[News] Jewish settlers, paving the way for West Bank annexation

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Jewish settlers, paving the way for West Bank annexation

Israeli settlers are escalating state-sanctioned violence and annexation
ambitions in the occupied West Bank, exploiting the world’s distraction
with the war on Gaza to legalize outposts, land-grab, and advance ethnic
cleansing against Palestinians.

Robert Inlakesh <https://thecradle.co/authors/robert-inlakesh>

JUL 19, 2024 -
https://thecradle.co/articles/jewish-settlers-paving-the-way-for-west-bank-annexation
(Photo Credit: The Cradle)

While the world’s attention has been diverted to Tel Aviv’s relentless
military offensive in Gaza, the Israeli settler movement has escalated its
state-sanctioned violence in the occupied West Bank.

Capitalizing <https://thecradle.co/articles-id/23974> on the distraction,
Jewish settlers have intensified their attacks, culminating in the recent ‘
legalization
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240628-israel-approves-plan-to-legalise-west-bank-settlement-outposts-sanction-palestinian-authority/>’
of five outposts by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This move is part of a calculated strategy of settlement expansion and
ethnic cleansing, paving the way for eventual formal annexation.

The occupation government has approved measures proposed by far-right
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to legalize the settler outposts,
initiate tenders for thousands more illegal settler units, and impose
sanctions on the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank.

Smotrich, himself an illegal West Bank settler
<https://thecradle.co/articles-id/6384>, has vowed that these measures will
pave the way for the introduction
<https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/6/28/israels-smotrich-promises-a-million-new-settlers-under-expansion-plan>
of a million new settlers.

*Record settler violence and ethnic cleansing*

Decrying the expansion
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/reports/ahrc5572-israeli-settlements-occupied-palestinian-territory-including-east>
of settlements at record rates, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk condemned
Israel’s decision in March to construct an additional 3,476 settler homes
in the West Bank. In this post-Al-Aqsa Flood reality, assaults on the
homes, businesses, and Palestinian populations by rampaging settlers have
surged to unprecedented levels.

In an April report
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/17/west-bank-israel-responsible-rising-settler-violence>,
Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented the extreme violence:

Israeli settlers have assaulted, tortured, and committed sexual violence
against Palestinians, stolen their belongings and livestock, threatened to
kill them if they did not leave permanently, and destroyed their homes and
schools under the cover of the ongoing hostilities in Gaza.

Since the beginning of the war in the Gaza Strip, over 540 Palestinians
have been murdered
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/canada-sanctions-israeli-extremists-settler-groups-over-violence-against-palestinians/#:~:text=Since%20October%207%2C%20troops%20have,been%20killed%20in%20that%20time.>
in the West Bank, dozens of them by Israeli settlers assaulting defenseless
villages under the protection of the occupation army.

In addition, state-backed settler “Defense Squad
<https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2024/2/26/settler-violence-israels-ethnic-cleansing-plan-for-the-west-bank>”
militias that were supplied
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-17/ty-article-magazine/.premium/israels-army-drafted-thousands-of-settlers-accounts-of-their-violence-are-piling-up/0000018d-12e7-d260-aded-b7efddbe0000>
with some 7,000 rifles after 7 October immediately took to ethnically
cleansing thousands of Palestinians from some 16 farming communities
located in Al-Khalil (Hebron), in addition to four other communities near
Ramallah.

As Ubai al-Aboudi, Director of the Bisan Center for Research and
Development, tells *The Cradle*:

What has happened since October 7 is that the Israeli army’s general order
has collapsed, so any action by any soldier is not only permitted but is
also allowed against Palestinians. So, if you look at this from a
historical perspective, it is a continuation and intensification; they see
that the world is busy with what is happening in Gaza, so they are
implementing their plans to push people out of their lands and replace them
with Jewish settlers.

