There's nothing new about radical Jewish settlers in the West Bank attacking Palestinians, but it's now spread to attacks on aid truck bound for Gaza. And as usual, the Israeli government does nothing about it:
Radical Israeli settlers have expanded their attacks on aid trucks passing through the West Bank this month, blocking food from reaching Gaza as humanitarian groups warn that the enclave is sinking deeper into famine.
....The violence and vandalism, committed with near-total impunity, raises questions about the willingness of Israel’s security forces to restrain extremist settlers and protect Palestinians. It also challenges the Israeli government’s claim that it is doing all it can to ensure that aid flows to Gaza, where the humanitarian situation has deteriorated rapidly since IDF forces moved into the southern city of Rafah.
As bands of teenagers become the arbiters of who can and cannot pass along main roads in the West Bank, any trucks carrying food have become vulnerable to attack.
These "radical settlers" live in outposts that are illegal even by Israeli standards, and they're dedicated to harassing and sometimes killing Palestinian farmers who they decide might have planted an olive tree in the wrong place. Everyone knows this is happening—there are no secrets here—and the IDF responds with a studied indifference. If and when police show up, they are oddly unable to identify anyone who might have been involved in the violence.
This is life in the West Bank under Israeli rule. Now it's spread to aid trucks and, once again, the IDF stands around and watches while the police take a few hours to show up. As for the Netanyahu government, it rarely bothers with even a pretense of caring.
It hardly matters if you're a die-hard supporter of either the Palestinian or the Israeli cause. This is barbaric and malicious no matter whose side you're on. But if you happen to be on Israel's side, you should be loudly denouncing this stuff and begging Netanyahu to put a stop to it. Nobody should want to be associated with this kind of bloody savagery.
Netanyahu's coalition is dreadful. I hope their government falls soon.
What political upside is there for Netanyahu to stop them?
And why do you even couch the question this way? There must be people within the Israeli gov. who want to stop them, but Netanyahu keeps them powerless.
Those walls, watch towers, and checkpoints didn't just appear overnight...
And yet the Washington Post can't find its way past its manic studious neutral stance. "raises questions about the willingness of Israel’s security forces to" blah blah blah. No it doesn't raise questions about it; it contradicts it, and they should say so. "It also challenges the Israeli government’s claim that" blah blah blah. No it doesn't challenge the claim; it disproves it.
Yes, I suspect the Wapo writers have strict orders from the top to "stay neutral", or at least to plausibly give that impression.
The Guardian, on the other hand:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/may/27/nothing-justifies-what-we-have-witnessed-here-the-doctors-returning-home-from-gaza
"British doctors Mohammed Tahir and Omar El-Taji thought they were mentally prepared to help treat people in Rafah. But what they and other foreign volunteers faced was beyond anything they could have imagined"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/27/global-shock-after-israeli-airstrike-kills-dozens-in-rafah-tent-camp
"At least 45 people, including many women and children, killed in assault that prompts international outcry"
Everybody just stop fighting!
Now I feel better. Tell me why I was ever associated with the savages. I live in the USA and don’t even know any Jewish people. Or Palestinians, for that matter. Thank goodness. Freaks.
Not sure how spouting bigoted platitudes is supposed to make you look better,
It should be more than obvious after so many years Justin is indeed a Troll. Not merely someone who you disagree with politically (as in e.g. either you or me relative to the other) but someone who loves being "provocative" and baiting for baiting sake, given his wildly swinging statements - spouting multi-directional baiting statements
Kevin, you've missed the point- the settlers ARE the Israeli side. the cruelty is the point.
Let's not forget that many of them are US Citizens. Not sure what actions can be taken be the US Government but more needs to be done.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/15/biden-extremist-jewish-settlers-travel-ban-loophole
As all headline questions, the answer is no.
Arafat and Rabin signed the Oslo Accords in 1993 with Clinton's personal assurance that the illegal settlements in the West Bank would be removed. By 1997 Netanyahu was Prime Minister and the number of illegal settlements had doubled with his full approval.
This has been going on for decades, folks. The settler movement has been destroying any chance of peace for 50 years. No, Netanyahu is not ever going to discourage them.
And key members of the current government, Gallant and ben Gvir, were among those "settler hooligans" in their youth. Since then, they've doubled down.
It's policy and has been for decades. Extremists create facts on the ground, then regular forces make them permanent. Even the Nakba largely started that way, when the massacre in Deir Yassin led to a panicked flight of Palestinians. When they tried to return home, the Haganah which supposedly were horrified by what Irgun and the Stern Gang had done wouldn't let them and their land became part of Israel. (Irgun was led by Menachim Begin and Stern (or Lehi) by Yitzhak Shamir, both later elected PM of Israel, which shows how little that country cares about terrorist pasts.)
Anyway, this has been Israel's modus operandi since at least 1948: let criminals clear a certain area, keeping its hands "clean", then call the absence of Palestinians there "facts on the ground" and annex that area. It's high time the US and the international community stopped falling for that obvious gambit.
PS I think it was Leon Uris who wrote about how Haganah, horrified, disarmed (but did not arrest) Irgun and Stern terrorists in Deir Yassin. What I as a teenager did not learn from the book was that Haganah then stopped Palestinians from returning home when the scare was over. The latter, many of them in Gaza, often still have the keys of their former homes as family heirlooms.
...and set up a court system by which Palestinian claims to hold titles to land were systematically denied. While honoring Israeli settler claims with dubious provenance.
It's all bad, all the way down.
