[Frustrated at the militarys pushback to their pogroms, settlers
will continue upholding Jewish supremacy by any means necessary.]
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WHY SETTLER POGROMS ARE NOW SWEEPING THE WEST BANK  
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Menachem Klein
June 26, 2023
962 Magazine
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_ Frustrated at the military's pushback to their pogroms, settlers
will continue upholding Jewish supremacy by any means necessary. _

A field burns amid a series of Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian
communities in the occupied West Bank, near the Palestinian village of
Qusra, June 22, 2023. , Flash90

 

Sometimes there is an event so extreme that it tears the veil of
willful ignorance from the eyes of Jewish-Israeli society. The pogrom
[[link removed]] in Huwara last
February, in which hundreds of settlers torched the Palestinian town
in the occupied West Bank, was such an event. Last week’s pogroms
[[link removed]] in Turmus
Ayya
[[link removed]],
Urif, and Umm Safa raised the curtain even higher, forcing many
Israelis to stare straight at a reality that has long been present and
can undoubtedly get worse.

But the main problem is not in the byproduct of occupation — Jewish
settler terrorism — but in Israel’s routine activity in the
territories. Indeed, the decision by the heads of the Israeli security
establishment to label the pogroms as “terrorism” indicates that
the veil has only been partially lifted; they simply don’t want
Jewish terrorism to interfere with
[[link removed]] or
embarrass the authority of the army, Shin Bet, and police.

Settlement is itself a violent act, whether it is done in concert with
Israeli law or with the law following retroactively. It is violent
because the settlers impose their presence on the natives and rob them
of land, water, free movement, and basic human rights. It is an
organized system of violence on behalf of the state.

The symbiosis between the army and the settlers is not limited to
violence; it also exists in the understanding of their mission. The
settlers explicitly define their mission as the Judaization of the
area, and they do this effectively and consistently. The army’s
mission is not to provide security for all residents in the
territories — as international law requires of the occupying power
— but rather to protect the settlers from the reactions of the
native Palestinians, who are not allowed to defend
themselves, neither with the help of the Palestinian security forces,
nor by establishing their own national guard. The factor that
determines whether a West Bank resident’s life and property will be
protected is whether or not they are Jewish.

Israeli security forces argue with Jewish settlers at the entrance to
the West Bank town of Turmus Ayya, June 21, 2023. (Yonatan
Sindel/Flash90)

Expanding settlements as a response to the murder of Israelis — as
senior government ministers pledged to do last week — is also not a
harmless civil action. It is violence without immediate bloodshed, yet
which will inevitably engender Palestinian resistance, followed by
bloody army repression. 

The Palestinians are tolerated only if they assimilate into the
landscape, becoming inanimate objects that forgo their collective
identity. But as long as they maintain that identity, they are by
definition an enemy. The army and the Shin Bet will continue to
control them with biometric and electromagnetic data that tracks their
location, actions, and thoughts as expressed in phone calls and on
social media. The Palestinians’ complete dependence on Israel for
permits makes it easy for Israeli authorities to gather information
about their family and medical conditions, sexual tendencies, personal
weaknesses, and social structures, and to weaponize that information
to force them into collaboration.

Jewish supremacy is clear as day, and the Palestinian people are
bleeding physically and politically. However, as settlements expand
and the army operates, the friction increases, and so too does the
Palestinian motivation to react. Today, Palestinian violence has
little expectation of liberating the West Bank; the power disparity
between the parties is all too evident. Rather, it is intended to
exact a price, any price, from the colonizers.

DANGEROUS FRUSTRATION

This pushback frustrates the settlers. How is it possible that all
their power and supremacy has still not erased Palestinian identity
and resistance? That frustration is what drives pogroms like those we
saw last week, which then pushes the army and government to use even
more force to expand the settlement project. Just a few days ago, Col.
(Res.) Moshe Hagar, head of the pre-military academy in the settlement
of Beit Yatir, called for the destruction
[[link removed]] of
a Palestinian city or village in order to teach the Palestinians a
lesson. Meanwhile, Bezalel Smotrich, who serves both as finance
minister and minister in charge of the civilian affairs in the West
Bank, called [[link removed]] any
comparison between what he termed “Arab terror” and the
“civilian counter-operations” both “wrong and dangerous.”

Damage caused to Palestinian homes and cars by Jewish settlers in the
West Bank town of Turmus Ayya, June 21, 2023. (Nasser
Ishtayeh/Flash90)

Their frustration today is greater than it was in the past. In the
1980s and ’90s, the settlers in the occupied territories transformed
from a civil movement supported by the establishment into the
establishment itself. They found their way into the executive levels
of the government’s civil and security branches that control the
Palestinian population and their land. Today, under the current
far-right government, they have reached the height of their powers.
They do not think for a moment about acknowledging the limitations of
their power, because the vector of their political ambitions is linear
and unequivocal. They must not retreat.

The idea of containing the conflict in order not to lose control —
as the army, Shin Bet, and police are hoping to do — is unacceptable
to those whose frustration is on par with their political and
theological extremism. The settlers are pushing the security
establishment to act in accordance with Hagar’s vision. Unlike in
“Operation Defensive Shield” — when the Israeli army physically
and politically destroyed the Palestinian Authority in 2002 through
devastating urban invasions — today there is no leadership left to
decimate. The PA under President Mahmoud Abbas has already done this
in the service of Israel. The Israeli right’s call to launch
“Defensive Shield II” is instead a call to action that places
Palestinian civilians as the central target, rather than as mere
acceptable collateral.

The end of the conflict and the two-state solution are no longer
relevant to the Israeli public and the international community.
Lacking a solution — or more accurately, the will to pursue one —
foreign governments, including Arab states, have allowed Israel to
create a single regime in the entire area between the river and the
sea without having to officially declare annexation.

The fact that two different groups live under two sets of laws under a
single sovereign means that Israel is implementing practices of
apartheid, racial supremacy, and military rule not as a matter of
foreign policy, but rather as its _domestic_ policy.

This is why, for example, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir
[[link removed]] is seeking to
establish his own private militia, to have the power to put Israeli
citizens in administrative detention
[[link removed]],
and to deepen the Shin Bet’s penetration into the lives of
Palestinian citizens of Israel. And, in the wake of the events of May
2021 [[link removed]], the
Israeli army has now drawn up plans to act against Palestinian
citizens in the event of a conflict.

Israel’s leaders are realizing that they need to further bend the
law to their will, otherwise the identity of the entire area between
the river and the sea will never be exclusively Jewish. And
unfortunately, the Jewish Zionist left has neither the vision nor the
courage to prevent this trend.

_A version of this article was originally published in Hebrew in Local
Call. Read it here
[[link removed]]._

_MENACHEM KLEIN is professor of Political Science at Bar Ilan
University. He was an advisor to the Israeli delegation in
negotiations with the PLO in 2000 and was one of the leaders of the
Geneva Initiative. His new book, Arafat and Abbas: Portraits of
Leadership in a State Postponed, was just published by Hurst London
and Oxford University Press New York._

_+972 MAGAZINE is nonprofit journalism based on the ground in
Israel-Palestine. In order to safeguard our independent voice, we are
proud to count you, our readers, as our most important supporters._

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