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HOW THE ISRAELI EXTREME RIGHT HAS ACHIEVED VICTORY  
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Ellen Cantarow
July 14, 2024
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ The settler movement in the West Bank has been key to the rise of
Israel's far right. _

Bethlehem, Palestine, Shutterstock

 

In 1979, I made the first of what would turn out to be decades of
periodic visits to Israel and the West Bank. I traveled there for the
New York alternative publication _The Village Voice_ to investigate
Israel’s growing settler movement, Gush Emunim (or the Bloc of the
Faithful). The English-language Israeli newspaper, _The Jerusalem
Post_, then reported that settlers from Kiryat Arba, a Jewish West
Bank outpost, had murdered two Palestinian teenagers from the village
of Halhoul. There, in one of the earliest West Bank settlements
established by Gush Emunim, a distant cousin of my husband had two
acquaintances. Under cover of being a Jew in search of enlightenment,
I spent several days and nights with them.

GUSH EMUNIM: THE ORIGIN OF THE SETTLEMENT MOVEMENT

Zvi and Hannah Eidels, my hosts, lived in a four-room apartment in the
settlement, which jutted out of an otherwise lovely Mediterranean
landscape dotted with stone terraces, olive trees, fruit groves, and
grape vines. Kiryat Arba flanked the Palestinian city of Hebron and
was an eight-minute car drive from Halhoul on which I wrote a separate
article about the murder of those two teens.

My initial evening with the Eidels happened to be on the holy day of
_shabat_.

The rush to finish cooking ended just before sundown and 32-year-old
Hannah, very pregnant with her sixth child, turned to me. “Do you
light?” she asked. For a moment I thought she was asking how I coped
with power failures in the American economic twilight. She took me to
the 10-by-12-foot living room. Just above a photograph of the
spiritual father of Gush Emunim, Rabbi Avraham Kook
[[link removed]], a bearded man with
a fur-trimmed hat and heavy-lidded eyes, stood a row of candles on a
tiny shelf. I suddenly recalled Friday evenings in my grandmother’s
apartment in Philadelphia and was unnerved to find myself, an
assimilated Jew — an atheist, no less — standing in Kiryat Arba,
once again brushing up against Orthodoxy. I nonetheless took the
matchbox, lit the candles, and stood there quietly for what I hoped
was a decent interval.

Later, Hannah filled me in on her theory of Jewish superiority: all of
creation, she assured me, is suspended in a great chain of being. On
the bottom: inanimate non-living things. A link farther up: animate
vegetation. Then, non-human animal life. Next, animate non-Jews. On
the top, of course, were the Jews. “This may shock you,” she said,
“but I don’t really believe in democracy. We believe,” she
faltered for a moment, glancing at Zvi who was sitting quietly beside
us cracking sunflower seeds and spitting the husks expertly onto a
plate, “in theocracy. Right, Zvi?” “Not exactly,” said Zvi.
“Not a theocracy. The government of God.”

Gush Emunim was both religious and militant. In a curious blend of
ultra-Orthodoxy and historically secular Zionism, “the Faithful”
claimed as their own some of the territories conquered in the Six-Day
War [[link removed]], the 1967 conflict
Israel fought against a coalition of Arab states, during which it took
the West Bank, which its leaders called “Judea and Samaria.”

“Here began our first place,” one movement leader told me, “in
Schechem [Nablus], where Jacob bought a plot of land. Here is the true
world of Judaism.”

“Some people think the goal of Zionism was peace,” another Gush
activist explained. “That is ridiculous. The goal of Zionism is to
construct a people on its land.” But, he continued, “there were
moral problems. There were Arabs living here. By what right did we
throw them out? And we did throw them out… All the stuff about
socialism, about national redemption, may be true, but that’s only
one part. The fact is, we returned here because the Eternal gave us
the land. It’s ridiculous, stupid, simplistic, but that’s what it
is. All the rest is superficial. We came back here because we
belong.”

And so began the settler movement, which, to this day, has never ended
or stopped taking land from the Palestinians.

THE ALON PLAN

Even before that Jewish supremacist incursion, Yigal Alon, Yitzhak
Rabin’s deputy prime minister, drafted a plan calling for
settlements that would extend Israel’s political boundaries to the
Jordan River. Such new Jewish settlements would ring Palestinian
villages and towns and separate them from one another. In 1979, when I
interviewed the mayor of Halhoul, where those two teens had been
murdered, he took me to a hilltop, pointed to Kiryat Arba, and said
all too prophetically: “The settlements are a cancer in our midst. A
cancer can kill one man. But this cancer can kill a whole people.”

