's return to citing human rights groups for information and statistics is significant given Israel's decision this year to ban six Palestinian human rights groups from operating.

Israeli officials have said that the Biden administration's focus on settler violence is "obsessive," The Jerusalem Post reported this week. But one Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Bennett government was not concerned that the Biden administration was overly concerned with the issue.

Officials of the Biden and Bennett governments are endeavoring to keep any bickering behind closed doors, wishing to avoid the open confrontations that marked the 12 years that Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister.

The reporting on settler violence also noted that Israeli law enforcement was often the victim of settler attacks and noted Israeli efforts to constrain the phenomenon.

The overall report also noted attacks by Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the United States, against Israel, even though Hamas operates in the Gaza Strip, not the West Bank.

[yankeedoodle]

Israeli minister under 24/7 protection over threats from 'Jews'
Omer Barlev has revealed he has been given round-the-clock protection after facing threats from extremist Jews.
https://www.rt.com/news/544527-israeli-minister-threats-protection/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=aplication_chrome&utm_campaign=chrome

Israel's minister of public security recently invoked the fury of right-wingers after he vowed to fight "settler violence." The news was announced by the official in a Twitter post on Monday.

From now on, Omer Barlev will be under 24/7 protection due to threats he has faced, he said.

"Following my determined campaign against the Arab crime families, I hoped that the moment would not arrive when one of them would threaten me personally. But that is not the case. I am not under threat from Arab criminals — I am threatened by Israeli Jews," Barlev wrote.

The minister, a member of the center-left Labor Party, did not reveal the nature of the threats or who made them. They likely came from hardline right-wing Jews, the fury of whom he invoked earlier this month.

Following a Monday meeting with Victoria Nuland, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs, Barlev revealed the two discussed West Bank "settler violence and how to reduce tensions in the area and strengthen the Palestinian Authority." The left-wing politician also vowed to continue pursuing both Palestinian and Israeli extremists, without favoring any of the rivaling hardliners.

"I will continue to fight Palestinian terrorism as if there is no extremist settler violence – and extremist settler violence as if there is no Palestinian terrorism," Barlev said at the time.

The remarks infuriated right-wing politicians, who accused Barlev of stigmatizing the entire Israeli settler community and pandering to Palestinians. Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, a top member of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's right-wing Yamina party, said the settlers "are the salt of the earth" for Israel, implying they were beyond reproach.

"The violence that one needs to be shocked by is the dozens of cases of the throwing of rocks and Molotov cocktails at Jews that occur every day, just because they are Jews, and all this with the encouragement and support of the Palestinian Authority," she stated.

A similar stance was voiced by another right-wing official, the minister of religious services, Matan Kahana, who described the West Bank settlers as "pioneers" while urging Barlev to retract his "false and distorted" remarks.

[yankeedoodle]

The Israeli pogrom against the Palestinians
https://www.redressonline.com/2022/02/the-israeli-pogrom-against-the-palestinians/

By Lawrence Davidson
Israel's violent squatters
On 21 January 2022 an organised gang of over a dozen masked Zionist "settlers" from the Givat Ronen outpost on the occupied West Bank attacked Palestinians planting trees near the village of Burin. There were seven Israeli Jewish supporters with the Palestinians. The "settlers" attacked them as well.

I place the term "settler" in quotation marks because what we are really talking about are not settlers but squatters. I will use the term squatter except where settler appears in a quotation.

As is normal in cases of Israeli squatter violence, the Israeli authorities were slow to arrive at the scene of the attack and, subsequently, made no arrests. The public security minister, Omer Bar-Lev, explained that "until the army gets there it takes time. Until the [Israeli] police were sent it took time and therefore... the moment the [Israeli] police arrive at the site, the terrorists are no longer there." The Palestinian police, for their part, could not respond because they are "forbidden from reacting to acts of violence by Israeli settlers". One can just imagine the army and the police rate of response if it was the Palestinians attacking the squatters. The double standard is obvious.

However, there was something novel in Bar-Lev's statement. He said that "in my view" the attackers constituted "a terror group". This designation apparently had nothing to do with the attack on Palestinians, but rather was warranted because the attackers had "targeted and harmed Israeli citizens".

This might well be something like a "false flag" statement on the part of the public security minister. It was meant to reassure the Europeans and Americans who are concerned by the violence of the Israeli squatter movement. The minister subsequently told a US official that the Israeli government takes the problem seriously and "is taking steps to tackle the phenomenon". This is almost certainly a lie. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has called squatter violence "insignificant", and several of Bar-Lev's fellow ministers criticised him for promoting a "distorted narrative".

Squatter violence goes back at least into the 1980s. In 1983 an 11-year-old girl from Nablus was murdered by Jewish squatters. "In their defence, the chief rabbi of the Sephardic community reportedly cited a Talmudic text justifying killing an enemy on occasions when one may see from a child's perspective that he or she will grow up to become your enemy". One can imagine that a similar logic could justify, in the eyes of some Palestinians, the killing of every Israeli Jewish child.

