September 02/3, 2023 -
Information Clearing House -
One important unintended consequence of
the Israeli government’s recent decision to
control the judicial system in the country
has been increased criticism of its policies
towards the Palestinians and the occupation
of Palestinian land. The Palestinian people
are violently displaced from their own
homes, and replaced by a group of extremist
Jewish settlers who appropriate their land.
Those settlements, and the failure of the
often-corrupt Palestinian leadership, have
made a two-state solution impossible. How
can one call something a state when the
population has no control over their own
land and resources?
Decades of punitive policies by the many
iterations of the Israeli government have
destroyed the Palestinian’s capacity to
protect their land without resorting to
violence. Palestinian attacks on Israelis
cannot be condoned. But Palestinians are
defending their land from invading settlers,
a policy for which they have paid a high
price.
According to B’TSELEM, the Israeli
Information Center for Human Rights in the
Occupied Territories, since occupying the
West Bank in 1967, Israel has
misappropriated more than 2 million dunams
(1 dunam equals 0.247 acre) of land,
including building and expanding settlements
and paving roads for settlers.
Data by the UN Office for Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs, show that there have
been at least 570 attacks against
Palestinians in the West Bank through the
end of June 2023, a substantial increase
over 2022. These numbers don’t include
incidents of intimidation and settlers’
trespassing Palestinian homes.
According to the United Nations, "Armed and
masked Israeli settlers are attacking
Palestinians in their homes, attacking
children on their way to school, destroying
property and burning olive groves, and
terrorizing entire communities with complete
impunity."
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On Saturday, June 24, 2023, residents of
Um Safa, Ramallah District, reported that
Israeli settlers, aided by soldiers,
attacked local residents and set fire to
homes with occupants still inside. Last
March, Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel
Smotrich, called for a Palestinian village
to be “wiped out” in retaliation for the
murder of two Israelis. In her poem “When
they say pledge allegiance, I say”
Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan writes,
“…my country is no country but ghost//is no
man but ghost//my country is dead//my
country is name the dead…”
Amiram Levin who headed the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF) Northern Command and was a
deputy director of the Mossad intelligence
agency, recently told Kan radio from Tel
Aviv that the Israeli military has been
weakened because of reservists’ refusal to
serve amid the government’s judicial
overhaul and that it has also become “rotten
to its core” due to Israel’s ongoing
presence in the West Bank.
“It [the Israeli military] stands on the
side, looks at the rioting settlers, and
begins to be a partner in war crimes,” Levin
said on the radio. “It’s 10 times worse than
the issue of [military] readiness…and I say
honestly, I am not angry at the
Palestinians, I am angry at us. We are
killing ourselves from the inside.”
When Levin was asked if he agreed with a May
2016 speech by former Meretz MK Yair Golan,
who was IDF deputy chief of staff at the
time, in which he said that policies in
Israel were similar to some in Europe in the
years leading up to the Holocaust he
responded: “We find it difficult to say it,
but that’s the truth. Look at Hebron, look
at the streets, streets that Arabs can’t
use, only Jews, that’s exactly what happened
in countries like that.”
That brutal policy of discrimination and
terror is denonced by the Hebrew poet Aharon
Shabtai in his poem “War”,
I, too, have declared war: You’ll need to
divert part of the force deployed to wipe
out the Arabs - to drive them out of their
homes and expropriate the land - and set it
against me. You’ve got tanks and planes, and
soldiers by the battalion you’ve got the
rams’ horns in your hands with which to
rouse the masses; you’ve got men to
interrogate and torture; you’ve got cells
for detention. I have only this heart with
which I give shelter to an Arab child.
Aim your weapon at it: even if you blow it
apartit will always, always mock you.
The British historian Simon Schama recently
told The Observer that Israel’s 1948
declaration of independence “promised equal
rights to all religious and ethnic groups.”
He also stated that Israel faces
“disintegration of the political and social
compact” over the current government’s
decision to alter the judicial system and
expand Jewish settlements in the Occupied
Territories.
In addition to leaders of the IDF,
international human rights organizations,
historians and, increasingly, many Jewish
individuals have also condemned the
settlements. I met Stéphane Hessel, a Jewish
survivor of the Buchenwald concentration
camp, a hero of the French Resistance, and
an observer of the editing of the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in New
York many years ago. He was there as a
member of the Bertrand Russel Tribunal,
which was highly critical of the Israeli
occupation of Palestinian land. I asked him
how he, as a Jew, could be a member of that
tribunal. With sadness in his eyes, he told
me, “Because I love Israel.”
