By John Pickard
Israel has directly killed around 45,000 Gaza Palestinians, 70% of whom, according to the UN, are women and children. Netanyahu is now ramping up the humanitarian crisis he has created in Gaza by outlawing the only organisation capable of organising relief on any scale – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
One international agency after another, including the UN, international legal bodies, welfare and charitable organisations, have described israeli policy in Gaza as ‘genocide’. There is no other word that can describe the constant bombardment of schools, hospitals and refugee facilities, as well as the deliberate starving of the population. It is only Western politicians – including explicitly Keir Starmer – who refuse to use the word.
Meanwhile, in what even the Financial Times calls Netanyahu’s “forever war”, Israel is threatening to do to Southern Lebanon and West Beirut what it has done to Gaze: reducing it to rubble, whatever the cost in lives and humanitarian problems, and there are already over 3,000 lives lost by bombed dropped on Lebanon.
But an important part of the ongoing wars of Israel, and a part that should not be overlooked, is the assault on the Palestinian population of the occupied West Bank. One element in the zionist settler project has always been the absorption of the West Bank into ‘Greater Israel’ and the October 7 incursion of Hamas last year has given the government the pretext it needed to supercharge state repression against West Bank Palestinians, in the hope – in vain – that they would flee of their own accord to Jordan or elsewhere.
An estimated 500,000 Israelis reside in exclusively Jewish settlements, on land confiscated from Palestinian villagers and landowners, and there are 147 settlements and 191 ‘illegal’ outposts in that part of the West Bank designated as Area C. A tenth of the total areas of the West Bank is located within the municipal boundaries of the official settlements, which, alongside large open areas controlled by the settlements regional councils, comprise approximately 40% of the total area in the West Bank.
Western politicians turn a blind eye
The ‘legality’ of any of the settlements is immaterial, because although none of them are technically ‘legal’ or recognised as part of Israel by Western governments like the UK, Western governments have simply turned a blind eye to UN resolutions and declarations of settlement ‘illegality’. There is, therefore, no serious political objection to them from Western mainstream politicians. We will wait until Hell freezes over before British ‘Labour’ Foreign Minister, David Lammy, makes any loud public complaints about them. The key issue is that for the Israeli state they are all ‘legal’, and so it provides services like roads to them and it provides assault rifles to the settlers.
The current government coalition, the most right-wing in the history of the state, depends for its survival on two right-wing settler parties. After October 7, the Israeli ‘security’ Minister, Ben Gvir has provided thousands of these military-grade rifles to settlers, many of them Israeli army reservists with access to arms anyway. With the acqiescence and often active support of the Israeli Border Police and the IDF, settlers have stepped up their attacks on Palestinian villages and smaller towns. Palestinian farmers forced to flee have seen their land and flocks stolen.
Israeli settlers’ terrorist activity on the West Bank
According to the Israel-based human rights organisation, B’Tselem, settlers have forced at least 18 Palestinian communities — over 1,000 people — to flee their homes since October last year. The Financial Times recently published a podcast (behind a firewall, but here for those who can access it) in which a team from the newspaper looked at the new ‘settler’ law that reigns on the West Bank since October 7. The FT team reviewed footage of settlers shooting at unarmed Palestinians, with a solidier standing by in at least one case, but when asked by the IDF about the incidents, they were fobbed off with the usual meaningless pat phrases about making ‘inquiries’.
According to the Financial Times reporters, the Security Minister has now granted settlers new enforcement powers, including the power to arrest. An international conflict-monitoring group, (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, Acled) noted that “aggressive acts are now increasingly carried out by people who have this quasi-military status”. The settlers have even established military-style observation posts overlooking Palestinian villages.
Alongside the semi-official pogroms organised against Palestinians in the outlying areas, IDF incursions into the larger Palestinian towns and refugee camps have also increased in tempo, frequency and ferocity, for the first time including bombing from aircraft. This has led to 11,000 arrests and detentions, with these ‘hostages’ facing abuse and torture and having no recourse to due legal process.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, ACRI, has published a report specifically on the Sde Teman Militaryfacility. “Mounting testimonies have exposed the unimaginable abuses at Sde Teman”, itreports, “- surgeries without anesthesia, prolonged restraint in agonizing positions, handcuffing injuries requiring amputation, permanent blindfolding even during medical treatment, detainees held in diapers, severe beatings and torture”.
Red Cross no longer allowed to visit Palestinian prisoners
This facility includes according to reports they have detained ”over 1,000 suspected ‘unlawful combatants’ from Gaza in cage-like enclosures surrounded by barbed wire – with no cells, beds or basic equipment”.
To compound the problems of the thousands of hostages held by Israel, in June the state revoked the right of the International Committee of the Red Cross to offer impartial and independent visits to Palestinian prisoners. The repressive policy of the Israeli government in the West Bank is described by the ACRI as a “legal coup”, but again, there is not a peep about this outrageous curtailment of basic human rights from Western politicians.
There are no clear war aims for the ongoing Israeli onslaught in Gaza, beyond the unlikely “complete” victory over Hamas. However, the IDF are laying plans, building military roads and establishing a military infrastructure that suggest they are planning to be in occupation of Gaza at least for the foreseeable future – well into 2025 and beyond. There is already a section of the Israeli right that is talking openly about new Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Israel is facing unprecedented crises in the coming months and years. The right wing settlers imagine that they can simply conjure away the whole Palestinian population of the West Bank. Israel has reduced much of Gaza to rubble and have (and are still) starving its population. But if the Israeli right think they can simply remove five million people, against their wishes and against the wishes of the Arab states to which they would expel them, they are living a dream. What they will do, is guarantee to hurl Israel into increasingly bitter and sharper internal conflicts as the apartheid project begins to unravel.
[Top picture: demolition of Arab homes, from Al Jazeera newsfeed.]
