Mohammed Assadi
Reuters North American News Service | Wiredispatch.com
Sep 30, 2008 04:15 EST
ASIRA AL-KIBLIYA, West Bank, Sept 30 (Reuters) – Armed with guns, slingshots, knives and stun grenades, Jewish settlers pelted the house of Palestinian Nahla Makhlouf with stones, uprooted young trees and painted the Star of David on her walls.
In Makhlouf’s West Bank village of Asira al-Kibilya, Palestinians brace for possible attack by their Jewish settler neighbours from nearby Titzhar almost every weekend. But the latest attack exceeded their expectations.
“They sprayed some sort of tear gas through the window. It smelled strong and made our eyes run and made it hard to breath, especially for my baby,” said the 33-year-old mother of four.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reacted strongly to the Sept. 13 attack, saying he would not tolerate “pogroms” by Jewish extremists who are determined on religious grounds to stop Israel swapping occupied land for peace.
Last week, an outspoken Israeli critic of the settlements was wounded by a pipe bomb outside his Jerusalem home, in what Olmert said was evidence of “an evil wind of extremism, of hatred, of violence” threatening Israeli democracy.
Settlers and the Israeli army said the Asira assault was triggered by the wounding of a nine-year-old settler boy by a Palestinian whom he had disturbed in the act of setting fire to a house in the Yitzhar settlement while the family was away.
But settler vigilante violence is growing, according to a recent U.N. report, which recorded 222 incidents in the first half of 2008, versus 291 in all of 2007.
HARDLINE
Some half a million Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, including Arab East Jerusalem. Their presence, viewed by major powers as illegal under international law, is partly shielded by a 790 km (490 mile) barrier Israel has been building since 2002.
In a newspaper interview on Monday, Olmert broke new ground by urging Israel’s withdrawal “from almost all the territories” captured in the 1967 Middle East war in return for peace.
But Olmert says Israel plans to keep major settlements in the West Bank in any peace deal, and would have to compensate the Palestinians for land lost.
The Palestinians say they cannot have a viable country of their own if it is chopped into pieces by Israeli settlement islands and the snaking walls and fences of the new barrier.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called the settlements “an obstacle to peace” which must go.
Some settlers justified the attack on Asira, saying the army failed to protect them against a violent infiltration.
“If the Israeli army had done what it should, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. They should either have prevented that infiltration or carried out a raid after,” Renana Cohen said.
Dani Dayan of Israel’s mainstream settlers’ organisation says the Arabs do not want peace. A Palestinian state would be a “launching pad” from which they would conduct “ethnic cleansing” against the Israelis, he argues. Many Israelis feel the same.
Most settlers oppose vigilante violence. But most agree that withdrawal would be “a sure recipe for war”, as Dayan puts is, because there will no “peace-loving Palestinians taking over”.
A younger, more aggressive breed of religious ideologues vows a violent response to any eviction threat, warning a heavy price would be exacted for any bid to close settlements down.
NO PROTECTION
Residents of Asira say the settlers need no provocation or pretext. Attacks on Asira date back three years, Makhlouf said.
Palestinians complain of unremitting harassment, such as the burning of their olive trees and stoning attacks on farmers in the fields, as a prelude to land-creep and confiscation.
The garden and rooftop of Makhlouf’s neighbour, Ahmed Dawood, were littered by stones rained onto his house in the settler rampage. The water tank was holed by four bullet.
Dawood’s son and a labourer in his field were shot and wounded. The army, he said, made no effort to stop the attack.
“I complained to the soldiers and they shouted back ‘Get inside’ and started shooting,” he said.
“We have nothing to protect ourselves with. We just take precautions such as putting metal grids on the windows. But the solution is to have them uprooted from here.”
Asira’s predicament is well known to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, who gave Makhlouf a small video camera in 2007 to document violence. The lens was knocked off focus by a rock in the latest attack but still provided an audio record.
Yoav Gross of B’Tselem said the settlers can be heard giving the army a one-minute ultimatum to act against the Palestinians or they would do the job themselves.
“They started counting one, two, three…,” he said. “They were giving orders to the soldiers, not the other way around.”
One Israeli human rights lawyer, Michael Sfard, says most soldiers do not realise they have not only the right but also the duty, as the occupying power, to defend Palestinians.
Settler attacks may rise in the upcoming olive harvest, when Arab farmers work the groves close to settlement perimeters.
One Palestinian woman in Asira was stocking up on corrosive cleaning fluids to throw at the attackers next time they visit.
“They have the army to protect them even while they are attacking us,” said the woman, who was afraid to give her name.
“But we have no one to defend us.”
(Editing by Douglas Hamilton and Samia Nakhoul)
e-mail: 
Peace and Justice Post 
The end of Israel as a Jewish state?
