In the West Bank, the Israeli army has banned Palestinian farmers from reaching their land and groups of settlers are burning farmers’ crops. Jacobin spoke to olive growers about Israel’s draconian moves to destroy their livelihoods.
Source: In the West Bank, Israeli Settlers Are Burning Palestinians’ Olive Trees
Israel has forgone it’s right to exist “Never was and never should be”
While the world’s attention has been focused on Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military and settlers have been relentless in their violence against Palestinians across the occupied West Bank.
Source: With all eyes on Gaza, Israel sets West Bank ablaze | The Electronic Intifada
The war in Gaza serves as a smokescreen to the escalation of settler expansion and violence in the West Bank, writes Dan Steinbock. Meanwhile, Biden’s hawks refocus on Iran. Last of a 5-part series.
In the days leading up to the lecture, Ascherman used his car to block a convoy of settlers, which was accompanied to a Palestinian village by a military Jeep “to do who knows what to a shepherding family that they’d already the day before, sent three of them to the hospital, and broke windows, solar panels and cars.”
Ascherman was hit with a rifle butt and had his phone stolen.
“But … they didn’t get to the family. We protected them, as a human being should do,” he said.
When Ascherman went to the police station to file a complaint against the settlers and soldiers, he was shouted at by a cop on the balcony, who told him he wasn’t welcome in the police station. The officer called him a traitor and accused him of doing human rights work for the money.
(Wonder who gets paid more — a rabbi volunteering to put himself in physical danger to protect Palestinians in the West Bank, or a cop?)
Source: Israeli Rabbi Describes Settler Rampages Across West Bank – CounterPunch.org
“It’s no surprise… that the same government that tortured Iraqis in Abu Ghraib is funding the same tactics on Palestinians,” said Jewish Voice for Peace.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has reported the ethnic cleansing of at least scores of Palestinian families from their homes and farms in Area C, the Israel-designated West Bank occupation zone completely administered by Israel.
“While all eyes are on Gaza… the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank could intensify further,” Israeli international law and human rights professor Neve Gordon wrote for the London Review of Books blog Monday, “with Israeli forces pushing Palestinians out of their homes and possibly across international borders.”
Source: ‘Abu Ghraib 2.0’: IDF Torture Videos Spark Renewed Calls to End US Military Aid to Israel
“Unfortunately, the Israeli government is supportive of these attacks and does nothing to stop this violence.”
Source: 30 Israeli Groups Urge Global Community to Help Stop Surging West Bank Settler Violence
The war in Gaza has emboldened settlers in the West Bank. In five accounts from the occupied territory, Palestinians speak of terrifying, ever-present settler violence — beatings, killings, house raids — backed up by the Israeli military.
“Settlers all over the West Bank see this war as a golden opportunity to torment Palestinians from small communities who are literally defenseless,” said one human rights campaigner.
Source: Israel Ramps Up Assault on West Bank With Airstrike on Mosque, Deadly Raids
While the world’s attention is drawn away from the Middle East Israel’s Extremists take advantage
Bezalel Smotrich’s settlement plan is to annex the West Bank, increase settlements and bring an end to the Palestinian Authority. He works silently, away from the cameras and the Knesset podium. He is a professional politician who knows how to swim against the tide.
( Middle East Monitor ) – Israel’s National Security Minister, on Friday, urged tougher military action against Palestinian resistance fighters in the Occupied West Bank and urged Israeli settlers to expand their presence there, despite surging violence and international calls for a halt to new construction, Reuters reports. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, was speaking at a settler outpost – one of several the Israeli military said had been discovered across the West Bank since Thursday but were not authorised. They would be dismantled ‘according to enforcement priorities’, a military statement said, without elaborating.
Source: Israeli Squatters Build new Outposts in Palestinian West Bank amid Rising Violence
Taking the West Bank
( Middle East Monitor ) – Israel has erected “a formal, full-fledged apartheid regime,” the editorial of Haaretz newspaper said yesterday, in a stark warning about the direction of the occupation state. Drawing attention to measures introduced by the far-right government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Haaretz’s editorial said that they include the contentious decision to grant Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, control over the occupied West Bank.
For decades, Israel has governed the occupied Palestinian territories beyond the 1949 Green (Armistice) Line through a military administration. Indeed, that is a “principle of international law”. An agreement was reached during January’s coalition talks, however, to place the occupied territories under civilian rule.
