By John Pickard
The Biden administration has set some alarm bells ringing in Jerusalem by its threat to impose sanctions on a unit of the Israeli Defence Force for its human rights abuses in the West Bank. The US decision, as well as the sanctions being imposed on individual Jewish settlers in the West Bank, will be viewed by Palestinians as far too little, far too late.
The unit in question, the Netzah Yehuda battalion, is composed entirely of Orthodox Jews, and religious nationalists, many of them from the illegal settlements on confiscated Palestinian land in the West Bank. It is a unit that by definition contains extreme zionists and anti-Arab racists. Two years ago, it was implicated in the murder of an 80-year old Palestinian-American who had been detained at a Netzah Yehuda checkpoint. It was typical of the IDF approach to being caught red-handed committing abuses that although two junior officers were dismissed, no legal action was ever taken.
The proposed US ‘sanctions’, on a single unit of the IDF, will have no meaningful or practical value because, like in every other armed force in the world, weapons and resources can be circulated and redeployed freely from one unit to another within the IDF. Nonetheless they has some significance, being the first ever time that the US has imposed sanctions on any unit of the Israeli army.
Threat to sanction an IDF unit is a political gesture
It is a political gesture and a rebuke to Netanyahu, one more indication of a growing split between Washington and Jerusalim. According to the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the White House “is considering measures against other military and police units.”
Joe Biden has not had a sudden attack of conscience. Like other Western politicians now calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, he is responding to the unprecedented wave of public revulsion across the globe against the genocidal war in Gaza. It is a war that has killed over 35,000 Palestinians, overwhelmingly non-combatants, and including around 13,000 children.
Predicatably, Netanyahu and his ministers, have responded to the threat of sanctions with faux outrage, not so much for any reall effectiveness of the sanctions, but for the political message they send. They have registered and are pushing back against the growing political and diplomatic isolation of Israel.
One-sided war on defenceless Gaza
While the Biden administration pretends to care about human rights abuses, it continues to arm a state that is waging a one-sided war on a defenceless population in Gaza, and which is sanctioning waves of pogroms against Arab villagers in the West Bank. On the bidding of the White House, Congress last week voted through a new package of arms support to Israel worth $26bn. Much of that will be deployed, not in “defence of Israel”, but to shore up an apartheid system that denies political and national rights to half of the population that Israel controls.
It is not only the Netzah Yehuda that is murdering Palestinians in the West Bank. That battalion, in any case, is no longer deployed there, having been moved, according to Al Jazeera, to the occupied Golan Heights. Today, it is the IDF collectively that is responsible for the arrests of thousands of Palestinians and the murder of hundreds in the West Bank.
Palestinian paramedic killed by Israeli sniper
To take one example out of scores, a recent report on the BBC website in the last week describes how a Palestinian paramedic was killed by Israeli sniper fire even as he was attending to people injured by Jewish settlers. The IDF “investigation” will go the same way as all their others – into a report that will be filed in a bin and never see the light of day. The IDF operate in the West Bank, as they do in Gaza, in the confidence that they have complete impunity.
Unlike the news from Gaza – which is largely hidden from the Israeli population, Al Jazeera now having been banned – the unrelenting oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank is more or less open source in Israel. Gideon Levy, an Israeli Jew and a columnist in the liberal newspaper (for Israel) Haaretz, regularly catalogues the crimes of the IDF in the West Bank. On March 30, he wrote, “While war rages in Gaza, the West Bank has undergone a metamorphosis. Israel has seized the opportunity to intensify the occupation, with mass arrests of Palestinians, hundreds killed, a host of new illegal settler outposts and roads. Shepherds expelled from their homes, violent settlers rampaging in uniform. All under the aegis of the war.”
Human hunting in the West Bank
Earlier the same month, Levy wrote an article under the heading “Human hunting…There’s no other way to describe what Israel Defense Forces soldiers were doing last Thursday at the separation barrier in the southern West Bank”.
“Spotting a young man climbing over the wall on a rope ladderwith others awaiting their turn, ,” Levy continues, “snipers opened fire at them from an ambush, hitting two of them in the back, one after the other. They fell to the ground on top of each other, bloodied”. Two days ago, in another article, Levy describe how “A Palestinian sanitation worker Is shot dead by an Israeli sniper for daring to go up on his roof”
IDF actively supports Jewish pogroms against Arab villagers
The Israeli/Palestinian news website, +972, give a stark account of the pogroms being committed by armed Jewish settlers in the last few weeks against Arab villagers in the West Bank, and with the active connivance of the IDF. Following the murder of a 14-year old boy from one of the Jewish settlements, their article reports, “Israeli settlers embarked on a murderous rampage across the occupied West Bank over the weekend, killing at least three Palestinians and destroying property in more than a dozen villages and towns”.
Hundreds of livestock slaughtered in Jewish pogroms on Arab villages
“According to the human rights group Yesh Din, Israeli settlers attacked 11 Palestinian villages and towns on Saturday alone. They threw stones, set fire to more than 100 vehicles, damaged scores of homes and businesses, and slaughtered hundreds of livestock. In the village of Beitin, near Ramallah, settlers shot dead 17-year-old Omar Hamed.
“In Al-Mughayyir, slightly further north, 25-year-old Jihad Abu Aliya was killed in circumstances that are still somewhat unclear: settlers were attacking the village at the time, but the Israeli army stated that Abu Aliya was killed by their fire. Another incident captured on a security camera shows Israeli soldiers standing guard while settlers set fire to a car in the town of Deir Dibwan, also near Ramallah”. As the pograms continued, settlers openly targetting Palestinian men, killing several. [Read the full article in +972 here]
The descriptions in +972 and Gideon Levy’s assessment is of a “metamorphosis” emphasise the brutality of everyday life for Palestinians in the West Bank. As of April 17, according to Al Jazeera, more than 8,000 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank are being held in Israeli captivity, most of these in ‘administrative detention’ meaning they are interned without trial. The number of Palestinians killed by the IDF and settlers – just since October 7 – is fast approaching 500.
Settlers are torching homes and cars
Armed settlers are torching homes and cars, killing livestock and unarmed civilians…while the Israeli army stands by or even assists. Nearly five hundred killed in six and a half months. We are not here talking about crimes being committed by the Netzah Yehuda battalion, but collectively by the IDF and Israeli police units. If the Biden administration had an ounce of principle, it would be sanctioning the whole of the IDF and indeed the state of Israel, and not single IDF unit.
[Top picture from newsfeed of WION news]
