Meanwhile on the Ethnic Cleansing Front on the West Bank

A good account of what is going on in the West Bank. The government does nothing.

Megan K. Stack, in the NYTimes:

The men came alone that morning, leaving families and sheep behind, and climbed the hill to see what was left of their village. On the sun-bleached crest, they found a scene of wreckage: The windows of the makeshift clinic had been smashed, household furniture lay shattered; sections of the schoolhouse had been burned to ash. There were drifts of clothing and stray shoes spread on the ground throughout the abandoned village, small things dropped in haste when the families fled.

The Palestinians who live (or lived) in this hilltop hamlet had decamped in terror a few weeks earlier. A gang of Israeli settlers — their neighbors — had been tormenting them for weeks, they explained, beating them up and threatening murder if they didn’t leave.

Similar scenes are playing out across the West Bank these days as Israeli settlers, backed and sometimes aided by soldiers, force Arabs out of villages, farmlands and herding pastures. Human rights monitors say they are documenting an apparently coordinated campaign to bring vast swaths of land under the control of Jewish settlements (all of which are illegal under international law, and some of which are also illegal under Israeli law) while forcing Palestinians into densely populated cities and towns….

 Insofar as one can still traverse the increasingly checkpoint-choked and claustrophobic West Bank, I’d been roaming around talking with Palestinians and trying to speak with settlers, who tended to rebuff conversation. Statehood has long been promised to Palestinians and is still invoked by U.S. officials in increasingly hollow platitudes. …

I used to assume the international community, for all the fecklessness it has shown here, would stop Palestinians from falling too far, being killed in numbers that were too great, losing too much territory. Now I look at Gaza, and I look at the West Bank, and I’m not so sure.

All of that was playing in my mind as I watched the men of Khirbet Zanuta trudge up the hill to try to get home — only to be met by representatives of the various forces arrayed against them: Israeli military power, religious zealots and faceless technology.

The uniformed visitor laid down the law in soft, even tones: If you insist on coming home, he told Mr. Til with an air of generosity, you can — so long as you accept its trashed condition. “It’s as-is,” he said, as if he were selling a house. Army drones had photographed every detail, he explained. If the residents moved so much as a stone or pulled a tarp over an unroofed house, it would be considered an illegal construction, and there could be trouble.

Mr. Til and the others were incredulous: What if it rains?, they pressed. What about the summer sun? The official held firm: You move things, you put up a tarp, you break the law. And then, having delivered this discouraging welcome, he drove off.

As a Palestinian civilian, Mr. Til is forbidden to own a gun, and even if the settlers hit him, he would be ill advised to strike back. Both law and practice are tilted against him. In the West Bank, settlers enjoy the full protection of Israeli civil and criminal law, while their Palestinians neighbors are subject to draconian military orders. That means, among other things, that Palestinians can be indefinitely imprisoned without charge.

Settlers, on the other hand, are routinely armed to the teeth. Many of them recently got government-issued assault rifles in a drive to harden Israeli defenses. The national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a settlement dweller himself, was filmed passing out rifles to settlers. On Monday, Israel’s head of firearms licensing resigned in a scandal over the distribution of illegal gun licenses; a senior security official told the Haaretz newspaper the government was “handing out guns like candy.” …

Visiting in late November, I had the feeling of entering a vast settlement dotted with Arab communities and refugee camps, shrinking remnants of an earlier place.

I shared this impression with Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former adviser to Palestine Liberation Organization negotiators. She replied by describing an unremarkable thing that sounded amazing to me because I never saw it: You could once drive down main roads in the West Bank, she recalled, straight into Palestinian cities. Settler bypass roads built since the 1990s — a nominal period of peace that nevertheless saw settlements expand at an unprecedented clip — routed traffic away from the places where Palestinians livedrestricted or even banned Palestinian cars and helped to choke off Palestinians’ movement. …

Negotiations have been dead since 2014, and Israeli military occupation of the West Bank is now so old that it more closely resembles annexation. Israeli officials make tortured arguments that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are legal. They’re not; international law prohibits occupying powers from transferring their own people to live on occupied land. And yet the settlements keep growing, feeding on the belief that Judea and Samaria (the biblical names preferred by settlers) are the God-given home of the Jews. Palestinians keep getting shoved into smaller spaces. In a book I wrote more than a decade ago, I pointed out — as many others have — that, even then, there wasn’t enough contiguous land for a state. …

Ms. Buttu was a ubiquitous presence during the peace talks of the early aughts but has come to regret her role in the negotiations. She no longer believes that Israel was bargaining in good faith and regards the talks as a largely theatrical process that kept everybody busy while Palestinians literally lost ground. …

Under the Oslo Accords, which were the agreements that brushed closest to making peace here, the largest chunk of territory in the West Bank, known as Area C, was to gradually transition to Palestinian jurisdiction, albeit with negotiating room for land swaps.

But that logic has since been turned entirely on its head. Israeli settlers, enthusiastically backed by key parts of the far-right Israeli government, are openly seeking to thin the Arab presence from the same land once envisioned as the raw material of a future Palestinian state. The forced displacement of Khirbet Zanuta is part of that movement, known by some hard-line settlers as “the battle for Area C.”

The legalistic contortions altering the landscape of the West Bank are various: designating land a “firing zone” needed for military training; invoking Ottoman law under which the state may seize uncultivated land. Even archaeological sites — of which there is no shortage in the Holy Land — can be used as a justification for displacing Palestinians.

And then there’s the question of permits.

