[News] After settler pogroms, even worse genocidal violence to come

[Anti-Imperialist News]

electronicintifada.net
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/after-settler-pogroms-even-worse-genocidal-violence-come>
After settler pogroms, even worse genocidal violence to come

Maureen Clare Murphy
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/maureen-clare-murphy> - 24 June 2023
------------------------------

Family photos are displayed on a floor in the home of the Dawabsheh family
in the West Bank city of Duma, 31 July 2015. Ali Dawabsheh, 18 months old,
was killed along with his parents when settlers firebombed their home. His
older brother Ahmad survived.
ActiveStills

“He wasn’t even fighting, was just trying to protect people,” the widow of
Omar Qateen told a delegation of diplomats in between deep breaths on
Friday.

The woman said she was in pain from the grief after her husband was killed
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/palestinian-killed-settler-pogrom-west-bank-town>
as hundreds of rampaging settlers, some of them armed, set fire to homes in
Turmus Aya, a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday.

Settlers attacked multiple Palestinian communities in the West Bank this
week after Palestinian gunmen shot and killed four Israelis
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/palestinian-killed-settler-pogrom-west-bank-town>
at Eli settlement, before being executed by armed civilians and special
forces. One day before the settlement shooting attack, Israeli forces
killed several Palestinians during a raid in Jenin, including two children.

At the scene of the attack in Eli on Tuesday, Israel’s ultranationalist
national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called on
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/palestinian-gunmen-kill-four-near-west-bank-israeli-settlement-emergency-2023-06-20/>
settlers in the West Bank to pick up arms.

In the revenge attacks that followed, settlers vandalized a mosque
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-22/ty-article/.premium/israeli-settlers-rip-up-quran-vandalize-west-bank-mosque-during-rampage/00000188-e430-d5fc-ab9d-ff78435a0000>
and tore up copies of the Quran and set fire
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-22/ty-article/.premium/settlers-burn-palestinian-school-try-to-torch-a-mosque-in-shooters-west-bank-village/00000188-e2f0-df52-a79d-fef3d2150000>
to a school in Urif, the Eli gunmen’s hometown. They also cut off
electricity to the entire village.
The Israeli military and police used live fire and crowd control weapons
against Palestinians trying to defend themselves and obstructed the movement
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestinian-shot-dead-settlers-storm-west-bank-town>
of ambulances and fire trucks in Turmus Aya, only several miles away from
Eli.

Footage shows settlers firing guns towards Palestinian homes in Turmus Aya:
During the rampage in Turmus Aya, 27-year-old Omar Qateen was shot and
killed by Israeli police, who initially said that the slain man was armed –
a claim refuted by his widow and not repeated
<https://www.972mag.com/turmus-ayya-settler-pogrom-palestinians-us/> in
subsequent police statements.

Qateen’s wife said that she was comforted knowing that her husband and
father of their two young children died bravely while coming to the aid of
others.

Switching from American-accented English – Qateen’s wife and children are
reportedly US citizens – to Arabic, the bereaved woman said they needed
international protection.
“This is genocide”

That was also the plea from Lafi Adeeb, the mayor of Turmus Aya, after
settlers set fire to more than 30 homes
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/palestinian-killed-settler-pogrom-west-bank-town>
in the town, attempting to burn families alive.

“This is genocide, this is a war against us. Settlers carrying weapons and
canisters full of fuel attack our small village and set fire to houses over
the heads of their inhabitants,” Adeeb told the publication *Middle East
Eye.*

“The attack was large and organized, with full protection and coordination
with the Israeli army, which is working against us and protecting them,”
Adeeb added.
Following Wednesday’s violence in Turmus Aya, famously home to many
Palestinian Americans, the US Office of Palestinian Affairs said
<https://twitter.com/uspalaffairs/status/1671589282736160770> it was
“appalled at ongoing settler attacks.”

The office added that it called on Israeli authorities to “protect US and
Palestinian civilians, and prosecute those responsible.”