Following the Six-Day War, leaders of the Faithful supplied the shock
troops for those growing settlements. It was common wisdom then that
the situation “on the ground” was changing from month to month in
favor of the Israelis. When I first started reporting there, a trip
between East Jerusalem and Ramallah took about 20 minutes. However,
once settler-only highways had been built and checkpoints put in place
for Palestinians, the trip became at least twice as long. Initially,
just soldiers posted on the roads, such checkpoints would later be
industrialized with footpaths, tunnels, and turnstiles that looked
like the ones in the subway system of New York where I later lived.
Palestinians were then often forced to wait, sometimes for hours,
before being allowed — or not — to proceed to their destinations.

THE ISRAEL-U.S. PEACE PROCESS

In 1993, a “peace process” was launched in — yes, you could
hardly get farther away — Oslo, Norway. It “changed the modalities
of the occupation,” as Noam Chomsky put it
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not the basic concept… [H]istorian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that ‘the
Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of
dependence of one on the other forever.’” The U.S.-Israeli
proposals at Camp David in 2000 only strengthened that colonialist
urge. Palestinians were to be confined
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scattered areas. President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak
proposed the consolidation of the Palestinian population into three
cantons under Israeli control, separated from one another and from
East Jerusalem.

From then on, Israel only continued its relentless occupation of
Palestinian land. In 2002, it started erecting an enormous barrier
wall
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along the Green Line
[[link removed](Israel)] and parts of the
West Bank. At its most dramatic, that wall is a series of 25-foot-high
concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by
electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast
distances.

After 1979, every time I traveled to the West Bank I saw new Jewish
settlements in formation, with their characteristic red-tiled roofs
and white walls. Meanwhile, the Israelis restricted Palestinians from
building new homes or even additions to current ones. In the West Bank
city of Ramallah, that prohibitive situation has resulted in an
uglified city center with ever taller buildings. Today, in photos of
Ramallah’s contemporary downtown
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I can’t even recognize the place I last visited in 2009.

VIOLENCE

From the very start, Jewish violence has accompanied the proliferation
of settlements. In 1979, settlers and soldiers were already
terrorizing residents of the Palestinian village of Halhoul and
committing violence elsewhere. “A rash of civilian acts of vandalism
occurred last spring,” I wrote that year. “Settlers… uprooted
several acres of grapevines belonging to farmers from Hebron… Kiryat
Arba residents also broke into several Arab houses in Hebron and
wrecked them.” A four-year-old boy slipped out of his house during
one of the curfews (levied by the Israelis on Halhoul, but not, of
course, on Kiryat Arba). That child was then stoned by Israeli
soldiers. Five months later, I reported speaking with his mother. She
“thrust the child toward me and pointed at a scar that still showed
on his forehead. ‘What can we do?’ she implored me. ‘We have no
weapons. We are helpless. We can’t defend ourselves.’”

In 1994, an American extremist settler, Baruch Goldstein
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Palestinian worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and
wounded another 125 of them. He was a supporter of the extremist Kach
(Thus) movement founded by American rabbi Meir Kahane. In 1988, that
movement and a split-off from it called Kahane Chai (Long Live Kahane)
were declared to be “terrorist” in character by the Israeli
government. It mattered little, however, since terrorism against
Palestinians continued to flourish.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

Forty-five years after my first report on the settlements, _New York
Times_ columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote
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that a farmer in his seventies living in the West Bank village of
Qusra, Abdel-Majeed Hassan, had shown him “the blackened ground
where his car had been set on fire, the latest of four cars belonging
to his family that he said [Israeli] settlers had destroyed.” Six
residents of Qusra had been killed in such attacks, Kristof reported,
between October 2023 and late June 2024. Israel’s government
responded to the October 7th Hamas assault in Gaza by endorsing
“more checkpoints, more raids, more Israeli settlements.” Almost
duplicating the agonized statement of that Palestinian interviewee of
mine in 1979, another Palestinian, an American engineer who had
returned to the West Bank, told Kristof, “I’m an American citizen,
but if they attack me here, what can I do? They can break my gate;
they can kill me.”

His article was entitled “We Are Coming to Horrible Days.” Coming?
The horror began over half a century ago. Had the _New York Times_ run
similar articles, starting in the late 1970s; had successive American
governments not turned a blind eye to what was happening; had
Washington not continued funding
[[link removed]] Israel’s
crimes with some $3 billion a year in aid, that country’s land
thefts and other crimes on the West Bank could never have continued.
In 1979, Israel was already confiscating water from Halhoul and other
Palestinian villages, while in the ensuing years you could see
swimming pools and lush lawns in the Jewish settlements there, even as
Palestinian villages and towns were left to collect rainwater in
barrels on housetops.

