Love Thy Neighbor, Settler-Style.
The presence of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank is seen by many as the main obstacle to achieving a lasting solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict based on the two-state model (and by Israel-supporters as ‘facts on the ground’ that we shouldn’t bother discussing).
The settlers are not some fringe hardline group within Israeli society. They are a fully subsidized political centerpiece linked by a modern infrastructure and heavy protection by the state, all to undermine Palestinian claims to their own land. They drive Israeli policies and symbolize the hopelessness of Israeli pragmatism.
Israel’s leaders both enhance settlement activity and claim with false alarm the existential dangers that would face the country if the two-state solution fails. In fact, during the Oslo years, the number of settlers in the Palestinian territories doubled, and since the relaunch of official negotiations between Israel and the PA last fall, settlement construction has increased eleven-fold. It is taking more from the Palestinians as it pretends to seek peace.
There are 197 settlements in the West Bank, housing 450,000 settlers on land illegally appropriated from Palestinian owners. Some of these settlements are no more than tiny outposts on remote hilltops, where 20 or so settlers would receive the full protection of the Israeli Occupation Forces. Others have morphed from outposts into huge towns with populations in the tens of thousands, such as Modi’in, Ariel (which lies more than 20 miles into the heart of the West Bank), and Maale Adumim, which bisects the West Bank into separate northern and southern entities and stretches from Jerusalem all the way to the Jordanian border. In fact, Ariel sits on the largest aquifer in the West Bank (the water is appropriated for Israeli use only), and Maale Adumim’s municipal area is only several hundred squared meters smaller than that of Tel Aviv.
Not content with stealing the land and resources of the Palestinians in the West Bank, the settlers aren’t very good neighbors either. Reports of attacks by settlers have been increasing at an alarming rate over the past year, although I’m not sure how much of that is an actual increase and how much is due to improved documentation and videotaping of such attacks.
Settlers seem to take objection to Palestinians plucking their own olive trees this harvesting season.
Apparently, that’s blasphemy because God promised His chosen people the land and then put a few million Palestinians on it so that all Ten Commandments could be broken in kicking them off it and fulfilling His divine will.
If it sounds like I’m talking like a lunatic, well, that’s the mentality of these people. Elan Ben-Shlomo, a resident of the settlement of Yitzhar overlooking the Palestinian village of Asira al-Qiblaya, sums it up. “This is the land God gave us, if you read The Bible you can know it,” he says. “The Arabs and all the people around, have no right to be here.”
I’m no Bible scholar, but I’m sure the Bible also preaches against stealing, murder and hatred. It is noted that the settlers of Yitzhar went on a rampage last week in Asira al-Qiblaya, an incident which even Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was compelled to call a ‘pogrom’.
The antics of people such as Ben-Shlomo point to a deeply delusional mindset amongst the settlers. “Hatred and aggression from the Arabs towards us is nothing new,” he says. It really is disturbing to think a grown man cannot see how stealing the land and resources of others through terror and subjugation would breed hatred.
The settlers act this way because they behave the way young children do when they face no resistance from authority. They push and push, but the Israeli establishment doesn’t hold them in check, and by providing them with infrastructure, subsidizing their housing and guaranteeing them protection by the army (which either does nothing to stop settlers’ attacks or actively takes part in them), Israeli society in general has allowed these colonialists to live lawlessly with absolutely no respect for the rights of others.
In fact, the army’s action near Qalqilya earlier today was business as usual: “…three internationals and one Israeli citizen, had been arrested “after being attacked by settlers” while helping Palestinian farmers pick olives.”
Its not the settlers that are such a huge obstacle to peace. It is Israeli society in general that facilitates their violence and their theft, and allows them to live, heavily armed, with such a dangerously warped sense of reality. That lackadaisical attitude allows the extremists to run amok in the midst of the Palestinian population in the West Bank, and allows the Israeli government to continue funding and expanding these settlements in pursuit of some ‘Greater Israel’ plan.
That is the true obstacle to peace.
Related posts:
- Just another war crime
- CNN will publish anything the Israelis feed them
- Settler violence and more batshit excuses
- Israel is a bully
- The Wall has yet to fall
Scratch any anti-Moslem propaganda deep enough and you’ll find an Israeli. I would say, Israelis hate Moslems with passion and as long and there is an Israel. There will be no peace in the ME. Point.
Posted by haramin | October 20, 2008, 10:13 pmGreat post!
The true obstacle to peace is the continued existence of the Zionist regime. Either we have ‘Israel’ or we have peace in the region. I don’t see how we can possibly have both.
Posted by Kalash | October 20, 2008, 10:25 pmthere’s an irony these settlers never discuss; even in ancient times, Israel was not an ethnically pure state.
Posted by newt | October 22, 2008, 6:43 pm“” Scratch any anti-Moslem propaganda deep enough and you’ll find an Israeli. I would say, Israelis hate Moslems with passion and as long and there is an Israel. There will be no peace in the ME. Point.”"
This is total bullshit. The vast majority of Israelis don’t have a problem with Palestinians, and have little but contempt and anger for the settlers.
Without an Israel, you’ve got one of the few bastions of secular humanism in the Middle East being extinguished. Israel’s got its issues, but the region without Israel is far, far worse.
Posted by Joe | October 24, 2008, 6:30 pmOh, and the attitude in Israeli society toward the settlers is anything but lackadaisical — it’s more that nobody knows any good way to shut them out of power. One more reason why winner-take-all elections are superior to parliamentary democracy.
Posted by Joe | October 24, 2008, 6:31 pmStop fucking subsidizing and protecting them? Thats what Israeli society can do. If Israelis feel that their future is being kidnapped by a few hundred crazy assholes, go out and protest en masse.
Posted by Mohammad | October 26, 2008, 1:33 pm“”If Israelis feel that their future is being kidnapped by a few hundred crazy assholes, go out and protest en masse.”"
A lot of people have done this. (Remember the crowds Rabin could draw?)
A lot of others, like in America and most other successful nations, are simply politically apathetic and not going to get involved either way. The price of success is that people retreat into a bubble a lot of times and concern themselves with little other than personal happiness — they call Tel Aviv Habuah (‘the bubble’) for precisely that reason.
Posted by Joe | October 27, 2008, 2:19 amthe bubble. lackadaisical son.
Posted by Mohammad | October 28, 2008, 12:08 pm“Without an Israel, you’ve got one of the few bastions of secular humanism in the Middle East being extinguished. Israel’s got its issues, but the region without Israel is far, far worse.”
I got the opportunity to visit Israel while living in Egypt for a year as a study abroad student. Both countries are not bastions of secular humanism in the Middle East. In fact Israel was probably the most racist place I’ve ever been in my life.
Plus the way Palestinians are treated in the West Bank is much worse than any of the posts made on this site imply. The entire situation is beyond fukd up there.
There was a glimmer of hope. When asking Palestinians what their solution to the conflict would be it wasn’t”push em into the sea!” or “finish what Hitler started!” They actually just asked to be given Israeli citizenship so that they could finally live in peace. Its not like Arabs and Jews cant get along, just look at Jew-Arab cooperation in Hollywood =P
Posted by Supper Sayyin | December 11, 2008, 11:06 pm