ISRAEL’S SETTLERS: Still Expanding in Numbers and Lawlessness

by Citizen Paul*

Yehuda Shaul, Executive Director of Breaking The Silence is one of the courageous Israelis featured in our upcoming publication Saving Israel From Itself. A few days ago Yehuda was giving British Diplomats a tour of Hebron when they were attacked by radical Israeli settlers. This serious Settler situation needs to be understood and put in perspective.

Just a few months ago now I was there in the historic city of Hebron on the occupied West Bank south of Bethlehem.

At that time, I saw some the settlers, and I spoke with some of the many Israeli soldiers who protect them.

Israel continues demolishing Palestinian homes throughout the West Bank. This photo shows a home demolition taking place in Jerusalem on 13 August 2008.

There in Hebron, ironically right where the tomb of Abraham, common ancestor of both Jews and Arabs is located, today’s conflict between Jews and Arabs is so tragically on display.
Through brute force, a few hundred fanatical Israeli Jews have imposed themselves on the more than 180,000 Palestinian Arabs.

On top of this a few thousand heavily armed Israeli soldiers not only guard these Israeli settlers, but facilitate their taking of Arab lands, closure of Arab businesses, and demolition of Arab properties.

Not only in Hebron, but in fact throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem, the Israelis keep right on building and expanding Jews-only settlements while demolishing Palestinian homes.

The settler population is now approaching half a million. Not all of them are fanatics, but all of them are part of the movement that deprives the Palestinian people of a country of their own.

Today there are in fact more than double the number of Israeli settlers as when the Oslo Agreement was signed on the White House lawn in September 1993.

Time after time the Israelis have broken repeated promises and reassurances that this would not happen. Indeed, back at the time of the 1978 Camp David agreement with Egypt, when there were only about 40,000 settlers and the situation was much less apartheid-like, the Israelis pledged to freeze all settlements and allow creation of a Palestinian State.

Yet what the Israelis have in fact actually done is use one ruse after another to keep building illegal settlements throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Heavily armed radical Israeli “settlers” in Hebron.

Furthermore, in recent years they have compounded everything by a Jews-only road network combined with concrete Walls and barbed wire fences jutting throughout the West Bank. It’s all a carefully coordinated plot designed to make it possible for the settlers to grab the valuable lands and resources of the West Bank from the Palestinians, and in the end to make an independent and viable Palestinian State impossible.

Today, through one means or another, the Israelis in fact control about 40% of the entirety of the West Bank. And the Palestinians are more and more confined — surrounded, nearly imprisoned in fact–within their their increasingly isolated and cut-off villages and towns everywhere controlled by Israeli army roadblocks and checkpoints.

So let’s cut through all the deceptions, all the lies, all the slick distortions the Israelis are so masterful at perpetuating.

The Israeli government has never intended to stop or to “freeze” their illegal settlements no matter what they pledged at Camp David, at Oslo, and at enumerable other times. Moreover the Israelis have never intended to reach a fair and reasonable sharing of The Holy Land with the Palestinian people who have inhabited this area — known to the entire world as Palestine until 1948 — for countless generations.

Bottom Line: Successive Israelis governments, whether of the right-wing or the left have never intended to help bring about a real Palestinian State. That has been the rhetorical facade for sometime masking Israel’s real policies and intentions which are more and more visible on the ground.

Year after year, the Israelis have instead used various kinds of political obfuscations and delaying tactics, all the while relentlessly pushing forward with more Jews-only settlements and more debilitating restrictions, barriers, and dispossessions for the Palestinians.

Furthermore, and this is critical and makes me even more furious, time after time our own government in Washington has not only allowed this to happen but has facilitated it, paid for it, excused it, and in the end helped make it all possible.

My report about all this, entitled, Saving Israel From Itself, will be available soon.

But actually it is not just a report, this publication includes the outline of a serious plan for what needs now to be done and how there can still be a Palestinian State and real peace between the Israel, the Palestinian people, and the entire Arab world.

On the cover, and featured in the report, is one of the courageous young Israelis I met on my trip, Yehuda Shaul.

Yehuda Shaul, Executive Director of Breaking the Silence

Yehuda himself was raised as a settler, and he is a religious Jew who wears a kippa (scullcap). Then he served in the army and saw for himself what was being done in Hebron. He couldn’t stand it. And he is doing something about it as I detail in Saving Israel From Itself.

