Gaza War, Part 3

[Anonymous]

The Israeli Settlers Attacking Their Palestinian Neighbors

With the world’s focus on Gaza, settlers have used wartime chaos as cover for violence and dispossession.


The sounds of destruction carried through the valley. It was October 28th, and I was standing on a rocky slope in the West Bank with Bashar Ma’amar, a Palestinian who records the aggressions of Israeli settlers. Ma’amar pointed a camera at a group ransacking a house below us. A couple of days before, the settlers had set fire to it; the house’s owner had gone to the police, but they had not intervened. As we watched, one settler kicked at the front door, and another tried to penetrate the charred walls with a board. Others tore a hole in the roof and slipped inside. On the hillside opposite us, three Israeli soldiers and a man with a rifle stood watching. Eventually, the settlers joined the soldiers to walk back to Eli, their settlement, where mothers pushed strollers down tree-lined blocks of red-roofed houses, people played tennis on courts with views of Palestinian farmland, and men and women carrying M16s and Uzis shopped in strip malls

Shouldn’t these IDF soldiers be in Gaza instead of protecting settlers? No wonder the war is not being won. The settlers are a burden to Israeli national security

[Anonymous]

Now is the time for them to implement their objectives,” Ma’amar told me. “All the attention is on Gaza.” Ma’amar is forty-one, tall and lanky. He drove his dilapidated car to Qaryut, his village of three thousand people, with winding alleys and olive groves that stretch in every direction. Qaryut, twenty miles north of Ramallah, is in the fertile central highlands of the West Bank, the twenty-two-hundred-square-mile territory that has been occupied by Israel since 1967. After Israel won the Six-Day War, fought against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, it took territory that included the West Bank, which most Israelis refer to as Judea and Samaria. Today, there are roughly half a million settlers in the West Bank, one for every six Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the territory, controls security—often with Israeli assistance—only in the urban centers. In the remaining eighty-two per cent of the territory, Israel is in charge. In Qaryut, Ma’amar operates a branch of the Red Crescent and administers message groups that monitor the actions of settlers and of the Israel Defense Forces. He is also a volunteer with B’tselem, an Israeli human-rights group.

One day when I visited Ma’amar, he piled up a dozen cameras on his desk—old mini-D.V. camcorders, point-and-shoot 35-mm.s—some broken by settlers. It was a collection built up during nearly twenty years of documenting settler violence and encroachment onto Palestinian land. “My cameras are my weapons,” he said. “I’m probably the person in Qaryut who has filed the most complaints to the police, to the Supreme Court.” There had been some moments of success. He’d helped a man get back half of the hundred and seventy acres that settlers had seized from him. Mostly, though, his cases went nowhere. “The Israeli legal system doesn’t work for the benefit of Palestinians,” he said.

His obsession with documentation was inherited from his grandfather Ahmed Odeh, who served for some thirty years as mayor of Qaryut. Ma’amar keeps century-old land deeds and tattered administrative maps, which show that the surrounding settlements were built on private land.

When Ma’amar was born, in 1982, his village was next to only one settlement, Shilo, established on land seized from his grandfather. Eli was founded when Ma’amar was five, taking more land from Qaryut. Eli and Shilo, which each has nearly five thousand residents, subsumed three of Qaryut’s five springs. The village had to buy its water from Mekorot, Israel’s national water company.

[Anonymous]

The first time that Ma’amar witnessed settler violence was in 1996. It was in the wake of the first election to Prime Minister of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was intent on blocking any progress toward a two-state solution. Shilo took even more land from Qaryut, to make a vineyard. The village staged a protest, which Ma’amar filmed. The Army and settlers rushed in, firing shots into the air, and settlers beat people and tried to take cameras from anyone documenting the scene. An Israeli court ruled that the land should be returned to Qaryut, but Ma’amar said that settlers continued to attack people who approached, so the land was effectively lost.

In the years that followed, settlers put up tents, then mobile homes, on hilltops. Settlements are mostly considered illegal under international law, but these outposts were illegal even under Israeli law. Still, the government did little to dissuade the hilltop settlers, who viewed themselves as pioneers. The outposts were quickly connected to larger settlements by water systems, power lines, and paved roads. In time, a corridor of settlement took shape, slicing across the West Bank until the map looked more and more like the one envisioned by many settlers and political leaders, in which Palestinians would live in small and disconnected territories within an expanded Israel. Qaryut sat right in the corridor’s path; there were now eight official settlements and at least eleven smaller outposts in a five-mile radius of the village. “Without international and legal pressure on the Israelis, Qaryut will disappear,” Ma’amar said.