*Strategic annexation plans*

One investigative report published in the Hebrew media indicated that since
the Hamas-led resistance operation began, Israel’s Security Minister Itamar
Ben Gvir <https://thecradle.co/articles-id/2193> had ordered
<https://www.mako.co.il/tv-ilana_dayan/2023/Article-fcb9b89df8dfb81026.htm?sCh=3d385dd2dd5d4110&pId=1434139730>
the police to stop enforcing the law against his fellow West Bank settlers.
This spike in settlement expansion, lawlessness, and illegal settler
violence also fits into what appears to be an accelerated effort to annex
large swathes of the West Bank entirely.

Back in February, a document presented by Netanyahu to his war cabinet,
entitled “The Day After Hamas Principles
<https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/02/24/ycfh-f24.html>,” set out to
assert complete Israeli sovereignty over everything west of the Jordan
River.

Although the occupation state has failed abysmally to defeat the
Palestinian resistance in Gaza, and the prospect of annexing the besieged
coastal territory – with any international buy-in – appears slim, the
Zionist settler movement, which currently dominates Netanyahu’s ruling
coalition is seizing an opportunity to achieve many of their desired goals
in the area they see as “Israel’s biblical heartland.”

Israel recently implemented a decision, first announced by the military on
29 May, to transfer
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/20/idf-transfers-powers-in-occupied-west-bank-to-pro-settler-civil-servants>
the responsibility for dozens of Civil Administration bylaws from the army
to “civil servants” who work as officials at the Israeli defense ministry
under Smotrich.

This followed Tel Aviv’s decision to begin changing the official governing
structure of the West Bank by transferring
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/08/israel-palestine-west-bank-annexation-netanyahu-smotrich-far-right/>
administrative powers from military to civilian control – in essence, a
step toward declaring the de jure annexation of the West Bank.

*State-backed settler expansion*

Currently, there are around 146 Israeli settlements
<https://peacenow.org.il/en/settlements-watch/settlements-data/population>
and roughly 191 settler outposts in the occupied West Bank, which controls
<https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2017/50-years-illegal-settlements/index.html>
around 46 percent of the territory. Almost all of these Jewish settlements
are situated in what is known as Area C, which accounts for roughly 61
percent of the territory and is under full Israeli security and
administrative control as per the 1995 Oslo Agreement signed with the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

The recent measures in the West Bank are part of a 2017 settler movement
proposal titled “Decisive Plan
<https://www.972mag.com/settlements-roads-infrastructure-smotrich/>,”
aiming to double the Jewish presence in the territory. Although the plan
was not enacted at the time, the war in Gaza provided opportunistic
conditions for its implementation and means to facilitate the annexation of
the West Bank.

In August of last year, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who
himself resides in the illegal settlement of Kedumim, announced his
intention to allocate
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/smotrich-said-aiming-to-allocate-180m-to-settlements-including-illegal-outposts/>
$120 million to settlement and settler outpost construction. It was also
revealed in 2023 that the Israeli military had set up what it calls the ‘Desert
Frontier <https://www.972mag.com/desert-frontier-idf-hilltop-youth/>’ unit,
which integrated extremist settlers from the ‘Hilltop Youth’ settler groups.

These radicals drew such concern that Israeli intelligence launched an
operation to infiltrate their ranks. Known for turning their weapons on
both army soldiers and Palestinian civilians, these Jewish extremists were
once considered terrorists even by Israeli standards.

*Political empowerment*

While Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank had
already risen to record highs
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/3/israeli-settler-attacks-against-palestinians-by-the-numbers>
between 2021 and 2023, UN data indicates that settler violence doubled
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/22/israel-settlers-violence-against-palestine-west-bank>
in
October 2023 and has only continued to surge.

This spike coincides with increased influence
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/smotrich-primed-for-authority-over-key-west-bank-appointments-in-deal-with-likud/>
granted by Netanyahu to far-right politicians such as Ben Gvir and Smotrich
– and emboldened others like the Israeli military’s Chief of Staff Herzi
Halevi
<https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/11/07/who-is-herzi-halevi-the-chief-of-staff-of-the-israel-defence-forces>,
yet another illegal West Bank settler.

