By John Pickard
Most armies throughout the world have tank corps of one size or another. But Israel must be the only army on the globe that has so many bulldozers. It has many armoured bulldozers that it uses liberally in the occupied West Bank – not for fighting, because they have no military purpose – but to make a political statement through the collective punishment of a civilian population.
Israeli raids in West Bank towns and cities are ostensibly ‘searches’ for Hamas or other militants, but in fact with every raid they carry out, they are multiplying the political support for Hamas ten times over. Invariably, the IDF armoured vehicles and jeeps are accompanied by bulldozers to tear down houses, community facilities and to dig up roads, in a word to ruin the civilian infrastructure on which normal lives depend. If a few nearby Palestinian family cars can be crushed along the way, so much the better.
Israeli army raids in Palestinian areas have always been accompanied by wanton vandalism and destruction. In the latest raid on a refugee camp in Tulkarem, during which the population were obliged to remain curfewed at home for two whole days, shops and facilities were destroyed. A shopkeeper showed Al Jazeera how money, cigarettes and other valuable were stolen from his shop and the IDF soldiers even had time to graffite the walls, with slogans associated with an Israeli football club. This behaviour is typical of the IDF: there is no ‘discipline’ and no ‘morality’ in this occupying force, because they know there is no sanction that the state or the army will use against them.
Thousands detained without charge, hundreds killed
Recently the IDF has even raided currency exchange outlets, blowing up and emptying ‘secure’ deposits, so that money from Palestinians working abroad and deposited for their families cannot be accessed locally. In the name of ‘fighting terrorism’, the Israeli state is doing its best to make normal life in the West Bank impossible.
Altogether, since October 7, 4,700 Palestinians have been detained, more than half of them held without charge – ‘hostages’ who are not feature in the Western media – and over 300 have been killed, mostly by the IDF and Jewish settlers.
Even outside of the main towns, where the military doesn’t do its ‘job’, then out-of-control Jewish settlers do it for them – destroying olive groves belonging to Palestinians, including trees that have taken decades to mature, stealing livestock and terrorising villagers away from their homes. The settlers, backed by the IDF have even poured cement into water springs used by Palestinian farmers for irrigating their fields.
The land, don’t you see, belongs only to Jewish people: that is the ‘River to the Sea’ that is referred to by the Israeli right, including the embassador to the UK. That the Arabs have no right to be in the West Bank or Gaza, is a philosophy only spoken out loud by the Israeli right and the settler movement, but in practice it is a policy implemented day in and day out by the IDF.
West Bank economy shattered
Israeli restrictions on movement, military checkpoints and the withholding of monies for the West Bank have had a devastating effect on the economy there. According to the International Labour Organisation, these pressures are “taking a huge toll, estimating that 32 per cent of employment — or 276,000 jobs — had been lost in the West Bank since the start of the war, and that the territory suffered economic losses of $500mn a month in October and November”. (Financial Times, December 31)
Towards the end of December, during the Christmas holidays, when the Western press was becoming ‘bored’ with Middle East news, Israel launched some of its most intensive raids ever. Overnight assaults took place simultaneously in ten large towns and cities, including Hebron, Halhul, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, el-Bireh, Jericho and, notably, the centre of Ramallah.
The last of these is the administrative headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, showing that the PA and its ‘leader’ Mamoud Abbas in fact have no ‘authority’ and especially no capacity to defend the rights and livelihoods of West Bank Palestinians. Yet these are the people the USA wants to put in charge of Gaza after it has been flattened by Israel!
Salaries of PA employees cannot be paid
Ironically, the tame Palestinian Authority, which has been effectively an outsourced part of the Israeli apparatus of repression, has now been denied funds by an Israeli financial embargo on taxes and remittances from abroad. Unable to distribute salaries to PA employees – a corrupt and croney-ridden system, but one at least that distributes some wages to families – will inevitably mean that among West Bankers, the PA will becomes even more of an irrelevance than it was before.
Every day and in every way, in other words, the Israeli government is building up a mountain of combustible political material for the future. If – perhaps we should say ‘when’ – the West Bank erupts into violent opposition to the Israeli occupation, into a new Intafada, it will be despite and not because of the leadership of Fatah in charge of the Palestinian Authority.
Such a movement will be branded, yet again, as ‘terrorism’ and the words of Israeli politicians will be echoed by politicians in the West, giving the Israeli state ‘sanction’ to crush it in blood. When that happens, the wave of support for Palesinians being savagely bombed in Gaza, will need to be repeated for their fellow sufferers in the occupied West Bank.
There will be no resolution of this conflict, even if it goes on for years, until the national, social and political rights of Palestinians are met and that presupposes, above all, that Israeli workers come to understand that hopes and aspirations cannot be bulldozed into rubble.
[Top picture from Al Jazeera newsfeed]