Subsequently, "in the 21st century, there has been a steady increase in violence and terror perpetrated by Jewish settlers against Palestinians". In 2008 the Israeli army command in the West Bank acknowledged that "a hard core of a few hundred activists were involved in violence against the Palestinians". Though the army said it planned to address the situation, the problem persisted and grew worse. In 2011 the Israeli government again acknowledged "a growing problem with extremists". Again, little was done about it. The United Nations and organisations, such as Human Rights Watch, have repeatedly voiced concern that the number of attacks was growing. The latter noted that "In many cases, settlers abuse Palestinians in front of Israeli soldiers or police with little interference from the authorities".

Here is suggested a reason for the lack of any crackdown on squatter violence. It goes on with the tacit consent of the government. To quote B'Tselem, Israel's main human rights organisation, "Israel has been using settler violence as a major informal tool to drive Palestinians from farming and pasture lands in the occupied West Bank."

Pogrom
What is the appropriate historical term for "informal", supposedly "unofficial", violence nonetheless carried out with the tacit approval of a government? How about pogrom? In this case, we can also call it an obscene embarrassment for all Jews who value human rights.

Pogrom is originally a Russian word which means "to wreak havoc". Traditionally, it was and continues to be a weapon of inter-group discord, where one group seeks to harm or evict an opposing group of different ethnic or religious makeup. The term came to characterise a government-approved tactic of czarist Russia of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In that case, the traditional victims were Jews.

It would seem that successive Israeli governments have used the same tactic to encourage squatter violence against the Palestinians on the West Bank. The endgame here is not difficult to understand. As B'Tselem explains it, the aim of the Israeli government is to clear Judea and Samaria (the biblical names for the West Bank) of non-Jews. The Israeli army has already confiscated around 42 per cent of this territory, and over time, an informal acceptance at all government levels was reached to allow Israeli squatter violence to help force the Palestinians off the remaining land. The dismissive reaction of Bar-Lev's government colleagues to the attack described above is the latest example of this consent.

A reversal of roles
It is painful for progressive Jews to delve into and try to explain why other Jews actively or passively support such tactics. The Zionists have spent a lot of time and energy trying to convince the world that, despite the fact that Israel is ranked the eighth most powerful country in the world, they are the innocent victims of, and also mortally threatened by, Palestinian anti-Semitic violence and hatred. To the extent that they, and the rest of the world, accept this narrative, Israeli tactics can be accepted as both defensive and warranted. But this narrative does not ring true. In fact, there has been a reversal of roles.

Most Zionists see the Palestinians as clones of those who persecuted Jews over the past several hundred years. The Palestinians also stand in the way of the territorial ambitions of the "Jewish state" – territorial ambitions which, once fulfilled, will supposedly provide a secure sanctuary for all the world's Jews. Anyone standing in the way of this goal becomes, ipso facto, an anti-Semite and, as such, they can be seen as enemies of the Jews. In the case of the Palestinians, they may appear as replicas of the East European and Russian anti-Semites who carried out pogroms – kept contained only by Israeli control.

The suggestion that the Israelis are reversing roles here is sacrilege for the Zionists. Yet the evidence bears this out. Starting in 1917, it was mostly East European Jews who, with British assistance, invaded Arab Palestine and took control of ever increasing amounts of that territory. It is Israeli Jews who now seek to purge the land of non-Jews. Palestinians in the occupied territories, harassed in their towns and villages, now play the role the Jews of Europe used to play – victims of pogroms. Some well-placed Israelis recognise the problem. In 2016, Yair Golan, deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army, told a public gathering in Israel: "If there is one thing that frightens me about the memory of the holocaust, it is identifying the revolting trends that occurred in Europe as a whole 70 to 80 years ago ... and finding evidence of those trends here, among us, in 2016." Israeli Jews brave enough to recognise and speak of this reversal of roles have always been rare, and they are getting rarer still: progressive Israelis are emigrating and rightwing governments have become the norm.

Conclusion
It must be over 20 years since I spoke on this issue at a public presentation at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. I had been invited to do so by a young untenured history professor. I had told him that it was a dangerous move, but for him, it was a matter of academic freedom and integrity. For me, it was part of a need to tell the truth about the Palestinian plight.

It was a full house, certainly over one hundred people. I gave a defence of Palestinian rights within a fact-based historical context. The real trouble came when someone in the audience suggested a comparison between Israeli behaviour and that of the Nazis. I said that the comparison was false. The Israelis had neither set up concentration camps nor organised a technologically based slaughter of their enemies. However, what they had done was pushed Palestinians into ghettos and allowed for periodic pogroms. The shocked gasps of the Zionists in the audience were audible. They walked out en masse and my host never got tenure. Yet the pogroms have become more frequent and more dangerous, at once making life more miserable for the Palestinians and perverting the ethical standards Jews have endorsed particularly since the holocaust. Learning bad habits from their past, the Zionists have made the tactic of pogrom their own.