Tom Nides, the US ambassador to Israel, said
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-22/ty-article/.premium/u-s-ambassador-we-will-not-stand-idly-by-and-watch-settler-violence/00000188-e3d1-d5fc-ab9d-fbf9ab070000>
that “we do not stand and watch settler violence. I’ve been very clear and
very specific that we will not stand by.”

In reality, US policy is even worse than doing nothing. Washington provides
Israel a floor of $3.8 billion in military aid each year, allowing for the
violent colonization of Palestinian land and brutal repression of any and
all resistance against it.
Meanwhile, the US shields Israel from accountability at all international
fora, including the International Criminal Court, where it opposes the now
apparently shelved Palestine investigation.

This impunity breeds the settler rampages that terrorized residents in more
than a dozen defenseless Palestinian communities this week, violence
explicitly encouraged by Israel’s leaders.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, kingmaker in Benjamin Netanyahu’s fragile coalition
government, once again made this clear on Friday when he visited Evyatar
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/visiting-evyatar-ben-gvir-tells-settlers-to-head-for-the-hilltops-expand-outposts/>,
a settlement outpost in the northern West Bank. He urged settlers to “run
for the hilltops” – harkening back to the identical exhortation
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-11576714> made 25 years ago by
Ariel Sharon, a notorious war criminal who later became Israel’s prime
minister. Ben-Gvir may well hope and expect that he will follow the same
path.

“In addition to settling the land,” Ben-Gvir said, “we need a military
operation: taking down buildings and killing terrorists.”

“Not one or two, but dozens and hundreds, and if need be thousands!” he
said.

“Above all, this is how we will fulfill our great purpose: the land of
Israel for the people of Israel,” he added, meaning exclusive Jewish
control from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, assuring settlers that
“we’ve got your back.”
Ben-Gvir was speaking to settlers at an outpost not authorized by the
government, built in May 2021 on land belonging to the Palestinian
communities of Beita <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/beita>, Qabalan
and Yatma on Jabal Subeih near the northern West Bank city of Nablus.

Since then, several Palestinians have been killed
<https://www.btselem.org/firearms/20220228_nine_months_of_protesting_seven_killed_and_dozens_injured_in_the_town_of_beita>
during or in close proximity to protests against the settlement.

Ben-Gvir is honest about the fulfillment of Israel’s state ideology,
Zionism – that it requires killing Palestinians and pushing them off of
their land.

After all, that is how the state was founded – by militias massacring and
terrorizing Palestinians, forcing them to flee and denying their right to
return to their land and property. And now the state is being steered
by messianic
figures like Bezalel finance minister Smotrich
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/spiritual-adviser-to-smotrich-theres-no-problem-with-having-a-halachic-state/>
who seek to impose Jewish theocratic rule.
Smotrich infamously called for Huwwara, a town near the West Bank city of
Nablus, to be “wiped out”
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-calls-genocide-met-shrugs-washington-and-brussels>
after a settler rampage there in February, similar to the one in Turmus Aya
this week.

His allies in Netanyahu’s extreme-right coalition are seemingly open to any
means of securing Jewish domination in Palestine, including burning
children alive in the sanctity of their homes.

The chief of staff in Ben-Gvir’s ministry
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-08/ty-article-magazine/.premium/far-right-israeli-ministers-adviser-is-kahanist-activist-facing-racism-and-terror-charges/00000188-9774-d3a7-adcf-b77f86910000>
is Hanamel Dorfman, who was filmed dancing at his 2013 wedding as his
guests stabbed and burned photos
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2015-12-24/ty-article/new-video-shows-extremist-jewish-leaders-present-at-wedding-of-hate/0000017f-f889-d318-afff-fbebc43d0000>
of Ali Dawabsheh, a Palestinian toddler who was killed along with his
parents when settlers firebombed his family’s home.