In November, 2022, Netanyahu won reëlection for the sixth time. To form a governing coalition, he allied with leaders of far-right parties, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who advocate for annexing the West Bank. Since then, the situation there has grown dramatically worse. In the first nine months of 2023, Ma’amar filed about seventy police reports of settler violence. In February, while he was driving an ambulance to pick up people injured in an attack, settlers smashed his windows and tried to burn the vehicle. In June, Palestinian gunmen killed four settlers near Eli; the next day, hundreds of settlers descended on Turmus Aya, a nearby village, shooting residents and burning cars and houses, some with people inside. By September, 2023, the United Nations was documenting around three settler-related incidents each day, the highest since it had started tracking the trend, in 2006, and eleven hundred Palestinians in the West Bank had been displaced.

Since October 7th, when Hamas-led fighters broke through the fence on Gaza’s border with Israel and killed some twelve hundred people and took some two hundred and fifty hostages, attacks near Qaryut have become routine. Settlers have burned cars and houses, blockaded roads, damaged electricity networks, seized farmland, severed irrigation lines, attacked people in their fields and olive groves, and killed, all without repercussion. Ma’amar told me that a thousand acres had been cut off from Qaryut. The U.N. has recorded five hundred and seventy-three attacks by settlers in the West Bank since the war began, with Israeli forces accompanying them half the time. At least nine people have been killed by settlers, and three hundred and eighty-two have been killed by Israeli forces. Five Israelis have been killed in the West Bank, at least one of whom was a civilian.

On October 9th, settlers sent a picture on Facebook to people in Qusra, a few miles from Qaryut, of masked men holding axes, clubs, a gas can, and a chainsaw, with text that read, “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village, we are waiting for you and we will not feel sorry for you. The day of revenge is coming.” Two days later, at the edge of the village, settlers lit utility poles on fire and tried to break into a house. For a half hour, a family huddled inside; then young men from the village arrived and threw rocks at the Israelis. Ma’amar drove over in his ambulance. At that point, the settlers started shooting. A man handed Ma’amar a six-year-old girl who had been shot. As the man walked away, he was shot and killed. When Ma’amar sped off, he said, settlers fired on his ambulance. Three Palestinians were killed, one of them the son of a man who had been killed by settlers in 2017. Then the Israeli Army stormed the village and killed a thirteen-year-old boy.

The next day, Hani Odeh, the mayor of Qusra, arranged for a procession to transport the bodies from the hospital to the village. Ma’amar took one of them in his ambulance. The I.D.F. dictated the route, then directed mourners to change course to avoid settlers. But dozens of settlers blocked the road and stoned the procession anyway. “I got out and talked to the Israeli commander, begging him to make the settlers leave,” Odeh said. “He told me to turn around.” The settlers killed a sixty-two-year-old man and his twenty-five-year-old son.

They can’t just continue to unleash the settlers on us like that,” Odeh told me. “My generation has always tried to reason with our youth, but they can no longer take it, so what am I to do? People like me, who advocated for peace their whole lives—we are not respected anymore. They say what did Abu Mazen”—Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority—“ever do for us? And they’re right. He keeps asking people to protest peacefully. Peacefully? There’s nothing peaceful about the situation we’re in.”

[Anonymous]

On October 29th, settlers showed up at one of Qaryut’s two remaining springs. They hung an Israeli flag and, with soldiers present, demolished one of the large concrete water basins that villagers had been using for irrigation for generations. Then the Army closed Qaryut’s access road to the spring. The road separated Shilo and Eli, and Ma’amar guessed that the aim of the settlers and the Army was to connect the two settlements.

For the next couple of weeks, settlers came to the spring frequently, accompanied by soldiers. Some wore shirts with the logo of Artzenu (“Our Land”), a subsidiary of a government-funded organization which is dedicated to farming land in the West Bank before “non-Jewish entities” do. (A spokesperson for Artzenu said, “Not everyone who wears the shirt in their free time represents the organization’s values.”) One day, Ma’amar filmed two soldiers in sniper costumes on the hillside above the spring and young settlers burning tires on the access road. One soldier, lying prone with his rifle balanced on a tripod, aimed straight at Ma’amar.

That day, I went down to the spring with Ariel Elmaliach, the mayor of Eli. Around ten young men and boys were working to turn one of the concrete basins into a swimming pool. “Come in another week with shorts and you can enjoy,” Elmaliach told me.

He asked the group why they were doing this work.

“To take more room around the settlement,” a boy of about fifteen said.

“For our homeland,” Nadav Levy, a bearded man in his early twenties, said. He added that he didn’t understand why people in Qaryut were upset about their project: “From my perspective, all of this is our land.”

Ory Shimon, twenty, said he felt that Israel was being unfairly scrutinized: “America came with ships and killed all the Indians and made them slaves. It’s terrible, but now America doesn’t say, ‘We’re sorry, take the land back.’