November 19, 2008By Anthony Loewenstein | Axis of Logic, Nov 15, 2008
The vast majority of Israeli citizens oppose the settler movement. Despite this, the colonialists recently launched a campaign to lure Israelis to visit the West Bank, the Jewish Forward newspaper reported. “Some 1,000 billboards have gone up across the country, showing photographs of cherubic settler children dressed in biblical costumes and carrying the slogan ‘Judea and Samaria – the story of every Jew’.”
The gulf between a sizable, vocal and often violent minority and the vast bulk of the population is growing by the day. Just last month a handful of Jewish radicals rioted near the West Bank town of Kiryat Arba and desecrated a Muslim graveyard after the Israel Defence Forces removed an illegal outpost.
Such actions are now occurring many times every week and the Israeli government seems powerless or unwilling to act decisively against it. Fundamentalist Zionists no longer recognise the authority of the Jewish state and demand the establishment of a Taliban-style, rabbinical entity in its place. Arabs will either be forcibly removed or live under authoritarianism.
How did Israel get to this point? Decades of funding and indulging the settler movement have resulted in the current crisis. As Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz: “Every class and institution of Israeli society defends the settlements, finances them from its own pockets, and is a full partner in the [land] theft, even if some of them are disgusted by it.”
The West Bank has become a Hobbesian land. Barely a day goes by without yet another report of settlers and the IDF impeding the daily lives of Palestinians on the “disputed” land.
In the 15 years since the Oslo peace talks, the colonies have multiplied in size and the settlers have more than doubled in number. A two-state solution is now impossible due to the presence of over 400,000 Jewish settlers on Palestinian land. A World Bank report recently revealed that property prices in the West Bank have rocketed out of the reach of most local businesses.
The September pipe bombing by Jewish radicals of Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell’s home in Jerusalem – a long-time critic of the settler movement – signalled a profound shift in the struggle against Israel’s internal enemies, a point powerfully made by leading peace activist Uri Avnery. “Israeli fascism is alive and kicking”, Avnery warned. “It is growing in the flowerbed that produced the various religious-nationalist underground groups of the past.” And yet the vast majority of the international Jewish Diaspora is tellingly silent on these issues, preferring to protest against Hamas “terrorism” and Iranian “provocation”. Thankfully Haaretz is unafraid to editorialise on the failure of Israel to uphold its own laws when broken.
Sternhell, even more determined to warn the world against the Jewish state’s threats, has argued since the attack against him and his family that “If Israeli society is unable to muster the courage necessary to put an end to the settlements, the settlements will put an end to the state of the Jews and will turn it into a bi-national state”.
As a believer in this solution, I don’t fear Sternhell’s thesis, but settler violence undoubtedly threatens the (long-discredited) claim that Israel is a Jewish democracy.
The challenge for the international community is to pressure Israel to decide what kind of state it wants to be and enforce its borders. Only a nation where all citizens are treated equally should be acceptable and the ever-growing tensions in cities where Jews and Arabs uncomfortably co-exist is worsening.
Ironically, before Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently resigned, he told a leading Israeli newspaper that the country must withdraw from the vast majority of occupied territory. They were fighting words from a disgraced leader and unlikely to be heeded any time soon.
The UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories reported last month that Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and, until 2005, the Gaza Strip represented elements of colonialism and apartheid. Despite the current truce between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights found that 68 children had been killed in Gaza in the 12 months to June this year because of “disproportionate and excessive lethal force” by the IDF.
The settler militants are one of the leading impediments to peace in the region yet much of the mainstream media and Zionist leadership remain in denial. The Jerusalem Post editorialised last month that “radical” settlers were “undermining the case for Jewish rights in the West Bank… and harden hearts to Israel’s legitimate security concerns and historic civilisational ties to the land.” International law is clear: every settlement beyond the 1967 Green Line is illegal and must be removed. There can be no lasting peace and justice without this.
It was a point equally ignored by one of America’s leading Zionist leaders, Morton Klein, who wrote recently that, “it is simply a flat-earth statement to describe Judea, Samaria and Gaza as occupied”.
His statement is categorically incorrect though represents the official position of the vocal international Zionist Diaspora: the rampaging settlers, land annexation and anti-Palestinian discrimination is a merely defensive position by Israel. The forthcoming election may set back prospects for peace even further.
The time is approaching soon when the world will recognise what has been clear for decades: the Jewish state has neither the interest nor desire to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. The alternative is now inevitable: the end of Israel as a Jewish entity.
http://antonyloewenstein.com/blog/2008/11/07/the-end-of-israel-as-a-jewish-state/
Share this:
Tags:fundamentalist Zionists, Israel, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, settler movement, Uri Avnery, West Bank, Ze’ev Sternhell
Posted in Commentary, Human rights, Palestine, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »