It seems US President Joe Biden is finally awake to the threat that extremist Israeli settlers pose. While Israel’s military campaign in Gaza grinds on, the West Bank has been allowed to reach boiling point, encouraged by hard right ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Since Hamas launched its brutal attack Oct. 7, slaughtering 1,200 mostly Israelis (along with dozens from other nations including the US, France and Thailand), there has been a significant uptick in violence in the West Bank. Israeli troops there have repeatedly either looked away or helped out as militant settlers have forced Palestinian families from their land.
At least 190 Palestinians, including 43 children, have died at the hands of Israeli security forces and settlers, while more than 2,000 have been arrested and detained. Nearly 1,100 have been evicted from their homes. In almost half the cases, according to the United Nations, Israeli security forces have accompanied or actively supported the settlers. Now Biden says he has told Israel’s leaders the attacks must stop, noting in a Washington Post op-ed that the US was considering issuing visa bans against extremist settlers attacking civilians in the West Bank.
Some military operations appear to be gratuitous, aimed at destroying symbols of Palestinian identity. Soldiers bulldozed a statue dedicated to the late President Yasser Arafat last week and destroyed the memorial to much-loved Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, erected on the spot where she was killed by Israeli forces while reporting last May.
There is deep concern in Washington over images of Netanyahu’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir handing out weapons to civilians in so-called community security squads. Fears that US-provided assault rifles could end up in the hands of extremist settlers threatened to halt an arms shipment to Israel last month.
Everyone from Biden to the European Union and Israel’s own Shin Bet security service have warned Netanyahu that, unless the settlers are reined in, their rampages could spark widespread violence in the West Bank, in Israel itself, and spill into the wider region.
Should mounting attacks lead to large-scale Palestinian displacement, Hezbollah may feel compelled to dramatically escalate its attacks on Israel, says Mona Yacoubian, vice president of the Middle East and North Africa center at the United States Institute of Peace. “Similarly,” she says, “Iranian-backed proxies further afield in the region would surely up the tempo of their attacks on US targets.”
While the numbers involved may pale before the estimated 12,000 Gazans killed in the last month, the settler violence feeds into a traumatic, deeply felt history. As Walid Khalidi meticulously details in “All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948,” more than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed or depopulated in 1948 following the creation of the state of Israel. They were replaced by Israeli settlements.
Since then, over five decades of military occupation, as many as 670,000 settlers have moved into the West Bank to settlements considered illegal under international law. The territory has become a dystopia for Palestinians. A 442-mile-long separation barrier cuts off farmers from their land and families from each other. Meanwhile, endless checkpoints, so-called “sterile roads” reserved only for Jews, night raids on villages, and the arrest — often without charge — of thousands of civilians, including between 500-700 children each year, continually reinforce the privileges one group enjoys over the other.
Palestinians see the latest settler attacks not as isolated outbursts, but as part of a concerted plan to drive them into a smaller and smaller swath of the territory. At the UN on Sept. 22, Netanyahu himself displayed a map of the “New Middle East” showing Gaza and the occupied West Bank as part of Israel. Ben-Gvir and other cabinet members have openly pledged to annex the West Bank in its entirety. Israeli ministers have speculated about driving Gazan civilians across the border into Egypt.
Whether Netanyahu shares their ambitions, or is appeasing hard-right coalition members to cling to power, hardly matters. The effect is the same: Israeli troops may soon face a third front, in addition to Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon, while any hope of enlisting the help of the Palestinian Authority in governing Gaza is rapidly vanishing.
A long-term solution will require new leadership on both sides. Israel must re-engage with a peace process that it abandoned years ago and acknowledge that its forever occupation must end. Until Palestinians have their own state, the conditions that led to every large-scale outbreak of violence, from the first and second intifadas to yes, the Oct. 7 attack, will remain. It will not be enough to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza — though that should be the immediate priority.
If a Netanyahu-led government seems incapable of making such a leap, so does the Palestinian Authority, the governing body created a year after the 1993 Oslo Accords. President Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected in 2005 to serve a four-year term and is still in office, is wildly unpopular, as is the PA. There is no doubt it would not be welcome back in Gaza in its current guise. It, too, must be completely reformed.
Yet, in the meantime, Israel’s government can at least not make its own problems worse. The unconscionable death toll in Gaza, Netanyahu’s disregard for the fate of the more than 200 hostages held by Hamas, and Israel’s continued rejection of a ceasefire have already gravely damaged its cause. The last thing it needs is to embolden a settler minority whose actions are undermining security for all Israelis and Palestinians and increasing the risk of a wider conflict.
Ruth Pollard is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Views do not represent the stand of this publication.
Credit: Bloomberg
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