Israel’s ‘other war’ in the West Bank also needs global condemnation

Having been set upon by the settlers they were badly beaten, their bones broken, before their car was smashed up and eventually torched. At one point, according to one of the women, an attacker put a rifle to the toddler’s head. 

Unlike Gaza you have to go searching for the headlines to such stories. In this instance it ended up making an opinion column in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, entitled: Israeli Settlers Have a Masterplan To Cleanse The Land of Palestinians. 

To its credit, Haaretz has been a brave and outspoken voice when it comes to condemning such acts of settler violence. This it must be said is a far cry from some of our own mainstream media and certainly from many of our politicians who seem happy to turn a blind eye to what is happening in the West Bank. 

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With Gaza you see it’s different, because there the sheer scale and horror of Israel’s war simply cannot be ignored by politicians who feel obliged to make appropriate gestures of concern or outrage while simultaneously supplying Israel with weapons or cosying up to its right-wing ultranationalist leadership.

Gaza and its immense suffering, it’s sad to say, acts as a convenient distraction from that other massive injustice meted out by the State of Israel in the West Bank to which many it seems are only too willing to turn a blind eye.

Almost every day while we watch the terrible scenes from Gaza play out on our news bulletins, elsewhere across the West Bank, pogroms are being enacted, some small some not so small, but all targeting Palestinians and Arabs with one aim in mind – ethnic cleansing. 

That pattern of Israeli domination and abuse that makes daily life a nightmare for many West Bank Palestinians always reminds me of the slogan emblazoned on the T-shirt of a young Palestinian man I once saw waiting at an Israeli checkpoint with scores of others one afternoon outside Ramallah. “SAME SHIT, DIFFERENT DAY,” read the slogan summing up the endless abuse and humiliation they had to endure.

But these days are not the same, and neither is the degree of abuse to which West Bank Palestinians are being subjected. While Israel’s war in Gaza might have no clear strategic objectives beyond “decapitating” Hamas and eviscerating Palestinian civilians in the process, in the West Bank it’s an altogether different story, albeit equally cynical in its undertaking.

For obscured behind the smokescreen of a global focus on Gaza, Israel in the West Bank is much more quietly, but no less forcefully, annexing occupied Palestinian territory and ethnically cleansing large parts of the Palestinian population. 

According to data compiled by the UN, settler violence has surged over the past 10 months. So far there have been 343 settler attacks against Palestinians. At least 143 Palestinian households, with 1026 people (including 396 children), have been displaced by violence. That violence too is increasingly coordinated between settler groups and Israel Defence Force (IDF) members. 

Some 700,000 settlers live in 279 settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, up from 520,000 in 2012. More than three million Palestinians who live in the same area are subjected to Israeli military rule that amounts to apartheid.

As Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who has campaigned against the settler movement, concisely summed up the strategy to The Washington Post recently, “the settlements were put there to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state”.

In the same article by the Post’s Foreign Affairs columnist, David Ignatius, Seidemann also explained how if “de-occupation” were to be undertaken to create a Palestinian state, many settlers would resist, making for “a significant possibility of a civil war between the state of Israel and the settler state of Judea and Samaria”, the settlers’ biblical terms for the areas of the West Bank.

In short, the West Bank is a ticking timebomb right now that has rarely been closer to an explosion during the Israeli occupation. Every day settlers cut down olive trees, sever water supplies for families, crops and herds, depriving Palestinians of a livelihood and ability to stay on their land. 

(Image: AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)

There are constant raids by Israeli forces and settlers, and with the far right holding sway in Netanyahu’s government the violence is running unchecked and is in fact encouraged.

As Palestinian Israeli citizen and journalist Hanin Majadli recently observed, how ironic it is to hear Israelis argue that residents of Gaza should “reject all support for terrorism” or “resist Hamas”, without a hint of self-awareness and having accepted or condoned a “decades-long regime of criminal occupation, in which the military and settlers torment the Palestinians”.

As Majadli also rightly points out, “unlike the residents of Gaza, the majority of Israelis actively participated, as military conscripts and reservists as well as apathetic civilians”, in this subjugation.

IF such levels of torment and oppression go unchecked is it any wonder that Palestinian resistance in the West Bank is hardening?

As Palestinians confront an expansion and intensification of what the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has dubbed Israel’s “silent war” against Palestinians, it’s perhaps only a matter of time before resistance erupts into widespread confrontation. 

In that eventuality then of course Israel and its allies will “condemn” what it describes as “acts of terrorism”, while having done nothing to address the root causes of settler violence. Just recently, even Israel’s intelligence community is said to have warned the military about a potential escalation in the West Bank, possibly reaching the scale of an intifada or uprising with bombings and attacks within Israel.

What’s happening right now in the West Bank is critical to the future of all Palestinians and Israelis alike. Time is running out for the international community to face up to the reality that addressing the Palestinian issue does not stop at getting a ceasefire in Gaza, but means confronting Israel, especially over settlements and settler violence in the West Bank. 

Now is the moment to address Israel’s “other war” if an even bigger conflict and genocide than that taking place in Gaza is to be prevented.