Elmaliach told me I was not allowed to take pictures, but then reconsidered. “Let’s do a deal,” he said. “If you write in your media that the Jews always take a place and they make it better, I give you permission to take a picture.” He picked up a couple of discarded bottles. “See, this is Arabs,” he said.

The spring, Elmaliach said, belonged to them, not to Qaryut. I showed him a map from the Civil Administration, Israel’s governing body in the West Bank, showing that the spring was well outside settlement boundaries. Eventually, he said, “I will give you a real answer. If you are coming to a new land, and you are now the owner of that land, then you put in that land the rules that you want.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The first time that Ma’amar witnessed settler violence was in 1996. It was in the wake of the first election to Prime Minister of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was intent on blocking any progress toward a two-state solution. Shilo took even more land from Qaryut, to make a vineyard. The village staged a protest, which Ma’amar filmed. The Army and settlers rushed in, firing shots into the air, and settlers beat people and tried to take cameras from anyone documenting the scene. An Israeli court ruled that the land should be returned to Qaryut, but Ma’amar said that settlers continued to attack people who approached, so the land was effectively lost.

In the years that followed, settlers put up tents, then mobile homes, on hilltops. Settlements are mostly considered illegal under international law, but these outposts were illegal even under Israeli law. Still, the government did little to dissuade the hilltop settlers, who viewed themselves as pioneers. The outposts were quickly connected to larger settlements by water systems, power lines, and paved roads. In time, a corridor of settlement took shape, slicing across the West Bank until the map looked more and more like the one envisioned by many settlers and political leaders, in which Palestinians would live in small and disconnected territories within an expanded Israel. Qaryut sat right in the corridor’s path; there were now eight official settlements and at least eleven smaller outposts in a five-mile radius of the village. “Without international and legal pressure on the Israelis, Qaryut will disappear,” Ma’amar said.

In November, 2022, Netanyahu won reëlection for the sixth time. To form a governing coalition, he allied with leaders of far-right parties, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who advocate for annexing the West Bank. Since then, the situation there has grown dramatically worse. In the first nine months of 2023, Ma’amar filed about seventy police reports of settler violence. In February, while he was driving an ambulance to pick up people injured in an attack, settlers smashed his windows and tried to burn the vehicle. In June, Palestinian gunmen killed four settlers near Eli; the next day, hundreds of settlers descended on Turmus Aya, a nearby village, shooting residents and burning cars and houses, some with people inside. By September, 2023, the United Nations was documenting around three settler-related incidents each day, the highest since it had started tracking the trend, in 2006, and eleven hundred Palestinians in the West Bank had been displaced.

Since October 7th, when Hamas-led fighters broke through the fence on Gaza’s border with Israel and killed some twelve hundred people and took some two hundred and fifty hostages, attacks near Qaryut have become routine. Settlers have burned cars and houses, blockaded roads, damaged electricity networks, seized farmland, severed irrigation lines, attacked people in their fields and olive groves, and killed, all without repercussion. Ma’amar told me that a thousand acres had been cut off from Qaryut. The U.N. has recorded five hundred and seventy-three attacks by settlers in the West Bank since the war began, with Israeli forces accompanying them half the time. At least nine people have been killed by settlers, and three hundred and eighty-two have been killed by Israeli forces. Five Israelis have been killed in the West Bank, at least one of whom was a civilian.

On October 9th, settlers sent a picture on Facebook to people in Qusra, a few miles from Qaryut, of masked men holding axes, clubs, a gas can, and a chainsaw, with text that read, “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village, we are waiting for you and we will not feel sorry for you. The day of revenge is coming.” Two days later, at the edge of the village, settlers lit utility poles on fire and tried to break into a house. For a half hour, a family huddled inside; then young men from the village arrived and threw rocks at the Israelis. Ma’amar drove over in his ambulance. At that point, the settlers started shooting. A man handed Ma’amar a six-year-old girl who had been shot. As the man walked away, he was shot and killed. When Ma’amar sped off, he said, settlers fired on his ambulance. Three Palestinians were killed, one of them the son of a man who had been killed by settlers in 2017. Then the Israeli Army stormed the village and killed a thirteen-year-old boy.

The next day, Hani Odeh, the mayor of Qusra, arranged for a procession to transport the bodies from the hospital to the village. Ma’amar took one of them in his ambulance. The I.D.F. dictated the route, then directed mourners to change course to avoid settlers. But dozens of settlers blocked the road and stoned the procession anyway. “I got out and talked to the Israeli commander, begging him to make the settlers leave,” Odeh said. “He told me to turn around.” The settlers killed a sixty-two-year-old man and his twenty-five-year-old son.