Palestinians in the West Bank have long lived under a tyranny of impossible paperwork. Despite severe water shortages and a 75 percent Palestinian population growth since the agreement stipulating the amount of water Palestinians could draw from a shared water source was set in 1995, Arabs need a permit to dig a water well. Settlers, who consume about three times as much water as Palestinians per capita, enjoy the luxury of being connected to Israeli water lines. This fall, I was shown secret wells that Palestinians, in desperation, had dug by hand and camouflaged to avoid detection by settlers.

Permits are also needed to build new houses or buildings in Area C, or to renovate existing structures. But building permits are virtually never granted to Palestinians anymore — by the Israeli military’s own account, less than 1 percent of Palestinian permit requests have been granted in recent years. It wasn’t always this hard: In 1972, 97 percent of Palestinian building permits were approved. …

In one typical campaign, Regavim zeroed in on an elementary school built in the impoverished village of Jubbet Adh Dib with European Union funds. The organization petitioned the court for demolition, arguing that the structure was unsafe. In May, the Israeli military arrived before dawn and razed the school. That was, in fact, the second school the village lost to Israeli bulldozers — in 2017, Israel demolished an earlier school and confiscated a solar power system installed with funds from the Dutch government. When the Dutch protested, Israel returned the solar panels.

Jubbet Adh Dib has no electricity without the solar panels and has struggled to maintain water access, which villagers lost for a time as the neighboring settlement expanded. When the village invested in a small pickup truck and a digger, they said, Israeli soldiers confiscated the equipment. …

“They terrorize us at night, send messages to leave the village,” Ms. Alwahsh told me. “We sleep in our clothes. We are constantly terrified.” …

At one point, Mr. Amro said, his next-door neighbor taunted, “See what I can do to you?” and then punched him in the face. Mr. Amro also said that one of the soldiers called him “my bitch” and threatened to force him to perform oral sex. After 10 hours of torment, when the group finally took him back to the road, Mr. Amro anticipated a bullet in the back as he walked away. …

Whatever comes next, it will surely be shaped by this realization: The Palestinians are out there on their own now. Nobody is coming to save the day.

4 replies
  1. Mark Engholm
    Mark Engholm says:

    Today I had an interesting brainwave: If one takes the Talmudism of the Jews seriously as their “evolutionary program”, the question arises as to whether all these so-called “institutes” for genetic testing, which are founded and run by Jews, serve a different goal than enlightening the world about their ancestors, namely their own attainment of knowledge as to which tested person is “one of them” (or should be considered as such according to their own “racial theory”). In addition, this test enables them to better trace the lines of their own species. So, as usual with them, it is less an altruistic concern than a purely selfish one. All these millions of data are stored and analyzed somewhere (presumably on servers in underground bunkers in “high-tech center” Israel). One could therefore speak of a reversal of the principles underlying the Nuremberg Race Laws. In the event of their desired Armageddon, all those identified as belonging to Jewish genetics will be collected, while the rest will be doomed to extinction.

    • Anon
      Anon says:

      Don’t worry, guy. They are not trying to have an Armageddon. The genetic tests exist simply because they are interesting enough to sell and make a great deal of money on.

  2. A Viewer
    A Viewer says:

    Greek mythology describes that the greatest punishment is to order someone to do what they like best. E.g., one of the goddesses sits down at her beloved ruler’s table, but is tied her throne. A love-struck god was caught under a net in the act of love, so that he had to remain in this position.

    Incidentally, this is very similar to the principle of the rabbi who, starting in the morning, “rewards” the street children who annoy him every day with a shekel for annoying him, until they finally lose the satisfaction of doing so because he (supposedly) no longer has a shekel.

    Ultimately, this would end with the Jews, who constantly insist on their “chosenness”, having to wear a yellow star. For only for as long as they do so “covertly” (and thereby cause us immeasurable harm) do they feel an almost diabolical joy and affirmation.

    Niekisch writes: “Does one not see that where anti-Semitism prevails, all things still revolve around the Jew? One does not free oneself from an object if from now on one merely relates to it ‘with an inverted sign’. The third imperial figure respects its sovereignty: it is not ‘anti’.”

    The Jew needs the perpetual hatred of his environment in order to generate his pseudo-identity from it. He himself is the source of the rejection against him. Bad news always means “good news” for him!

    We should therefore be neither philo-Semites nor anti-Semites, but neutra-Semites (my own creation). This is the only way to interrupt the feedback effect that he uses to accuse us of following anti-natural “rules” that he himself sets up and mislabels as “morality”.

    Hitler about the churches: “Let them rot away like a gangrenous limb.” No more social attention is paid to the matter until it disappears of its own accord. Jews are no longer socially advantaged. There had to be social consensus on this, to thwart this is the zeal of the Jew.

  3. A Viewer
    A Viewer says:

    Professor Heinz Haber, a member of Operation Paperclip, said in one of his articles that the Egyptian pyramids were only built in the last 5 seconds, if you take the Earth’s age on the scale of a day. The daily consumption of petroleum alone, which originated from organic microorganisms in prehistoric times, took a million years to form. He was a staunch supporter of nuclear energy.

    Haber had already recognized in the 1960s that overpopulation would become the main problem of mankind and that if this problem was not solved, all other problems would become obsolete. He had also recognized that this problem was not the result of poverty, but of prosperity. The white race, through its progress, is virtually breeding its own demise in the Third World.

    In some of Darwin Award nominee Malcolm’s episodes, German names are repeatedly found in Australian settlements. You have to imagine: For over 40 years he was able to survive in the merciless environment of the outback, then he dies in a freak accident when his driverless Rover crushes him against a tree. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw6L3qkO5LPFTcLOaGhH-2WbDxz2Hfn3a

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