Bernard Spiegal

The focus has been on Gaza, understandably so. But this has perhaps been at the expense of ignoring, or at least marginalising, what is simultaneously happening in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in particular since the 7^th October.

In order to understand Israel’s strategic intentions towards Palestinians, its important to keep in view events in the totality of the occupied territory: Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem.  

Israel’s strategic intention is easily stated: to create a Jewish supremacist state from the river to the sea.  In some ways, it has already achieved this. This strategic intention, and the actions that flow from it, have been pursued since Israel’s establishment in 1948, though with variations over time as to pace and extent.

Since the 7^th October, there has been a significant increase in IDF and Settler activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem: dispossessions, evictions, killings and maiming of Palestinians all directed at ‘persuading’ them to abandon their land, homes and livelihoods to make way for Jewish-only settlers. There is an echo here, a disturbing echo, of Nazi Germany’s quest for Lebensraum, living space, the creation of which required the removal of Eastern and Central European populations to make way for so-called‚ ‘Aryan‘, colonising Germans. Similarly, achieving Israel’s colonising intent requires the absence, or severe reduction, of Palestinians on land Israel covets.

The UN report on the West Bank and East Jerusalem

Below, I’ve taken a bit of space to highlight the nature of Israel’s unremitting assaults on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this because it has received too little attention in the media, mainstream and social. What follows is extracted from The UN Human Rights Office report of the 28 December 2023. My comments are in italics.

In period 7 October – 27 December there were 300 deaths of Palestinians, including 79 children. Of these, Israeli Security Forces killed at least 291 Palestinians, settlers killed eight, and one Palestinian was killed either by Israeli Security Forces or settlers.

Children are ‘necessary’ targets for a dispossessing, colonising regime, a perspective I touch on in a previous blog article. In addition, in another blog article, I introduce the work of Professor Nudera Shalhoub-Kevorkian who coined the term ‘unchilding’ to describe Israel’s oppression of children.

The UN report described a sharp increase in airstrikes as well as in incursions by armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers sent to refugee camps and other densely populated areas in the West Bank, resulting in deaths, injuries and extensive damage to civilian objects and infrastructure. These incursions, which continue to take place, have resulted in the death of at least 105 Palestinians, among them 23 children, since 7 October up to today.

Those unleashing the air strikes and using heavy, armoured moving equipment are of course sitting safe and immune within their killing machines. Destroying homes and vital infrastructure renders those areas uninhabitable, thereby contributing to the potential permanent displacement of the population that once lived there.

On the 19 and 20 October, during a 30 hour-long incursion into Nur Shams Refugee Camp in Tulkarem, Israeli Forces using military weaponry and means of engagement killed 14 Palestinians, including six children, wounded at least 20 others, and arrested 10 Palestinians.

Israeli Security Forces (ISF) have arrested more than 4,700 Palestinians, including about 40 journalists, in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Some were stripped naked, blindfolded and restrained for long hours with handcuffs and with their legs tied, while Israeli soldiers stepped on their heads and backs, were spat at, slammed against walls, threatened, insulted, humiliated and in some cases subjected to sexual and gender-based violence, the report describes.

Israel has marinaded itself, and its children, in racist stereotypes about Palestinians. A process of dehumanisation that issues in behaviour such as that described above. This is not untypical.

 It reminds me of a point made by one commentator (sorry, cannot recall name) to the effect that, whatever the earlier prowess and skill of the IDF, now that it is an Occupation army, daily humiliating Palestinians in displays of imperious indifference to the suffering they inflict, it is morally weakened as a consequence.

Israel acknowledges no boundaries; it destroys a home as readily as it kills a child.  Underpinning this callous indifference is Israel’s racist-infused conception of Palestinians.

There has been a sharp rise in settler attacks, an average of six incidents per day, such as shootings, burning of homes and vehicles, and uprooting of trees. In many incidents, settlers were accompanied by ISF, or were themselves wearing ISF uniforms, and carrying army rifles. Multiple incidents of settlers attacking Palestinians harvesting their olives, including with firearms, and forcing them to leave their land, stealing their harvest and poisoning or vandalizing their olive trees, depriving many Palestinians of a vital source of income.

Thus, what we witness is state sponsored, state supported, state protected infringements of basic, foundational human values, not to speak of the brazen disregard for international law.  The only reason Israel can pursue what amounts to genocide, be that in the West Bank, Gaza or East Jerusalem, is because of the active support of the so-called liberal democracies of the West, in particular the USA, with the UK trotting along behind.

Since 7 October, Israeli authorities have imposed severe and systematic restrictions on the movement of Palestinians across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The ISF has closed almost all entrances to Palestinian villages and towns to vehicular access and disconnected Palestinian cities and towns from main roads by closing road gates and placing earth mounds or concrete roadblocks.

The call to cease and desist: a futile call? 

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said, ‘The dehumanization of Palestinians that characterizes many of the settlers’ actions is very disturbing and must cease immediately….The report reiterates our [the UN]  calls for a halt to measures that lead to the creation of a coercive environment and concerns regarding forcible transfer, in addition to the continued lack of accountability for settler and ISF violence’.

—End UN report extracts—

Ras al ‘Amud, East Jerusalem, 13 December 2023 photo by OCHA oPT

To the UN’s dismal tale above, we can add ICAHD UK’s (Israel Committee Against House Demolitions) reports on the continuing colonisation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem:

‘In 2023, ICAHD analysis revealed that over 1,395 structures were demolished and 1,537 people displaced in the West Bank with a further 66,136 people directly affected.‘

Strategic intent

The aim – and current achievement – then, is to dispossess Palestinians via ‘a continuing Nakba’. Land and livelihoods are stolen, and the now homeless/landless Palestinians are forced to move to predominately Palestinians towns. This movement away from the land, and the livelihoods that depend on it, fit into a wider intent: to, in effect, ‘kettle’ Palestinians within over-populated enclaves, hemmed-in, surrounded, by a system of checkpoints and pass requirements that constrain movement and personal connection. 

Palestinians have two choices, neither of their making: move abroad; or accept they will be forced to live a highly constricted life, utterly dependent on Israel.  There is a third choice, however: to resist. To date that is the path that has been chosen. Our job, is to support that resolve.

In devoting attention to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as above, I aim to counter any tendency of thought that disaggregates the different parts of Palestine, thereby fuelling the notion that there can be a separate, sustainable ