Palestinians in Hebron call on the international community to join in the Dismantle the Ghetto campaign and take action to evacuate Israeli settlers from the city.
Israeli settler violence in the West Bank isn’t an isolated incident. Rather, nearly every week settlers from nearby agricultural outposts terrorize the Palestinians of Masafer Yatta as they take over their land. “Settler violence is only part of Israeli colonist goals,” Ali Awad, a Palestinian activist, tells Mondoweiss. “These people are used as tools — justified by racist laws — for committing ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.”
There are more than two settler attacks on Palestinians a day this year on average. According to two Israeli human rights experts, the violent settlers are working with the cooperation of the army and the Israeli government to take over more and more land for Jewish settlement in a policy of pushing Palestinians out of Area C. This is a traditional use by the army of Israeli settlers.
Protests have continued in the Palestinian village of Beita against the establishment of a settler outpost on the village’s land. Israeli forces have continued to violently suppress protests, killing two more Palestinians over the past month. “For more than 100 days we have been resisting against the occupation and the settlers,” Abed al-Fattah Hamayel, a local activist in Beita, told Mondoweiss. “And everyday the situation is becoming even more volatile. The soldiers are just waiting for any excuse, or just the right moment to kill anyone.”
Devyn Springer and Abu Shawarib speak to Mohammed El-Kurd, a poet, writer, and activist from Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem, Palestine. This episode is a collaboration with the Groundings Podcast.
Recent videos show routine racism and violence directed against Palestinians with Israeli government support. Jewish settlers threaten to unleash dogs on Palestinians. Others spew hatred as soldiers protect them: “This is my land, King David walked around here two thousand years ago, herding his sheep. When you were where — in Saudi Arabia? Where Muhammad roamed…. Muhammad killed people. Raped. You’re a rapist people.”
The New York Times runs “hasbara” or Israeli propaganda about coexistence in Haifa, including humans with wild boars. But Alice Rothchild writes that boars are actually a tool of occupation: Jewish settlements outside Nablus frequently blocked access to the local villages, burned their farms and olive trees, and raised wild pigs that they released into Palestinian farms.
On Wednesday, Israeli forces arrested five Palestinian children, ranging between the ages of 8 and 13, in the South Hebron Hills as they picked the seasonal wild flowers to bring back home to their families. Eyewitnesses say the children were first attacked by Israeli settlers, and then detained by Israeli soldiers at the settlers’ demand. “This was obviously an attempt by the settlers to intimidate the boys by using the soldiers,” eyewitness Basel Adrah tells Mondoweiss. “They didn’t steal or damage anything. All they were doing was picking akoub. Is this a crime?”
A short video taken by a family as they picnicked in the West Bank this month may be the best field guide yet to Israel’s complex apartheid system of state-sponsored Jewish supremacy.
On Wednesday, Israel issued tenders for more than 2,500 new settlement housing units in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem a mere hours before US President Joe Biden was sworn into office. The Israeli government has now approved and promoted thousands of new settlement housing units in the first few weeks of 2021, while also continuing to deny Palestinians the right to build on their land in Area C — the more than 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli control.