Twenty-three years after I made my first trip, the Israeli human
rights organization B’tselem reported
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that, in “the first decade following the occupation, the
left-leaning ‘Alignment’ governments followed the Alon Plan.” It
advocated settling areas “perceived as having security importance”
and sparse in Palestinian populations. Later, governments under the
far more conservative Likud Party began establishing settlements
across the West Bank, not just based on security considerations but
ideological ones
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JEWISH SUPREMACY

A word about the attitudes of Israeli Jews. In 1982, I interviewed a
group of Israeli teenagers, one of whom, the daughter of Israeli
leftist acquaintances of mine, told me that each new generation in her
country was more right-wing than that of its parents. On one of
several trips to Hebron in those years, I read this graffiti on a
wall: “ARABS TO GAS CHAMBERS.” It certainly caught the mood of
both that moment and those that followed to this day. For decades, in
fact, the cry “Death to Arabs!” could be heard at some Israeli
demonstrations. By the time Israel began its genocidal campaign in
Gaza in 2023, you could watch videos
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dancing and chanting “Death to Amalek!” (The name Amalek refers to
ancient biblical enemies of the Jews.)

Kristof writes that “Israel’s ‘state-backed settler violence,’
as Amnesty International describes
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it, is enforced by American weapons provided to Israel. When armed
settlers terrorize Palestinians and force them off their land — as
has happened to 18 communities
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since October [2023] — they sometimes carry American M16 rifles
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Sometimes they are escorted by Israeli troops…The United States is
already in the thick of the West Bank conflict… Many settlers have
American accents and draw financial support from donors in the United
States.”

But keep in mind that this is nothing new. Baruch Goldstein, that
infamous mass murderer of 1994, was an American and it was very clear
even then that American Jews were among the most rabid of the
settlers.

In 2021, fulfilling the prophecy of the very first Israeli settler I
ever visited, Zvi Eidels, the Israeli regime established what the
human rights organization B’tselem called
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“a recognition of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the
Mediterranean Sea.”

It feels bitter indeed to me to be able to say, “I told you so.”
My accounts were largely ignored in those decades when I periodically
reported from the West Bank. After all, I wrote for _The Village
Voice_ and other non-mainstream publications. The _New York Times_ was
largely silent on the subject then and Kristof’s recent telling
observations sadly come decades too late. Even as I was finishing this
article, Israeli forces were bombing
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densely populated neighborhoods in the Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee
camps in the northern West Bank. (The Nur Shams brigade, which was an
Israeli target, is an armed resistance group affiliated, according to
Mondoweiss,
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with the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.)

Raja Shehadeh, one of Palestine’s greatest writers, recently let me
know that even he – whom Israeli forces once recognized as an
illustrious person and allowed to travel in relative freedom — fears
venturing outside since the settlers are “all over” the West Bank.
In a recent Guardian article
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he wrote: “I spent the last 50 years of my life getting used to the
loss of the Palestine of my parents; and… I might spend the
remaining years of my life trying to get used to the loss of Palestine
in its entirety.”

I’ve known Shehadeh since 1982 and never in all those years had I
seen him despair. It’s unbelievably depressing to find him writing
this now. All I could write back was: “I’m afraid you may be
right.” Sometimes evil does triumph. Israel has now become a largely
fascist country with a deeply fascist government and it has been
transformed into that, at least in significant part, because my
country has profusely underwritten the most malignant developments
there, which are still ongoing
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Just as I was finishing this article, in fact, the Associated Press
reported
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that “Israel has approved the largest seizure of land in the
occupied West Bank in over three decades.” That land grab, its
account added, “reflects the settler community’s strong influence
in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the most
religious and nationalist in the country’s history.” Thus have the
prophecies of the religious-nationalist Gush Emunim been fulfilled.

[_AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am forever indebted to Noam Chomsky, with whom I
first became friends in 1964, and whose 1974 book, _Peace in the
Middle East?
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taught me about the realities of Israel’s subjugation of the
Palestinians. For my first trip, he provided me with the name of a
person of great influence, the incomparable Dr. Israel Shahak, as well
as of other holocaust survivors opposing Israel’s occupation. Noam
Chomsky launched me on the long trajectory of my writing about
Palestine from 1979 to this very moment. He is now 95 years old and in
Brazil with his wife Valeria, recovering from a stroke. May he be
blessed through the ages._]

Copyright 2024 Ellen Cantarow

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* Israeli Settlement Movement; West Bank Land Seizure; Palestinians;
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