“Once the agreement is implemented, Smotrich will in effect become the governor of the West Bank, holding powers that will allow him to control nearly almost all areas of life there, including planning, building and infrastructure, which he intends to use to expand the settlement enterprise and stop all Palestinian development,” said Haaretz.
Source: Haaretz: Israel has erected ‘a formal, full-fledged apartheid regime’
“By making it harder for people to spend time in the West Bank, Israel is taking yet another step toward turning the West Bank into another Gaza, where two million Palestinians have lived virtually sealed off from the outside world for over 15 years.”
Source: Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community | Common Dreams
WEST BANK INVASION AND COLONISATION ISRAEL’S PRIORITY
Benjamin Netanyahu’s incoming hardline government has put West Bank settlement expansion at the top of its list of priorities a day before it is set to be sworn into office.
Source: West Bank settlements top agenda for Benjamin Netanyahu
Distraction provides cover for Israeli crimes
The European Union has expressed its profound concern about the rash of extra-judicial killings by Israel of Palestinian young men, with ten having been killed recently. This year alone, some 207 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces. The new extremist government of Binyamin Netanyahu and his fascist partners in ‘Religious Zionism’ is suspected of having more Palestinians killed since October. Although a ‘shoot to kill policy’ has been on the books for many years, Some observers fear that the new far right government may be resorting to it more often.
Source: Spike in Extrajudicial Executions by Israeli Police of Palestinian Youth
three squatter-settlements are so strategically placed, in other words, to serve as a sword to decapitate Palestinian East Jerusalem from the body of the Palestinian West Bank, forever sinking any hope of a two-state solution (which in any case is already virtually impossible).
Anti- Semitism or Anti- Israel. They are no longer the same. It’s no longer 1967 but 2022 and Jews are turning against Israel.
The settlers are well aware that political parties will be keen to win their votes, and won’t be interested in disputes over the construction of new settlements. That’s why work is already underway to identify new sites and possibilities for new settlements and “facts on the ground” at the expense of the Palestinians and their land.
A dozen members of Congress have asked top officials in the Biden administration to address a new Israeli policy that severely restricts the ability of foreigners, including U.S. citizens, to travel to the occupied West Bank.
Source: Lawmakers Scrutinize Israeli Rules Limiting West Bank Travel
Israel’s application of ‘Collective Punishment’ is currently being taken to the extreme by Putin in Ukraine when the orders like “Slay all of them” are given. In the case of Putin, he no longer cares about any negative fallout in the Trumpian world of “fake news” because news is today it seems whatever you say it is and who controls the technology to spread it.
Israel’s response to a series of deadly attacks in Be’er Sheva, Hadera, and Bnei Brak over the past two weeks was as predictable as it was malicious. So far, the authorities seem to believe that the four Palestinian assailants — three citizens of Israel and one West Bank resident — acted of their own accord and without organizational backing, despite the first three identifying with the Islamic State. That didn’t stop the authorities from reacting in their usual habit. Over the ensuing days, the police ramped up patrols of Arab towns in Israel; carried out stop-and-frisks of Palestinian citizens in Jewish neighborhoods and public spaces; and clamped down on Palestinians working in Israel without permits. Several municipalities ordered construction companies to freeze their employment of Palestinian laborers, while some Israeli schools told Arab maintenance staff to work only after students had gone home. Along with raids in the West Bank, soldiers blocked Palestinian workers from entering Israel through open parts of the separation barrier, which for years had been left unperturbed with the army’s quiet consent.
This proclivity for collective punishment forms a bedrock of Israeli policy toward Palestinians.
Source: Collective punishment shouldn’t be normal – +972 Magazine
A neverending creeping disease not seen on the front pages of the Western media.
Israel has announced plans to build more residences for Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank, drawing immediate condemnation from Palestinians, peace activists and neighboring Jordan.
Source: Israel to build 1,300 new West Bank settler homes | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera
LAND GRAB
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is playing with words to advance the colonial state’s de-facto annexation of the occupied West Bank. In an interview with the New York Times, Bennett used spin about compromise which amounted to nothing other than promoting colonial expansion while retreating on formalising another land grab. “This government will neither annex nor form a Palestinian state, everyone gets that,” Bennett said. “I’m prime minister of all Israelis, and what I’m doing now is finding the middle ground – how we can focus on what we agree upon.” While diverging political views among Israelis may have prompted Bennett to shift towards a compromise, particularly as his is a coalition government, the issue at stake is still the colonisation of Palestinian land. Moreover, the Palestinians have been removed from the equation.
