By a Labour Party member
The Times of Israel reported this week that a Jewish settler on the West Bank has been given three life sentences for firebombing a Palestinian family home, killing a baby and his parents.
What was notable in the case was the fact that the trial judge attributed the attack to an “extreme racist ideology” on the part of the murderer Amiram Ben Uliel, and that the newspaper, correctly, described Ben Uliel as a “terrorist”.
This case typifies in microcosm a part of Israeli society that is rarely dealt with by the British press. Settlers, living on confiscated Palestinian West Bank land and often with an extremely racist outlook, have conducted a relentless campaign of intimidation, harassment and violence against local Arab villagers. Even in this case, a rarity in coming to court at all, it has taken five years for the family of those firebombed to get any kind of justice. The judge noted that to this day, Ben Uliel “has not taken responsibility for his actions”.
Convicted as a lone attacker
Although Ben Uliel was convicted as a lone attacker, the only survivor of the firebombing, a five-year old boy, claimed that other settlers had been present and that they had fired on him when he escaped. His evidence was not admitted on account of his age. Ordinary workers will be appalled at the crime of Ben Uliel, but there will be those in Israel, including Members of the Knesset and ‘respectable’ politicians, who will hail him as a ‘hero’ and when an appeal is considered, will be demanding his early release. The “extreme racist ideology” mentioned by this trial judge is far from being confined to a handful of lunatics – it pervades the whole of the political right-wing, including many members of the Knesset.
The attack described in this case is far from being unique. In April, The Times of Israel reported that even in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, “virus season brings rise in settler violence targeting Palestinians.” Despite restrictions having been placed on Israelis leaving their homes, it reported, there had been almost a doubling of attacks by settlers on Arab villagers, from 9 per month to 16 per month.
Israeli settlements are on land confiscated from Palestinian villages and farms. They are built to the most modern air-conditioned designs. They are serviced by all the necessary utilities and by new roads which are, in effect if not ‘legally’, settler-only roads. Last but not least, the settlers are armed to the teeth.
South African apartheid
Even in the worst days of Apartheid South Africa, there were no ‘raiding’ expeditions of white racists into the African ‘townships’ or ‘Bantustans’, where the overwhelming majority of blacks were forced to live. In the West Bank it is different. The size and scale of land confiscation and settlement building has been such that the population of Jewish-only settlers is at least comparable with the population the Palestinians. Many of the settlers support a political ideology that would see the whole of ‘Eretz Israel’ – from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River – as exclusively Jewish.
They would be happy to terrorise Arabs out of their homes in the hope that they would flee elsewhere. It is a hoped-for ethnic cleansing and a ‘freeing’ of the land that would never have occurred to the white racists in South Africa who were in such a tiny minority. So it is, that more or less with impunity and with the Israeli Army unwilling to do anything about it, the extreme right wing of the settler movement actively harasses and terrorises local Arab villagers week in and week out.
According to B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, “Violence by settlers (and sometimes by other Israeli civilians) toward Palestinians has long since become part of daily life under occupation in the West Bank.
Injuries to life and limb
“These actions range from blocking roads, throwing stones at cars and houses, raiding villages and farmland, torching fields and olive groves, and damaging crops and property to physical assault, sometimes to the point of hurling Molotov cocktails or using live fire. Over the years, this widespread violence toward Palestinians has resulted in injuries to life and limb, as well as damage to property and land”.
The violence meted out by the settlers is only the ‘informal’ equivalent of the same violence meted out on a daily basis by the Israeli state itself as it gradually and inexorably squeezes more land out of Palestinian hands and crowds the Arab population into smaller and smaller areas. Western social media is full of incidents and examples of the almost casual daily indignity and brutality faced every day by Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli occupying army, brave boys who point automatic weapons at children.
According to B’Tselem, in the last fourteen years, up to the end of last month, Israel has demolished over 1600 Palestinian homes in the West Bank, not even including those in East Jerusalem. This has led to nearly 7,000 additional homeless Palestinians, half of them children.
Demolition of Palestinian homes
“In Palestinian communities unrecognized by the State of Israel, many which are facing the threat of expulsion, Israel repeatedly demolishes residents’ homes. From 2006 through 31 August 2020, the homes of at least 1,085 people living in these communities – including 521 minors – were demolished more than once by Israel.
“In addition, from January 2012 through 31 August 2020, the Civil Administration demolished 1,778 non-residential structures (such as fences, cisterns, storerooms, farming buildings, businesses and public buildings) in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem)”.
With Palestinians having no civil rights, with no economic development allowed, facing all manner of obstacles to their daily activities and lives, it is no surprise that a comparison has been drawn between the racist Apartheid regime of South Africa and the policy of the Israeli government today.
The South African journalist and author, Bejamin Pogrund, was an early ally of Nelson Mandela and among the first Jews to fight South African Apartheid. After he moved to Israel in the 1990s, he used his experiences in South Africa to fight against the accusation that Israel was an ‘apartheid’ state. He seems to be changing his mind.
Netanyahu’s annexation plans
According to the Times of Israel again, Pogrund has warned that if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes ahead with his plan to annex large parts of the West Bank, apparently without offering Israeli citizenship or rights to the Palestinians who live in these areas, “Israel will indeed turn into an apartheid state”
“I have argued,” he says, “uphill and down dale, and lectured about it in a dozen countries and books and articles, that this is not apartheid. There is discrimination against the Arab minority and there’s an occupation in the West Bank — but it’s not apartheid…if we annex the Jordan Valley and the settlement areas, we are apartheid. Full stop. There’s no question about it.”
Many activists in the labour movement today would say – and the overwhelming majority of Palestinians would agree – with the greatest respect to Benjamin Pogrund and notwithstanding his history of Struggle in South Africa, he is wrong on that point. Whatever legal changes might take effect through Israel’s annexation of most of the West Bank, it would be only rubber-stamping what is already a fact on the ground.
At the 2018 Labour Party conference, following a brief and very positive debate on the rights of Palestinians, the entire floor of the conference was awash with Palestinian flags being waved. Today, under the leadership of Keir Starmer, a different atmosphere prevails, one in which it is impermissible to criticise the state of Israel. But Labour Party members must not give in on this point; they must continue to fight as hard as they have done in the past for the national and democratic rights of the Palestinian people. One Palestinian family has seen some element of justice, five years after the fact. Another few million are waiting their turn.
September 15, 2020