They can’t just continue to unleash the settlers on us like that,” Odeh told me. “My generation has always tried to reason with our youth, but they can no longer take it, so what am I to do? People like me, who advocated for peace their whole lives—we are not respected anymore. They say what did Abu Mazen”—Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority—“ever do for us? And they’re right. He keeps asking people to protest peacefully. Peacefully? There’s nothing peaceful about the situation we’re in.”

Reading this, and thinking back on how so many try to label criticism of Israel as inherently “anti-semitic” or to blame hostility toward Israelis as unfair, born of some innate hatred of Jews, etc. …

No. THIS and so many similar situations that Israel engages in every day is why there is hostility toward Israel today, and toward supporters of Israel today. This isn’t about all Jewish people. This is about toxic, malignant Zionism.

[Anonymous]

Settlers are worse than the devil.

[Anonymous]

10-year-old Yazan Kafarneh died last Monday in Gaza from malnutrition. His story and a photo of the emaciated child are at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/world/middleeast/yazan-kafarneh-gaza-starvation.html

This is absolutely disgusting and a war crime. Israel is in flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The ICC needs to make an example of the culprits so that no other child ever starves in this way. This is beyond evil.

[Anonymous]

If I wanted to read a book I wouldn’t spend my time in DCUM. Please keep your threads a reasonable length

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The first time that Ma’amar witnessed settler violence was in 1996. It was in the wake of the first election to Prime Minister of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was intent on blocking any progress toward a two-state solution. Shilo took even more land from Qaryut, to make a vineyard. The village staged a protest, which Ma’amar filmed. The Army and settlers rushed in, firing shots into the air, and settlers beat people and tried to take cameras from anyone documenting the scene. An Israeli court ruled that the land should be returned to Qaryut, but Ma’amar said that settlers continued to attack people who approached, so the land was effectively lost.

In the years that followed, settlers put up tents, then mobile homes, on hilltops. Settlements are mostly considered illegal under international law, but these outposts were illegal even under Israeli law. Still, the government did little to dissuade the hilltop settlers, who viewed themselves as pioneers. The outposts were quickly connected to larger settlements by water systems, power lines, and paved roads. In time, a corridor of settlement took shape, slicing across the West Bank until the map looked more and more like the one envisioned by many settlers and political leaders, in which Palestinians would live in small and disconnected territories within an expanded Israel. Qaryut sat right in the corridor’s path; there were now eight official settlements and at least eleven smaller outposts in a five-mile radius of the village. “Without international and legal pressure on the Israelis, Qaryut will disappear,” Ma’amar said.

In November, 2022, Netanyahu won reëlection for the sixth time. To form a governing coalition, he allied with leaders of far-right parties, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who advocate for annexing the West Bank. Since then, the situation there has grown dramatically worse. In the first nine months of 2023, Ma’amar filed about seventy police reports of settler violence. In February, while he was driving an ambulance to pick up people injured in an attack, settlers smashed his windows and tried to burn the vehicle. In June, Palestinian gunmen killed four settlers near Eli; the next day, hundreds of settlers descended on Turmus Aya, a nearby village, shooting residents and burning cars and houses, some with people inside. By September, 2023, the United Nations was documenting around three settler-related incidents each day, the highest since it had started tracking the trend, in 2006, and eleven hundred Palestinians in the West Bank had been displaced.

Since October 7th, when Hamas-led fighters broke through the fence on Gaza’s border with Israel and killed some twelve hundred people and took some two hundred and fifty hostages, attacks near Qaryut have become routine. Settlers have burned cars and houses, blockaded roads, damaged electricity networks, seized farmland, severed irrigation lines, attacked people in their fields and olive groves, and killed, all without repercussion. Ma’amar told me that a thousand acres had been cut off from Qaryut. The U.N. has recorded five hundred and seventy-three attacks by settlers in the West Bank since the war began, with Israeli forces accompanying them half the time. At least nine people have been killed by settlers, and three hundred and eighty-two have been killed by Israeli forces. Five Israelis have been killed in the West Bank, at least one of whom was a civilian.

On October 9th, settlers sent a picture on Facebook to people in Qusra, a few miles from Qaryut, of masked men holding axes, clubs, a gas can, and a chainsaw, with text that read, “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village, we are waiting for you and we will not feel sorry for you. The day of revenge is coming.” Two days later, at the edge of the village, settlers lit utility poles on fire and tried to break into a house. For a half hour, a family huddled inside; then young men from the village arrived and threw rocks at the Israelis. Ma’amar drove over in his ambulance. At that point, the settlers started shooting. A man handed Ma’amar a six-year-old girl who had been shot. As the man walked away, he was shot and killed. When Ma’amar sped off, he said, settlers fired on his ambulance. Three Palestinians were killed, one of them the son of a man who had been killed by settlers in 2017. Then the Israeli Army stormed the village and killed a thirteen-year-old boy.

