H. Scott Prosterman Informed Comment
Since October 7, 18 new settlements and eight new army bases have been constructed on what was Palestinian family homes for generations. When Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest government took power in 2022, it accelerated a far-right campaign to ethnically cleanse the northern areas of the West Bank. The first step was to balkanize the formal Palestinian holdings in the 1994 Oslo Accords. That was augmented by roadblocks and IDF outposts. Now, a settler project decades in the making is taking root in the northern West Bank, as the IDF turns a blind eye to the flagrant violations of human rights and international law.
Netanyahu at the least ignored intelligence warnings about the Gaza buildup to October 7, 2023, because of his dedication to splitting the Palestinians by propping up Hamas in Gaza. October 7 prompted the Likud and IDF to treat the West Bank as a war front with tanks and armed drones. Avi Bluth, the Israeli Central Command chief is directing this atrocity in collaboration with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and Defense Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The grand design is to blow up the Oslo Accords, and ethnically cleanse the West Bank one sector at a time, in preparation for annexation. A collateral casualty of October 7 was the 2023 repeal of the Disengagement Law, and the provocative reintroduction of settlements into populated Palestinian areas. And they’re being repopulated and expanded at warp speed to create new, intractable “facts on the ground.” The Homesh and Sa-Nur settlements have already been repopulated. Others are on track for quick restoration.
Since the 2005 when Israel relinquished four isolated settlements in the area in an effort to consolidate Jewish demographics, the Likud government has aimed to reclaim that land. The occupation on steroids has claimed 18 new sites that further disrups what remains of the land where 720,000 Palestinians live. Israel has prosecuted a brutal campaign of intimidation and expropriation against the native Palestinians since October 7; accompanied by new military outposts to protect the new settlements and new roads on stolen land. That includes 14 new settlements, which encircle ancient towns and villages such as Jenin and Tulkarm, where no Israelis have ever lived in modern times.
Though Area A of the West Bank is off limits to Israelis under the Oslo agreement, the settlers backed by Likud and the IDF are building new structures faster than ever. One village targeted is Beit Imrin, where a settler was killed last May in an ATV accident of his own making, but was declared a Palestinian terrorist incident by the IDF and police. The village has since been sacked in various settler raids. That also prompted a violent pogrom in 20 more Palestinian towns, burning cars and homes including with people inside.
The website +972 has chronicled these events since 2021, before the current Likud government took hold. This includes the incidents at the Masafer Yatta village, which was the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary, No Other Land. Not surprisingly, the uber-Zionist propaganda machine has gone into overdrive in attempt to discredit the film by Likud in Israel, and Republicans in the US. The Siamese twin criminal alliance between Netanyahu and convicted felon Donald Trump has been analyzed in these pages numerous times since 2019.
B’Tselem is the Israeli information center dedicated to human rights in the West Bank. It advocates for “human rights, liberty and equality” guarantees for Jews, Palestinians, and all people “living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” It also facilitates legal counsel for people ensnared by the Likud-IDF pogrom machine, and whatever protections can still be affected. They noted on “X” this week that, “Since October 2023, settler violence and military raids have forcibly displaced at least 4,635 Palestinians in the West Bank. Entire communities have been driven out of their homes in 62 cases, with another 15 communities partially displaced.”
These are pogroms, the same dynamic used to drive Jews from their homes in the Pale of Settlement and other parts of Europe since the Crusades. It’s tragic and maddening that Israel under Likud has resorted to the same brutality, which ultimately led to the creation of Israel as a safe haven for Jews. And all with the blessing of the Republican Party and US Ambassador Mike Huckabee. Prof. Juan Cole pointed out that, “Ultimately, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu wants to ethnically cleanse all Palestinians, including the Christians.” That doesn’t sit well with Huckabee and his fellow Christian Nationalists, who have been promoting the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Gaza for Christian settlements, leading to fissures in the Likud-US Evangelical alliance. But that alliance is predicated upon the myth that the Palestinian people don’t warrant recognition as an ethnic group with valid claims to their historic homeland.
The area between Nablus and Jenin has been targeted for new settlements and IDF bases because it is the largest, contiguous area of Palestinian territory remaining. Residents of the Homesh and Yuval settlements candidly say their goal is to break it up. Lost on the settlers and the government is the enormous costs involved in securing the area for settlement expansion. This adds to the financial and security burden of a military already stretched thin among operations in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Gaza; and was done without any input or assessment from the Israeli Central Command. This campaign has brought horrors to the daily lives of Palestinians in the form of settler and military raids, roadblocks, restricted access to their own land, uprooting trees and destroying infrastructure, as depicted in the film No Other Land. One especially grotesque act was done by the settlers of Sa-Nur, when they ordered residents of Asasa to dig up a fresh grave of an elderly man and move him soon after he was buried.
The Palestinian refugee crisis was dramatically escalated recently, when the IDF dismantled the refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams. That involved bulldozing homes and infrastructure, where refugees from the 1947 Nakba have been living since 1953, and resulted in 32,000 Palestinians being displaced from their homes – the largest displacement since 1967. The IDF then bi-sected the Jenin camp with a new military road wide enough for two tanks to escalate the intimidation and inconvenience.
Photo by Sameeh Karram: https://www.pexels.com/photo/historic-stone-alley-in-bethlehem-under-blue-sky-33358670/
Haaretz reports that, “Most movement restrictions currently imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank are being carried out without required legal approvals, violating IDF protocols.” The IDF is breaching its own codes to meet with the Likud political agenda. IDF legal adviser Cobi Marcus addressed that in a letter to Commander Bluth, describing it as “anarchy,” and an ongoing pattern. But this has been going on since 1967, and escalating dramatically in recent years, as noted in Red Pepper Media: “Between 1967 and 2022, Israeli settlers stole roughly seven per cent of all the land in the West Bank. From 2022 to 2024, they doubled that to 14 per cent, stealing as much land in two years as over the previous 55. Activists on the ground estimate the number has likely tripled by 2026.” This has disrupted farming and grazing practices, and brought greater costs for Palestinian farmers and shepherds.
An ongoing characteristic of Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank is the targeting of civilians area for punishment, rather than just military targets. Destruction of civilian infrastructure has been a violation of International Law since the 1949 Geneva Convention, but Israel acts as if they have some exemption. Israel targets civilians because, “they assume that Palestinian children will grow up to be terrorists,” as writer Hugh Curran noted. Recent airstrikes in Lebanon have killed 3,800 people and wounded over 11,000. The IDF has also destroyed 17 Lebanese hospitals and bombed 68 more, along with 100 schools, according to the World Health Organization.
These are not acts of thoughtful, spiritual Jews. Rather, they are acts of mean-spirited, violent people using a mythical interpretation of Judaic history as a cover for their cruelty, and calling it Zionism. The pervasiveness and embrace of this pathology has prompted many Jews to divorce their Judaism from Zionism. This form of Zionism supports of a corrupt prime minister, whose government depends on the inclusion of a criminal sector to maintain power and standing. There’s nothing spiritual or righteous about that.
H. Scott Prosterman is a writer and communications consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, and holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan
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