Jeremy Bowen talks to a squatter/settler
"Bowen: Israeli settlers intensify campaign to drive out West Bank Palestinians"BBC 10/8/25."The conflict between Arabs and Jews for control of the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea started well over a century ago when Zionists from Europe began to buy land to set up communities in Palestine.It has been shaped by significant turning points.The latest has come from the deadly 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Israel's devastating response.The consequences of the last 22 months of war, and however more months are left before a ceasefire, threaten to spread across years and generations, just like the Middle East war in 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan.The scale of destruction and killing in the Gaza war obscures what is happening in the West Bank, which smoulders with tension and violence.Since October 2023, Israel's pressure on West Bank Palestinians has increased sharply, justified as legitimate security measures.Evidence based on statements by ministers, influential local leaders like Simcha and accounts by witnesses on the ground reveal that the pressure is part of a wider agenda, to accelerate the spread of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and to extinguish any lingering hopes of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.Palestinians and human rights groups also accuse the Israeli security forces of failing in their legal duty as occupiers to protect Palestinians as well as their own citizens - not just turning a blind eye to settler attacks, but even joining in.Violence by ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers in the West Bank has risen sharply since 7 October 2023.Ocha, the UN's humanitarian office, estimates an average of four settler attacks every day.The International Court of Justice has issued an advisory opinion that the entire occupation of Palestinian territory captured in 1967 is illegal.Israel's rejects the ICJ's view and claims that the Geneva Conventions forbidding settlement in occupied territories do not apply - a view disputed by many of its own allies as well as international lawyers.In the shade of the fig tree, Simcha denied all suggestions he had attacked Palestinians, as he celebrated the fact that most of the Arab farmers who used to graze their animals on the hills he has SEIZED and tend their olives in the valleys had gone.He looks back to the Hamas October attacks, and Israel's response ever since, as a turning point."I think that a lot has changed, that the enemy in our land lost hope. He's beginning to understand that he's on his way out; that's what has changed in the last year or year and a half."Today you can walk around here in the land in the desert, and nobody will jump on you and try to kill you. There are still attempts to oppose our presence here in this land, but the enemy is starting to understand this slowly. They have no future here."The reality has changed. I ask you and the people of the world, why are you so interested in those Palestinians so much? Why do you care about them? It's just another small nation."The Palestinians don't interest me. I care about my people."Simcha says the Palestinians who left villages and farms near the hilltops he has claimed simply realised that God intended the land for Jews, not for them.""At a ceremony in one of them ("outposts") in the south Hebron Hills in April this year, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose powers over the running of the occupation also make him something like the governor of the West Bank, donated 19 all-terrain vehicles to the settlers. He praised them for "grabbing massive territories".A sharp-eyed reporter at the Times of Israel pointed out that one of the settlers at the ceremony, Yinon Levi, had been filmed harassing Palestinians from an all-terrain vehicle. Levi is sanctioned by the UK and the European Union for using violence to drive Palestinians off their land, though President Trump lifted similar sanctions imposed by Joe Biden.Levi is radical settler royalty, married to the daughter of Noam Federman - a notorious extremist. Federman is a former leader of the Kach party, which is designated as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the European Union and others.On 28 July this year, Yinon Levi fired a bullet that killed Odeh Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist, during a disturbance in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair. Levi pleaded self-defence and was released after three days of house arrest.When we went to Umm al-Khair, Hathaleen's dried blood was still at the place where he was killed.His brother, Khalil, told me the dead man was holding his five-year-old son, Watan, and filming the violent scenes on his phone when he was killed."https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4wwxz12jkoThis project has been going on for over a hundred years. It is getting ever closer to fulfilment.
David Ainsworth ● 1d23 Comments