Even as I work to complete this publication, the situation in the West Bank continues to get worse and yet my own government still continues to do nothing about it.

Astoundingly, greatly pressured by the Israelis, the Bush Administration has even recently cancelled U.S. visas for young Palestinians in Gaza who have been awarded prestigious Fulbright Scholarships to come study in our country. We’re recently interviewed one of those Fulbright students in Gaza.

And here are three short news reports, all published in British newspapers in the past few days and little known in our country, about recent attacks by settlers on British diplomats who were being given a tour of Hebron by Yehuda Shaul.

Jewish settlers attack British diplomats in Hebron

Reuters Thursday, August 7, 2008 HEBRON, West Bank: A small group of Jewish settlers attacked a delegation of British diplomats during a visit to the West Bank city of Hebron on Thursday, the British Consulate said.

The consulate in Jerusalem said the diplomats were attacked while touring the area in an armoured car. None were injured.

A Palestinian security official in the city said one of the settlers kicked the car after trying to open one of its doors.

Tension often runs high in Hebron, home to 180,000 Palestinians and around 650 Jewish settlers who live in fortified enclaves guarded by Israeli troops.

Diplomats regularly visit the flashpoint city to assess security conditions and the role of settlers.

The British diplomats were taking part in a tour by a group called “Breaking the Silence.”

Tours by the group, led by former Israeli soldiers, are often attacked by some settlers who see them as siding with the Palestinians.

The British consulate said Israeli police intervened after the attack and an investigation was under way.

The Israeli government had no immediate comment.

British diplomats attacked by Hebron settler

James Hider in Jerusalem

The Times of London - 7 August: A car full of senior British diplomats was attacked today by a Jewish settler in the volatile West Bank city of Hebron.

The diplomats were visiting from London and Brussels to assess the situation in the ancient city, where around 700 Jewish settlers live under massive Israeli army and police protection amid some 180,000 Palestinians.

The city has been a major friction point, with Palestinians and Israeli human rights groups accusing the hardline religious settlers of attacking the Palestinian population with impunity.

The attack came as British officials were being given a tour by Breaking the Silence, a British-funded organisation led by former Israeli soldiers who have served in the city – home to the tombs of several Biblical patriarchs – and who have become angered by the violence of the settlers.

The diplomats, who were traveling in an armoured car, were trying to leave the city through the large settlement of Kiryat Arba, close to the city centre, when a settler’s car pulled in front of them, blocking their way, a British diplomatic source told The Times.

A “well known settler trouble-maker” then jumped out and started kicking the vehicle, the source said. The British diplomats reversed and tried to leave the scene, but the settler jumped in his car and again pulled in front of them and started thumping and kicking the vehicle. Another group of settlers refused to open the gates to Kiryat Arba to prevent the British vehicle from entering.

The British diplomats called the Israeli police, at which point the settler accused them of trying to run him over and called an ambulance, the British source said.

Nobody was injured, but the diplomat said: “We do regard it as a serious incident.”

Israeli human rights groups who monitor Hebron warn that settler violence has been increasing in recent weeks, partly as a result of the chaos within the Israeli government and partly because one of the Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem – which also receives British Foreign Office funding – has distributed around 100 video cameras to Palestinians to document the violence, mainly by settlers but also by the Israeli security forces.

The first results of the project were felt recently by the Israeli Army when a Palestinian activist filmed an Israeli soldier firing a rubber bullet at close range into the leg of a bound and blindfolded Palestinian prisoner, while a senior officer held the detainee by the arm. The officer this week resigned his command but will continue to serve in the Army.

Assaf Peled, B’Tselem’s coordinator for the project, called Shooting Back, said that, in Hebron, three of the cameras had been broken by settlers, sometimes after they had been confiscated by Israeli soldiers.

Israel’s front-line thugs

Consistent stands against the depravity of the West Bank’s lawlesssettlers are the only way to put an end to their crimes

The Guardian - August: News that leftwing activists are facing increased pressure to stay out of the West Bank is a worrying development in local politics, especially at a time when settler attacks on Palestinians are on the increase. Rather than clamp down on the settlers perpetrating the violence, the [Israeli] authorities are pursuing a path of locking the doors to the outside world and pretending that nothing at all is amiss.