The next day, Hani Odeh, the mayor of Qusra, arranged for a procession to transport the bodies from the hospital to the village. Ma’amar took one of them in his ambulance. The I.D.F. dictated the route, then directed mourners to change course to avoid settlers. But dozens of settlers blocked the road and stoned the procession anyway. “I got out and talked to the Israeli commander, begging him to make the settlers leave,” Odeh said. “He told me to turn around.” The settlers killed a sixty-two-year-old man and his twenty-five-year-old son.

They can’t just continue to unleash the settlers on us like that,” Odeh told me. “My generation has always tried to reason with our youth, but they can no longer take it, so what am I to do? People like me, who advocated for peace their whole lives—we are not respected anymore. They say what did Abu Mazen”—Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority—“ever do for us? And they’re right. He keeps asking people to protest peacefully. Peacefully? There’s nothing peaceful about the situation we’re in.”

Reading this, and thinking back on how so many try to label criticism of Israel as inherently “anti-semitic” or to blame hostility toward Israelis as unfair, born of some innate hatred of Jews, etc. …

No. THIS and so many similar situations that Israel engages in every day is why there is hostility toward Israel today, and toward supporters of Israel today. This isn’t about all Jewish people. This is about toxic, malignant Zionism.

Many Jewish people agree with you and are absolutely sickened by Israel's atrocities. This makes it quite clear that you are right. There is nothing antisemitic about standing up against, as you say, "toxic, malignant Zionism." It is the "toxic, malignant Zionists" who try to throw up a smokescreen by screaming about "antisemitism" when anyone draws attention to Israel's war crimes and unacceptable behavior. People are fed up with this cheap and underhanded trick.

[Anonymous]

Yes! The antisemites are sick of the underhanded trick!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The first time that Ma’amar witnessed settler violence was in 1996. It was in the wake of the first election to Prime Minister of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was intent on blocking any progress toward a two-state solution. Shilo took even more land from Qaryut, to make a vineyard. The village staged a protest, which Ma’amar filmed. The Army and settlers rushed in, firing shots into the air, and settlers beat people and tried to take cameras from anyone documenting the scene. An Israeli court ruled that the land should be returned to Qaryut, but Ma’amar said that settlers continued to attack people who approached, so the land was effectively lost.

In the years that followed, settlers put up tents, then mobile homes, on hilltops. Settlements are mostly considered illegal under international law, but these outposts were illegal even under Israeli law. Still, the government did little to dissuade the hilltop settlers, who viewed themselves as pioneers. The outposts were quickly connected to larger settlements by water systems, power lines, and paved roads. In time, a corridor of settlement took shape, slicing across the West Bank until the map looked more and more like the one envisioned by many settlers and political leaders, in which Palestinians would live in small and disconnected territories within an expanded Israel. Qaryut sat right in the corridor’s path; there were now eight official settlements and at least eleven smaller outposts in a five-mile radius of the village. “Without international and legal pressure on the Israelis, Qaryut will disappear,” Ma’amar said.

In November, 2022, Netanyahu won reëlection for the sixth time. To form a governing coalition, he allied with leaders of far-right parties, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who advocate for annexing the West Bank. Since then, the situation there has grown dramatically worse. In the first nine months of 2023, Ma’amar filed about seventy police reports of settler violence. In February, while he was driving an ambulance to pick up people injured in an attack, settlers smashed his windows and tried to burn the vehicle. In June, Palestinian gunmen killed four settlers near Eli; the next day, hundreds of settlers descended on Turmus Aya, a nearby village, shooting residents and burning cars and houses, some with people inside. By September, 2023, the United Nations was documenting around three settler-related incidents each day, the highest since it had started tracking the trend, in 2006, and eleven hundred Palestinians in the West Bank had been displaced.

Since October 7th, when Hamas-led fighters broke through the fence on Gaza’s border with Israel and killed some twelve hundred people and took some two hundred and fifty hostages, attacks near Qaryut have become routine. Settlers have burned cars and houses, blockaded roads, damaged electricity networks, seized farmland, severed irrigation lines, attacked people in their fields and olive groves, and killed, all without repercussion. Ma’amar told me that a thousand acres had been cut off from Qaryut. The U.N. has recorded five hundred and seventy-three attacks by settlers in the West Bank since the war began, with Israeli forces accompanying them half the time. At least nine people have been killed by settlers, and three hundred and eighty-two have been killed by Israeli forces. Five Israelis have been killed in the West Bank, at least one of whom was a civilian.

