Settler violence report from IsraeliAmerican academic

Jeff Halper

Settlers have descended in a rampage on the Palestinian town of Huwara near Nablus and have set it on fire – houses (more than 30), businesses, mosques, schools, every building they could set fire to, plus more than 40 cars and even the local fire engines so that the spreading flames cannot be contained.

There are apparently many Palestinian casualties – one reported dead, 98 Palestinians have been treated for injuries so far – although the settlers are also attacking ambulances and the Israeli army is reported preventing the Red Cross from entering the town.

(Now, three hours after the pogrom began, the settlers are still in the town and, according to the reports of Israeli Channel 12, are preventing Palestinian families trapped in the burning houses to escape – and no attacker has been arrested.)

Huwara is a Palestinian town of about 6000 surrounded by the most violent Israeli settlements in the West Bank: Itamar, Tapuakh, Yitzhar, Qdumim, Har Brakha and others.

Attacks on Palestinians are commonplace and the perpetrators, well-known to the po- lice (now under the control of Itamar Ben Gvir, a settler from Hebron who has been tried seven times for violent attacks on Palestinians), are never punished.

This attack, however, is on a scale we have never seen; even Israeli TV is calling it a pogrom. And apparently other Palestinian communities in the area are being attacked as well, Burin and even Nablus.

This will lead, I believe, to a qualitative change in the political situation as we have known it – in one way or another. Many in the current Netanyahu government believe that this is the time to violently repress all Palestinian resistance.

Bezalal Smotrich, a settler who has been appointed a government minister in charge of the Civil Administration, the Israeli military government in the West Bank, responsible for approving settlements, expropriating land and demolishing homes, has just posted a “like” to a tweet from an elected Israeli official in the West Bank calling for the “eradication of Huwara.”

The Israeli government believes – and not without reason – that “quietizing” the situation through violent repression, punishment and economic sanctions will, given the complicity of the US and normalization with the Arab world (based itself on the use of Israeli technologies of repression against

An aerial view of a yard where cars were torched overnight, in the Palestinian town of Huwara near Nablus in the occupied West Bank. [Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP] their own people), pave the way for a normalized, permanent regime of apartheid.

But Israeli pogroms also open opportunities – tragically. They demonstrate the unrestrained violence to which Palestinians are submitted and highlight the unsustainability – and injustice – of “the situation.”

We must demand that our governments hold Israel and its settlers accountable for their actions. Indeed, if only our governments would uphold their own international laws of which Israel stands in gross violation, the occupation would collapse by the very weight of its illegality.

Palestine represents the test of whether “the international rule of law” constantly invoked by Biden in regards to US support for

Ukraine has any political or moral meaning, or if we in fact live in a Kissinger-arian dystopia of realpolitik.

I think we know the answer, and that means we have to go beyond the “human rights approach” to meaningful political action.

Source: Jim Halper Facebook

Jeff Halper is an Israeli-American anthropologist, author, lecturer and political activist who has lived in Israel since 1973. He is the director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and a co-founder of The One Democratic State Campaign.