Not all settlers are inherently violent; to portray their entire subgroup as such is as disingenuous as claiming that all Palestinians are fanatics just because there are radical elements in their midst. However, just because all settlers shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush doesn’t excuse the inaction and indifference on the part of the Israeli authorities when faced with the crimes of the extremists among the settler population.

Of late, there has been a steady stream of brutal assaults carried out by settlers against their Palestinian neighbours in the West Bank, right under the noses of the lackadaisical army. The phenomenon is, sadly, nothing new; what has brought the story back into the spotlight are the efforts of human rights groups, such as B’Tselem to film the violence and document the shocking reality on the ground – which is why, it seems, the authorities are so keen to clamp down on their activity in the region.

However, the settlers don’t confine their vindictive and vicious attacks to Palestinians; they are not averse to attacking their Jewish peers either. Two recent incidents amply demonstrated the extent to which the Wild West Bank has become bandit country, with no sheriff’s posse daring to stand up to the rogue elements holding the region at ransom.

First up was a Breaking The Silence tour to Hebron, whose bus was surrounded by jeering settlers who blocked their path and showered those aboard with abuse. Instead of intervening on behalf of the victims of the threatening mob, the police “did not manage to disperse the mob”, “no arrests were made”, and in the end they simply ordered the tour group to return from whence they came.

Then another Breaking the Silence group came under attack from settler vigilantes, who doused the participants with boiling water after confronting them in the streets of Hebron and heckling them with cries of “traitor”, and other such hostile invective.

For anyone who’s been to Hebron, Kiryat Arba, or any of the settlements which play home to the extremist hardcore of the settler movement, incidents such as those in Hebron, or the assaults in Susiya, are by no means surprising. Being subjected to settler abuse and attack is part and parcel of the experience for Israeli left-wingers and Palestinian locals alike. Sordid as it may be, the depths to which many settlers have sunk is merely a symptom of the malaise infecting Israeli society, rather than the cause.

Radical elements exist in every religion, in every ethnic group, and in every country. Human nature dictates that there will always be those for whom conforming to societal norms is antithetic to their bigoted, boorish ways – but that is when those charged with keeping order in society are meant to be put into play. In Israel, the state apparatus should, in theory, be mobilised to full effect to quell any illegal activity, whether carried out by right- or left-winger, Jew or gentile.

The security forces are, of course, by no means scared to act when it suits them. Palestinian demonstrations are routinely put down with excessive force: rocks flung by pre-teens are countered with rubber bullets, tear gas, and – often – live and indiscriminate fire. But when it comes to clamping down on violence emanating from the settler community, a different set of rules apply, and the authorities’ reeking hypocrisy is exposed as endemic to the way in which they view the different strands of Israeli society.

I’ve witnessed the double standards for myself countless times, from the kid-glove treatment my platoon used when evicting the settlers of Homesh to the heavy-handed brutality meted out by the border police in the Palestinian villages of Bil’in and Nilin. What is explained away as “necessary in the interests of security” in one situation is turned on its head in another; softly-softly replacing an all-out show of force, simply because the assailants in question are religious Jews rather than Muslims.

The longer the duplicity is allowed to thrive in the military and political spheres in Israel, the worse the violence will get on the part of the settlers’ lunatic fringe. Giving them carte blanche to engage in low-level crime only encourages them to see how much more they can get away with, in their attempts to intimidate and bully anyone they see as against them in their holy war.

There’s unlikely to be a sea-change any time soon in the upper echelons of Israeli politics, given their tacit support of the settlement enterprise in turning a blind eye to illegal construction, and the army’s providing of military support to settlers the length and breadth of the West Bank. However, there has to be a concerted effort on the parts of all with an interest in human rights to follow B’Tselem’s lead and apply sufficient pressure on Israeli judges to see court cases through to a satisfactory conclusion.

Only by taking consistent and courageous stands against the depravity of the lawless settlers will there be an end to their crimes. The police force and army seem uninterested in calling them to heel, or allowing activists to bear witness to their crimes; it can only be hoped that the legal system is made of sterner, and more moral, stuff than them.