Source: Bennett’s “Natural Growth” Rhetoric can’t conceal Israel’s colonial Land Grab
some 100 Israeli troops who served in the Palestinian West Bank have called on Defense Minister Benny Gantz and on Minister of Public Security Omer Bar-Lev to intervene to halt the violence of Israeli squatter-settlers toward indigenous Palestinians, which they say they saw with their own eyes. The call came in a letter that was sent on Wednesday by troops who had recently completed their military service, according to Israeli Army Radio. The troops said in their letter, “We, the undersigned, call upon you, male and female soldiers who served in the West Bank, to act now firmly against the phenomenon of settler violence.” They underlined that “Settler violence has been raging for years with tacit support” from the Israeli state.
“The Golan is occupied land that belongs to Syria. Israel has no claim of right over the region. Israel’s aggression then subsequent occupation and unilateral annexation constitute obvious violations of international law. Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton and the US Senate have categorically condemned identical violations elsewhere. This resolution is the US’s latest move to recognize Israel’s control over the Golan as legitimate. It builds on the US’s vote last month, for the first time, against a UN resolution condemning Israel’s occupation of the Golan.”
via » Syrian Rights Group Denounces US Senate Call on Golan Heights– IMEMC News
Today the US Congress is weighing draft legislation based on problematic logic that conflates a call for businesses to stop operating in West Bank settlements, which are unlawful under the 1949 Geneva Conventions that prohibit transferring civilians into occupied territory, with a boycott of Israel.
Companies should fulfill their human rights responsibilities by ending operations in the settlements – yet the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S. 720) would impose criminal penalties on businesses and nonprofits who stop doing business with Israel or Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, erasing the distinction between Israel and the West Bank that the US has long recognized.
“If I need something fixed, an Arab comes and I host him,” one settler told Avi.
“I don’t have a lot interaction with them, except for when I’m shopping,” another said. “With the store staff and sometimes with the other shoppers.”
A orthodox seminary student said he sometimes even says hello to the Palestinian janitors who work at his yeshiva.
Some might say these relationships sound a lot like colonialism, but these Israeli settlers would argue otherwise.
“This is a historic event that we have been waiting for,” an extremist member of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party said.
The latest radical move by hardline Zionists in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party could see Israel´s government annex all of the occupied West Bank, incorporating most of historic Palestine into the Israeli state.
The central committee of the right-wing party overwhelmingly voted on Sunday for a resolution urging Likud parliamentarians to push for the annexation of the territories that are already illegally-held.
“If the president of the United States believes Jerusalem is ours, there is no reason why a right-wing party and coalition cannot. It’s important for us to show Trump what the ruling party in Israel wants, and since he loves the Jewish people, sooner or later, he will come to the same conclusion,” the activist added.
via Israeli Ruling Party Votes to Annex West Bank and Seize Last Palestinian Lands | Informed Comment
If Israel is not willing to relinquish military control over the West Bank, then it is saying that there can be no two-state solution. Benjamin Netanyahu last week promised that Israel will never relinquish security control over the West Bank, even as part of a two-state peace deal, which is to say that the Israeli army will occupy the Palestinian territory forever. [tmwinpost] “[I]n any agreement, and even without an agreement, we will maintain security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River,” the prime minister said at an event marking 50 years since Israel conquered the West…
Source: Netanyahu vows to occupy the West Bank forever | +972 Magazine
The reality in the West Bank is one that resembles a prison, where the prisoners are held for as long as humanly possible. Their release will carry a price — and Israelis are not willing to pay it. The Knesset passed a law Monday night denying entry visas or residency rights to foreign nationals who call for boycotts against Israel or the settlements. The law won’t have much of an affect on entry into Israel proper, but rather will mostly affect those trying to enter the West Bank — a solid reminder that the ban is yet another example of the way Israel holds Palestinians prisoners. After all,…
Source: New entry law a reminder that Palestinians live in Israel’s prison | +972 Magazine
His ideological proximity to the new U.S. president will allow Netanyahu to advance plans for the de facto annexation of the West Bank. Now all he needs is Trump’s approval. By Menachem Klein A slip of the tongue from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month is worthy of attention. In an unprepared response to a Likud Knesset member, Netanyahu said: “What I’m willing to give to the Palestinians is not exactly a state with full authority, but rather a state-minus, which is why the Palestinians don’t agree [to it].” [tmwinpost] This almost never happens to Netanyahu. He is calculated, in contrast to…
Source: Trump is just what Netanyahu needs to annex the West Bank | +972 Magazine
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