And many of those Jewish terrorist groups were absorbed into the IDF.
And some of their leaders became Prime Ministers of Israel.
Among the many things Israel and its supporters have gotten an undeserved pass on is their claim that Israel was “only defending itself” in 1948.
And somehow they “defended themselves” into possessing half the territory that had been allocated to the proposed Arab state.
In the 1830's, most Americans were ambivalent about the ongoing theft of land and expulsion of Native Americans. Most Americans didn't engage in it.
That said, no one nowadays says that this lets those Americans off the hook for enabling and turning a blind eye. No one says, "The US government and wider society aren't guilty because this was really the actions of a small group and the supreme court said it was wrong"
Instead, we rightly condemn the government and people of that time for allowing it to happen.
When people nowadays denounce "Zionism" sure some want to undo the creation of Israel full stop, but most people are objecting to the idea embodied by these settlers and the current government of Israel that Israelis have the right to brutalize Palestinians and take their land with no restrictions.
Whatever Zionism was in the 1970's, Zionism is now becoming synonymous with this settler violence and Israel is allowing the settlers to rebrand it in the eyes of the world.
“Will Netanyahu ever stop the settler violence?” No. This has been another edition of simple answers to easy questions.
Sure, Israel allows its citizens to blatantly ignore laws and murder Palestinians, but there's still no genocide to be found at all. It's just some radicals, or whatever. There's just nothing to be done.
Well, except using your military to murder civilians. But that's still not genocide, because
texass allows its citizens to blatantly ignore laws and murder folks the governor does not like.
Texas has a little ways to go. Just a little.
There is not genocide because there is not extermination. Genocide is not merely Bad Things Lefties do not like.
What is going on is ethnic cleansing. This is quite bad enough without the inaccurate (and thus weak and self-harming to making real points) usage.
Ethnic cleansing is quite nasty enough, is not refutable with facts - use the phrase that fits rather than self-undermining.
There is not genocide because there is not extermination. Genocide is not merely Bad Things Lefties do not like.
"Genocide" is also not just extermination. I doubt that what Israel is doing constitutes genocide, but anytime a minister in the Israeli government proclaims that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, and that they are just Arabs, which is a fairly regular occurrence, they increase the chances that the ICJ will find that this is genocide.
"No genocide to see here in Nazi Germany, no iree", says Lounsbury. Get your deadbeat ass off the couch, lounger, and help your mom with the groceries.
+1
My first Thought: Fuck No!! That is his base!!!!!
Israel is a little like Trump accusing others of what it is itself guilty.. River to the sea for example has been an Israeli goal since the 80s. They’ve committed what essentially are pogroms on the West Bank for the last 40 years—terrorizing, seizing land and creating settlements. And now they have a ghetto to destroy and they claim they have to punish the innocent along with the guilty. Reminds me a little of the Nazi’s destroying entire villages after one of their soldiers was assassinated.
Only Netanyahu could make the violent, homophobic, misogynistic, fundamentalist Islamist Hamas into sympathetic victims.
And in doing so they’ve lost the world except for the wacko talking in tongues American evangelicals who are apparently awaiting the second coming and what they call the rapture. And they and their Speaker of the House are controlling American foreign policy. Sad..
Sadly it’s all there in history.
Yeah, this is that whole "Israel is an apartheid state" thing that some of us have been noticing for 20+ years.
These "radical settlers" live in outposts that are illegal even by Israeli standards, and they're dedicated to harassing and sometimes killing Palestinian farmers who they decide might have planted an olive tree in the wrong place.
It should be noted that "harassing," in this context, includes widespread arson of both cars and homes, destroying agricultural land, stealing or slaughtering flocks of sheep, and outright threats that they will kill Palestinians if they do not vacate their homes and land.
Based upon my experience commenting at other sites, don't expect the usual suspects to show up in this thread. They avoid this topic as if it would send them into anaphylactic shock.
Not just "studied indifference." In this video, you can see IDF soldiers standing around watching the destruction and doing nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9gSkF2SgtI
It was probably thirty years or more ago, but I remember reading a story on Eric Alterman's old blog about an Arab village on the occupied west bank where the locals constructed overhead roofs over the sidewalks. This was because settlers would rent upstairs rooms under assumed names, and then proceed to throw all their shit (as in poop) out the window in an effort to encourage the Arabs to leave.
The answer is that Netanyahu won't do anything to stop it unless he feels enough pressure to stop it. He certainly doesn't mind it happening. We see this with today's slaughter, namely that of civilians in the camp Israel told civilians to go to. Israel's original response was to claim the attack was legitimate. When this met with world outrage, even Germany, it became an unfathomable mistake. How could that have happened?
Of course if the US yawns, then Netanyahu will likely conclude that it wasn't so bad, and we will get another one soon enough. But fortunately Biden is a decent person so he will be outraged at the slaughter of civilians in the camp Israel set aside to keep civilians safe. I kid, that apparently isn't an important part of being decent these days.
So the answer is that the US won't care that much about the attack on aid trucks, so Netanyahu won't care about the attack on aid trucks. And the only people who will is the student protesters because they don't understand how the world works and think they should oppose things like this.
Sometimes Kevin you ask such naive questions, we're left wondering where you have spent the last 50 years...
The answer is NO, "from the River to the Sea" is the unofficial Israeli policy, they won't stop until they ethnically cleanse every Palestinian in West Bank and Gaza.
If you want to stop the misery, stop arming Israel and give a Green Card & an airplane ticket to every Palestinian who requests one.
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