On October 9th, settlers sent a picture on Facebook to people in Qusra, a few miles from Qaryut, of masked men holding axes, clubs, a gas can, and a chainsaw, with text that read, “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village, we are waiting for you and we will not feel sorry for you. The day of revenge is coming.” Two days later, at the edge of the village, settlers lit utility poles on fire and tried to break into a house. For a half hour, a family huddled inside; then young men from the village arrived and threw rocks at the Israelis. Ma’amar drove over in his ambulance. At that point, the settlers started shooting. A man handed Ma’amar a six-year-old girl who had been shot. As the man walked away, he was shot and killed. When Ma’amar sped off, he said, settlers fired on his ambulance. Three Palestinians were killed, one of them the son of a man who had been killed by settlers in 2017. Then the Israeli Army stormed the village and killed a thirteen-year-old boy.

The next day, Hani Odeh, the mayor of Qusra, arranged for a procession to transport the bodies from the hospital to the village. Ma’amar took one of them in his ambulance. The I.D.F. dictated the route, then directed mourners to change course to avoid settlers. But dozens of settlers blocked the road and stoned the procession anyway. “I got out and talked to the Israeli commander, begging him to make the settlers leave,” Odeh said. “He told me to turn around.” The settlers killed a sixty-two-year-old man and his twenty-five-year-old son.

They can’t just continue to unleash the settlers on us like that,” Odeh told me. “My generation has always tried to reason with our youth, but they can no longer take it, so what am I to do? People like me, who advocated for peace their whole lives—we are not respected anymore. They say what did Abu Mazen”—Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority—“ever do for us? And they’re right. He keeps asking people to protest peacefully. Peacefully? There’s nothing peaceful about the situation we’re in.”

Reading this, and thinking back on how so many try to label criticism of Israel as inherently “anti-semitic” or to blame hostility toward Israelis as unfair, born of some innate hatred of Jews, etc. …

No. THIS and so many similar situations that Israel engages in every day is why there is hostility toward Israel today, and toward supporters of Israel today. This isn’t about all Jewish people. This is about toxic, malignant Zionism.

Many Jewish people agree with you and are absolutely sickened by Israel's atrocities. This makes it quite clear that you are right. There is nothing antisemitic about standing up against, as you say, "toxic, malignant Zionism." It is the "toxic, malignant Zionists" who try to throw up a smokescreen by screaming about "antisemitism" when anyone draws attention to Israel's war crimes and unacceptable behavior. People are fed up with this cheap and underhanded trick.

Azerbaijan demanded yesterday that Armenia gives up 4 villages immediately. This is after expelling 1.6 million Armenians in September. Where are the threads, the protests, the condemnation of toxic, malignant Azerbaijanism? No? Nothing? Pakistan is expelling its 20 million Afghan refugees and leveling their refugee camps? Still no condemnation of toxic malignant Pakistanianism? Muslim countries can do whatever? We only have condemnation for the one Jewish country?

[Anonymous]

Exactly. At the root of it all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The first time that Ma’amar witnessed settler violence was in 1996. It was in the wake of the first election to Prime Minister of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was intent on blocking any progress toward a two-state solution. Shilo took even more land from Qaryut, to make a vineyard. The village staged a protest, which Ma’amar filmed. The Army and settlers rushed in, firing shots into the air, and settlers beat people and tried to take cameras from anyone documenting the scene. An Israeli court ruled that the land should be returned to Qaryut, but Ma’amar said that settlers continued to attack people who approached, so the land was effectively lost.

In the years that followed, settlers put up tents, then mobile homes, on hilltops. Settlements are mostly considered illegal under international law, but these outposts were illegal even under Israeli law. Still, the government did little to dissuade the hilltop settlers, who viewed themselves as pioneers. The outposts were quickly connected to larger settlements by water systems, power lines, and paved roads. In time, a corridor of settlement took shape, slicing across the West Bank until the map looked more and more like the one envisioned by many settlers and political leaders, in which Palestinians would live in small and disconnected territories within an expanded Israel. Qaryut sat right in the corridor’s path; there were now eight official settlements and at least eleven smaller outposts in a five-mile radius of the village. “Without international and legal pressure on the Israelis, Qaryut will disappear,” Ma’amar said.

In November, 2022, Netanyahu won reëlection for the sixth time. To form a governing coalition, he allied with leaders of far-right parties, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who advocate for annexing the West Bank. Since then, the situation there has grown dramatically worse. In the first nine months of 2023, Ma’amar filed about seventy police reports of settler violence. In February, while he was driving an ambulance to pick up people injured in an attack, settlers smashed his windows and tried to burn the vehicle. In June, Palestinian gunmen killed four settlers near Eli; the next day, hundreds of settlers descended on Turmus Aya, a nearby village, shooting residents and burning cars and houses, some with people inside. By September, 2023, the United Nations was documenting around three settler-related incidents each day, the highest since it had started tracking the trend, in 2006, and eleven hundred Palestinians in the West Bank had been displaced.