To compound matters, Israeli settler militias that launch violent,
unprovoked assaults on Palestinian villages have been discovered using
army-issued assault rifles
<https://twitter.com/PeaceNowIL/status/1672655841449631745> in their
rampages. Settler organizations, including legal outfits that launch
appeals in Israeli courts to bulldoze Palestinian homes, also receive
financing from the government. All of this demonstrates the
interconnectivity between the occupation state and the most radical
elements of the settler movement.

To smooth that pathway, Israel’s wealthiest billionaire, Miriam Adelson,
recently donated $100 million
<https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2024-06-03/ty-article/.premium/trump-is-desperate-for-cash-but-donors-have-conditions/0000018f-df3a-db29-a3ef-ff3a27530000>
to Donald Trump’s 2024 Presidential bid, anticipating that he would
recognize the Israeli annexation of the West Bank once re-elected.

Should the Israeli government pursue official annexation, it is expected to
target Area C of the West Bank, an area rich in water and agricultural
lands that accounts for about 61 percent of the territory.

*Legalizing land theft*

On 18 July, the Israeli Knesset passed a bill rejecting Palestinian
Statehood <https://thecradle.co/articles-id/25987>, reinforcing a
long-standing government agenda. Since 2017, public proposals to annex
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/likud-top-body-votes-to-annex-parts-of-the-west-bank/>
parts of the West Bank have been promoted by the ruling Likud Party.

Speaking to *The Cradle*, Khaled Barakat, a leader of the Palestinian
Alternative Revolutionary Path (PARP) movement, says:

To explain this new wave of Israeli settlements, we have to go back to
2005, 2006, to the time when Ariel Sharon was the Prime Minister and when
all the Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza due to the resistance; he found
himself in a situation where he had suffered a defeat and so adopted the
strategy of occupying all the hills of the West Bank.

Barakat adds:

They then established new armed settler organizations, which is why there
are now 12 of them; they are armed, they are militias, and they cooperate
directly with the Israeli army. The major danger behind these settler
militias in the West Bank is that they are non-State actors, so when they
attack Palestinians daily, Israel says well, we have nothing to do with
that; they are just residents of the West Bank. They are, of course, not
residents; they are armed colonialist settlers that remind Palestinians of
the same gangs that existed in Palestine in the 1930s and the ones that
actually founded the Zionist regime.

 In 2019, Netanyahu proposed
<https://www.vox.com/world/2019/9/10/20859101/israel-netanyahu-jordan-valley-annex-election-september>
annexing
the Jordan Valley, sparing only a small pocket under PA control
<https://twitter.com/RaphaelAhren/status/1171447732902301697?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1171447732902301697%7Ctwgr%5E1a1ec9424fe872c1d2f6365d6411ce4d78982c2d%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fworld%2F2019%2F9%2F10%2F20859101%2Fisrael-netanyahu-jordan-valley-annex-election-september>.
This strategy involves maintaining the PA’s power in Areas A and B, home to
over 3.2 million Palestinians, to avoid the logistical and financial burden
of direct rule. Netanyahu’s policy aims to ensure the PA’s survival
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-said-to-tell-knesset-panel-that-israel-needs-the-palestinian-authority/>
for security collaboration while simultaneously undermining Palestinian
Statehood and annexing West Bank territory.

As Israel struggles to secure military victories over Hamas in Gaza and
Hezbollah in Lebanon, Netanyahu may pivot to annexation efforts in the West
Bank. This could involve a military campaign similar to the 2002 Operation
Defensive Shield
<https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/operation-defensive-shield-lessons-and-aftermath>,
aimed at dismantling resistance groups and projecting an image of victory
to maintain support from far-right settler allies.
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