Ben-Gvir, who provided legal defense for the suspects of the 2015
firebombing attack that killed the Dawabsheh family, was among those in
attendance, as was Bentzi Gopstein, one of his advisors. Gopstein’s
daughter was the bride whose nuptials were being celebrated at the infamous
“wedding of hate.”

Before he started donning suits, Dorfman led the Hilltop Youth
<https://www.jta.org/2016/09/28/ny/the-ties-that-fray>, an extremist and
religious-nationalist group of Israeli settlers who agitate for a Jewish
kingdom from which non-Jews would be expelled.

The ringleader of the attack
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/family-baby-killed-settlers-fears-fresh-attacks/36916>
against the Dawabsheh family home was allegedly part of the Hilltop Youth.

Once on the fringe, Jewish supremacists who venerate Baruch Goldstein
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/taking-apartheid-new-extremes/36986>,
a US-born settler who murdered 29 Palestinian men and boys in Hebron’s
Ibrahimi mosque in 1994, are now running the Israeli government and have
oversight of its police and military forces
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/incoming-idf-chief-halevi-to-meet-with-smotrich-who-wields-authority-in-west-bank/>.

Settler terror is state terror

Israel tries to maintain the pretense that settler violence is not
sanctioned by the state, with its military spokesperson describing
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-spokesman-slams-settler-riots-that-create-terror-far-right-mk-it-was-a-protest/>
this week’s rampages as “very grave,” adding that it hinders the army’s
ability to fight “terror.”

The spokesperson has also claimed
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-22/ty-article/.premium/pogroms-against-palestinians-we-cant-shut-out-the-burden-of-history/00000188-e3d5-df52-a79d-fff7eb870000>
that the Israeli military – which subjects Palestinians under its rule to total
surveillance
<https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/4/13/under-israeli-surveillance-living-in-dystopia-in-palestine>
– had no advance knowledge of the attack by hundreds of settlers in Turmus
Aya, despite it being planned in WhatsApp groups and reportedly leaked on
social media.

As one Israeli analyst put it, if the military spokesperson’s claim is to
be believed (which it shouldn’t be), it doesn’t make sense that Israel
wouldn’t know about the plans unless they didn’t want to have prior
intelligence.
In an editorial
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2023-06-23/ty-article-opinion/.premium/standing-orders-for-a-pogrom-against-palestinians/00000188-e459-d5fc-ab9d-ff79bc690000>
on Friday, the Tel Aviv newspaper *Haaretz* observed that the attack on
Turmus Aya “was predictable,” as was the army’s claim of intelligence
failure.

“When a failure keeps recurring for decades, it’s clear that the problem
isn’t lack of control, but a pattern of behavior and a decision from on
high – that is, from the country’s leadership – to allow Israelis to attack
Palestinians,” the editorial states.

“There’s no need for explicit orders; it’s enough to know the spirit of the
commander.”

While the military seeks to preserve plausible deniability, Ben-Gvir is
forthright with the unpalatable truth: Backed by various state apparatuses,
settler terror in tandem with brutal military repression (this week that
included the first ever military drone strike
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israeli-drone-attack-kills-three-near-jenin>
in the West Bank) is what will secure exclusive Jewish rule from the river
to the sea.

Netanyahu has expedited settlement expansion by giving “practically all
control over planning approval for construction” in settlements to
Smotrich, as reported
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-hands-smotrich-full-authority-to-expand-existing-settlements/>
by *The Times of Israel*.
Settlers established several new outposts since four Israelis were killed
on Tuesday and others are set to be regularized
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/legalization-of-3-west-bank-outposts-among-plans-slated-for-approval-next-week/>
by Netanyahu’s government. Ben-Gvir’s orders are clear: grab the hilltops.

As bad as this week’s settler attacks may have been, the worst is yet to
come. And Israel’s powerful friends will be 100 percent complicit, having
ignored the pleas from Turmus Aya by answering settler state terror with
only empty gestures of toothless solidarity.
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