Since October 7th, when Hamas-led fighters broke through the fence on Gaza’s border with Israel and killed some twelve hundred people and took some two hundred and fifty hostages, attacks near Qaryut have become routine. Settlers have burned cars and houses, blockaded roads, damaged electricity networks, seized farmland, severed irrigation lines, attacked people in their fields and olive groves, and killed, all without repercussion. Ma’amar told me that a thousand acres had been cut off from Qaryut. The U.N. has recorded five hundred and seventy-three attacks by settlers in the West Bank since the war began, with Israeli forces accompanying them half the time. At least nine people have been killed by settlers, and three hundred and eighty-two have been killed by Israeli forces. Five Israelis have been killed in the West Bank, at least one of whom was a civilian.

On October 9th, settlers sent a picture on Facebook to people in Qusra, a few miles from Qaryut, of masked men holding axes, clubs, a gas can, and a chainsaw, with text that read, “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village, we are waiting for you and we will not feel sorry for you. The day of revenge is coming.” Two days later, at the edge of the village, settlers lit utility poles on fire and tried to break into a house. For a half hour, a family huddled inside; then young men from the village arrived and threw rocks at the Israelis. Ma’amar drove over in his ambulance. At that point, the settlers started shooting. A man handed Ma’amar a six-year-old girl who had been shot. As the man walked away, he was shot and killed. When Ma’amar sped off, he said, settlers fired on his ambulance. Three Palestinians were killed, one of them the son of a man who had been killed by settlers in 2017. Then the Israeli Army stormed the village and killed a thirteen-year-old boy.

The next day, Hani Odeh, the mayor of Qusra, arranged for a procession to transport the bodies from the hospital to the village. Ma’amar took one of them in his ambulance. The I.D.F. dictated the route, then directed mourners to change course to avoid settlers. But dozens of settlers blocked the road and stoned the procession anyway. “I got out and talked to the Israeli commander, begging him to make the settlers leave,” Odeh said. “He told me to turn around.” The settlers killed a sixty-two-year-old man and his twenty-five-year-old son.

They can’t just continue to unleash the settlers on us like that,” Odeh told me. “My generation has always tried to reason with our youth, but they can no longer take it, so what am I to do? People like me, who advocated for peace their whole lives—we are not respected anymore. They say what did Abu Mazen”—Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority—“ever do for us? And they’re right. He keeps asking people to protest peacefully. Peacefully? There’s nothing peaceful about the situation we’re in.”

Reading this, and thinking back on how so many try to label criticism of Israel as inherently “anti-semitic” or to blame hostility toward Israelis as unfair, born of some innate hatred of Jews, etc. …

No. THIS and so many similar situations that Israel engages in every day is why there is hostility toward Israel today, and toward supporters of Israel today. This isn’t about all Jewish people. This is about toxic, malignant Zionism.

Many Jewish people agree with you and are absolutely sickened by Israel's atrocities. This makes it quite clear that you are right. There is nothing antisemitic about standing up against, as you say, "toxic, malignant Zionism." It is the "toxic, malignant Zionists" who try to throw up a smokescreen by screaming about "antisemitism" when anyone draws attention to Israel's war crimes and unacceptable behavior. People are fed up with this cheap and underhanded trick.

Azerbaijan demanded yesterday that Armenia gives up 4 villages immediately. This is after expelling 1.6 million Armenians in September. Where are the threads, the protests, the condemnation of toxic, malignant Azerbaijanism? No? Nothing? Pakistan is expelling its 20 million Afghan refugees and leveling their refugee camps? Still no condemnation of toxic malignant Pakistanianism? Muslim countries can do whatever? We only have condemnation for the one Jewish country?

Why don’t you make threads about it?

Deflection deflection deflection

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:Then settlers rewrote the story. In a statement, Yossi Dagan, the head of the settlers’ regional council whose area of authority includes Rehelim, said that a combat soldier on leave had been “attacked by tens of Hamasniks.” The harvest around Israeli settlements had to be stopped, he said, because it was “being used as a platform for terrorism.” Settlers later shared an image from Saleh’s funeral, in which his brother, Hisham, is waving a Hamas flag. Shortly afterward, Israeli police arrested Hisham. Polls show that support for Hamas in the West Bank, where dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority is widespread, has risen from twelve per cent to forty-four per cent in recent months. Seventy-two per cent of Palestinians polled also said that they thought the October 7th attack was “correct.” (Ninety-four per cent of Israelis think that the I.D.F. is using either an appropriate or an insufficient amount of force in Gaza.)

We don’t have any hope,” Bilal’s cousin Hazem Saleh told me. He pointed toward some new houses in the village. Their owners didn’t intend for them “to be demolished or bombed,” he said. “They are not calling for fighting, or killing, or war. But when they are afraid to go out, when they don’t have the minimum standard of living, when they are pressured, their reaction will be the same as the action.”

