Miriam Berger and Shira Rubin of the Washington Post report that all is not well in the West Bank.
HUWARA, West Bank — Dozens of Israeli settlers rampaged through Palestinian towns, torching cars, homes and killing a man, hours after a Palestinian gunman killed two Israelis.
The scenes from the hours-long rampage Sunday night bore the trademark of a once-active settler movement known as “price taggers,” whose mission was to extract a “price” for any Palestinian attacks or threats to the settler movement.
This a typical case of an escalating cycle of violence.
…a Palestinian gunman opened fire at a traffic junction in Huwara, south of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, killing Hillel Menachem Yaniv, 22, and Yagel Yaakov Yaniv, 20, brothers from the nearby Har Bracha settlement — likely itself a retaliation for an Israeli raid on Nablus the week before that killed 11 Palestinians, including militants and civilians.
About that raid in Nablus, it was at least partly retribution for “a shooting that killed an Israeli soldier near the illegal settlement of Shavei Shomron in October,” and was “the third major Israeli operation in the West Bank since the start of the year.”
At least 150 Israeli soldiers in dozens of armoured vehicles swooped on Nablus on Wednesday in what turned out to be one of the deadliest military raids in the occupied West Bank since the mass Palestinian uprising or Intifada of 2000-05.
Within four hours, the Israeli army killed 11 Palestinians and injured more than 80 people with live ammunition – some of them critically. The raid comes barely a month after 10 Palestinians were killed in a similar raid in the Jenin refugee camp about 41km (25 miles) away.
The Jenin raid was allegedly a preemptive attack or, as U.S. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel put it, “a counterterrorism operation.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its troops entered Jenin to arrest an Islamic Jihad “terror squad”, who it accused of being “heavily involved in planning and executing multiple major terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers”.
Sometimes the explanations for these massacres are a bit more candid:
“A Huwara that is burning — that’s the only way we’ll achieve deterrence,” Tzvika Foghel, a lawmaker from the far right Jewish Power party, told Galei Israel radio the next day. “We need to stop shying away from collective punishment.”
I must pause here to note that collective punishment is banned under the Geneva Conventions and international law.
All this violence served as the backdrop of a meeting on Sunday in Jordan between representatives of Israel and Palestine intended to stop the escalating cycle of violence.
The Jordanian government on Sunday announced that Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to de-escalate tensions, shortly after a Palestinian gunman killed two Israelis in a shooting in the occupied West Bank.
Sunday’s shooting marked the latest violence in a wave of fighting that has killed dozens of Israelis and Palestinians over the past year. Jordan invited the sides with the aim of reducing tensions ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
A statement from Jordan’s Foreign Ministry said that the Israeli and Palestinian representatives agreed to work toward a “just and lasting peace” and affirmed the need to “commit to de-escalation on the ground.”
It said they had agreed to preserve the status quo at a contested Jerusalem holy site, and that Israel had agreed to halt new settlement approvals in the occupied West Bank for four to six months. It also said both sides agreed to support “confidence-building steps” and to meet again next month in Egypt.
But there’s really little reason to believe these promises will be kept by either side. More typical of the far right Israeli government’s attitude are statements like these:
Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, the third-largest bloc in the coalition, said that he had “no idea” about the discussions at the “unnecessary conference” in Jordan, but that Israel would not agree to a settlement freeze, “even for one day.”…Smotrich…called for “striking the cities of terror and its instigators without mercy, with tanks and helicopters, in a way that conveys that the master of the house has gone crazy.”
Unsurprisingly, the posture of the Israeli government causes consternation among many non-Israeli Jews, including here in the Americas.
That’s a Canadian rabbi questioning “the entire Zionist enterprise,” and putting a challenge on leaders in American Jewish community. That rhetoric is still an outlier, but I think we’re going to see this rift start to become more mainstream. It’s hard to imagine Zionism being widely questioned in the diaspora, but it clearly wasn’t supposed to develop into a far right movement that openly calls for the collective punishment of Palestinians. It’s just not consistent with core Jewish values or the political and moral outlook of American jewry. For that reason, I don’t see the old relationship holding steady, but rather a growing number of American Jews wondering if the Zionist project can be rescued from Netanyahu and the Settler Movement.
As a non-Jew, I’m deeply uncomfortable wading into those waters. Mainly, it makes me sad. I applaud efforts to stop the violence, but I can find no basis for optimism for either Israelis or Palestinians. And America and Israel are going to grow apart in a way that will be deeply painful for Jews worldwide. That’s not something I want to see, but it’s a moral conflict that is reaching the breaking point.
