• ‘Settler violence is an arm of the state’s agenda to continue to consolidate control in the West Bank,’ International Crisis Group’s Mairav Zonszein tells Anadolu
• Israeli aggression will intensify and create conditions for ‘an ethnic cleansing campaign,’ says academic and writer Abdaljawad Omar
ISTANBUL
For more than a year now, and decades before that, Israel has been decimating Palestinian life in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
The only difference between the two Palestinian territories is how Israel is destroying them – one with bombs and missiles clear for all to see, the other in a less explicitly genocidal way.
In the West Bank, Israeli tactics have always been a lethal mix of violence and repression, recently recognized as apartheid and declared unlawful by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
But the escalation in Israeli aggression there since last October has been, according to countless analysts and experts, almost unprecedented in scale and intensity.
The numbers alone paint a stark picture.
Almost 750 Palestinians have been killed and over 6,200 wounded since Oct. 7, with more than 11,200 detained by Israeli forces, more often than not on non-existent charges or ones that hold no legal ground.
Near the end of August, Israel carried out what was its largest military operation in the West Bank in more than two decades, killing, wounding and arresting scores of Palestinians, razing homes, properties and critical infrastructure including roads, water and sewage networks, and power systems.
Add to this the hundreds of attacks by illegal Israeli settlers over the past year, along with forced expulsions and a surge in destruction and seizure of Palestinian land and properties.
Now, as Israel expands its assault to Lebanon and diverts media attention away from the Palestinian territories, the feeling is that the West Bank could be headed for even worse days ahead.
Abdaljawad Omar, an academic and writer based in Ramallah, listed that among his three major fears, saying the Israeli war on Hezbollah could prove to be “the cover to enact aneven more fierce policy in the West Bank,” particularly with the world more occupied by the threat of a “different kind of huge regional battle.”
Palestinians in the West Bank, he said, expect that Israeli aggression will only intensify, creating conditions for “an ethnic cleansing campaign or an improvisation that leads to large-scale emigration from Palestine.”
“The second fear is that … the model of Gaza will be replicated in West Bank in some way,” he said.
This could entail more “destruction of civilian infrastructure … and conducting more intensive military operations,” Omar told Anadolu.
“The Israeli army is continuing with its longstanding policy of invading Palestinian towns, cities and villages, arresting people or conducting assassination operations in these towns in the north of the West Bank,” he said.
There are increasingly severe restrictions on the freedom of movement, with more checkpoints and tougher conditions for Palestinians looking to move between towns and cities, he added.
“We’ve been living under a brutal regime of terror, called military occupation, and that will continue. The settlers will continue expanding the settlements, (more) people will be killed, and the situation in the West Bank might even get worse,” said Omar.
‘Settler violence is an arm of the state’s agenda’
Between October 2023 and this September, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented some 1,390 attacks by Israeli settlers.
At least 135 of these led to Palestinian fatalities and injuries, while a staggering 1,110 caused damage to Palestinian properties.
Mairav Zonszein, Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group, stressed the importance of remembering that settler violence in the West Bank is nothing new and had been on the rise since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government came to power in late 2022.
One of the reasons that it spiked even more after Oct. 7 is “that all of the attention moved to Gaza,” said Zonszein, author of the Crisis Group’s recently released report, ‘Stemming Israeli settler violence at its root.’
Another key cause, she said, is that illegal Israeli settlers who already had “an agenda to push Palestinians out of certain areas of the West Bank” have been “emboldened” by the state’s policies.
The current Israeli government is filled with far-right ministers and ministers who themselves are settlers, who have the same agenda of forcing Palestinians out, she said.
According to Zonszein, settler violence against Palestinians is prevalent everywhere in the West Bank, including areas around Ramallah, the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.
But specifically in the northern West Bank, in areas around Nablus, there are “very radical settlers who are consistently involved in settler violence,” she told Anadolu.
By not taking any action against them, the Israeli state – the army, police and courts – are “effectively giving them a green light,” she said.
Types of violence by settlers, she explained, ranges from shootings and fatal assaults to intimidation, verbal abuse, seizure of Palestinian resources and blocking their access to their own lands.
“These are things that are also done in different ways by the army itself. The army blocks Palestinian access, the army will arrest Palestinians when they just try to resist settlers,” said Zonszein.
“Violent settlers and soldiers are working together towards the same goal. They don’t have an issue with what settlers are doing.”
The same is the case for certain politicians who defend their actions and embolden them further, she said.
Even when settlers are clearly guilty of doing something illegal to Palestinians, she continued, they get off the hook by claiming the right to self-defense, and there is no accountability.
“Settler violence is an arm of the state’s agenda to continue to consolidate control in the West Bank,” asserted Zonszein.
Delinking policy to inflict ‘financial pain’
Omar, an academic at the Birzeit University in the West Bank, agreed with this assessment, emphasizing that settlers and the Israeli state “play complementary roles.”
“Us Palestinians, I don’t think we really differentiate between military raids where Israeli soldiers are wearing uniforms, and settler attacks where Israeli settlers are wearing civilian clothes,” he said.
“Settlers themselves are in the government. The government serves the settlers and the settlers serve the government … In many ways, this is a dynamic duo,” he said.
The illegal settler movement is part of an established Israeli governmental policy and plays a fundamental institutional role in a project that is sanctioned by Israel’s current government and all previous governments, he added.
A newer element of Israeli policies in the West Bank, according to Omar, is to “delink Israel from the West Bank as much as possible,” which is supported by the far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and other officials.
“We’ve been seeing at the governmental level a policy of attempting to delink the Israeli banking system from the Palestinian banking system as much as possible,” he said.
“A policy since Oct. 7 that is being tested out … of inducing financial pain in the West Bank, preventing Palestinian labor from entering Israel, decoupling Israel from any connections – economic flows, infrastructure flows and financial flows – that link Israel to the West Bank itself.”