Hisham Saleh spent three months in jail, without charges, for waving the Hamas flag. The settler who shot Bilal was arrested, and released a few days later. “We are happy that the court decided from the beginning that that was self-defense,” his lawyer, Nati Rom, told me. The judge had cited the events of October 7th, writing, “The vigilance to which we are commanded by the blood of our brothers and sisters who fell for the sanctity of the land and the defense of the homeland is a real obligation.”

Rom said that, to his knowledge, no other settlers had faced charges since October 7th. Settler violence was “fake news,” he said.

Saleh’s shooter was back in the Army, so I visited one of his neighbors, a forty-six-year-old woman named Reuma Harari. At the gate of Rehelim, soldiers took my passport, then security escorted me to Harari’s house. Her back yard was a suburban idyll: a swing set on an AstroTurf lawn, an oak tree, a small dog; Tel Aviv was only forty minutes away, if the traffic was light. She offered me a seat under an olive tree. “Ironic,” she said, chuckling.

They literally have a video of this guy’s brother waving a Hamas flag, and you wonder why this happened?

Who do we believe here, the Israeli government, and peaceful civilians whose sole crime was moving to a new home, or the family of a dead man who clearly was, at the very least, loosely affiliated with Hamas, an organization’s whose primary goal is the eradication of Jews in Israel. It really should not be a hard decision, and yet American leftist neon axis seem to struggle with it.

Yes because a farmer who carried a donkey through town to harvest on Saturday morning to avoid the Zionist KKK is a Hamas operative right? This is your excuse?

Maybe he wore it at his brothers funeral for the same reason you’re defending the death of a farmer : anger and retribution .

Two things are illegal in the West Bank : settlements and Hamas in the West Bank and guess what? The rise in one is causing the rise of the other. Do you think any settlers would even think of even moving to the West Bank if Hamas was well and alive and farmers like this guy were militants?

Let’s use that brain . God may promise land but I see he doesn’t promise sense

There are two sides to every story. The Palestinians claimed that the farmer was just minding his business, going back to pick up his phone from his field when he was brutally killed for absolutely no reason by the evil Jewish people.

The Israelis claim that the farmer and Hamas militant was part of a group of Hamas agents that violently attacked a group of settlers, and was killed in self defense as a result.

The question is which story do you believe, because obviously both stories cannot be true, so let us look at the established facts;

1) The Israeli soldier who shot the farmer was arrested following the incident, in accordance with Israeli Law;

2) Following a quick court proceeding, an Israeli judge found that the shooting was clearly in self defense, and ordered the release of the soldier; and

3) The farmer’s brother was videotaped praising Hamas and supporting Hamas following the incident, demonstrating that he and his family were likely supporters of Hamas’ genocide, and would potentially have been part of a local effort to kill Israelis.

So, while there are two stories, the only story that matches up with the facts of the case is the one given by Israel; Saleh was a part of a group of pro-Hamas militants who took the opportunity to violently ambush a group of Israeli civilians, and ended up being shot and killed by an IDF soldier on leave who was a part of this group.

This is backed up by the fact that a literal court of law, after reviewing all of the available evidence, determined this was the case, and is backed up by the victims’ family’s clear support of Hamas.

I can't think of anything more likely to make a Palestinian want to support Hamas than to have one of their relatives murdered by some Israeli settler terrorist.

That aside, the fact that someone waves a flag you don't like now apparently means you can now murder one of their family members. Is this what you're saying? What other flags are an excuse for murdering a family member? I think Israel is a genocidal nation that is committing war crimes. Does that mean I should kill the relatives of someone who waves an Israeli flag? You need to think about the precedent you're trying to set here and how you would feel if the roles were reversed.

We know these West Bank settlers have a long history of harassing, murdering, and threatening Palestinians with a view to stealing their property. One thief was even caught on camera saying, 'If I don't steal it, someone else will steal it." The settlers know what they're doing, and Israel allows them to get away with it. This is accumulation through dispossession, and it has been going on since before the Nakba, and it is evil. Palestinians are considered uentermenschen who can be killed or kicked out of their homes without consequences.

This article describes a West Bank Palestinian who records settler aggression on video: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/israel-west-bank-settlers-attacks-palestinians
Even as he was collecting footage of settlers looting a Palestinian home and breaking and entering, Israeli soldiers stood by and watched. The soldiers later walked home with the settlers to their settlement, which is illegal under international law. Israel allows this racist violence as part of its strategy of ethnic cleansing.

But Israelis, who had family and friends murdered on the kibbutz, should not be upset.

[Anonymous]

The US is not subsidising Azerbaijan to the tune of trillions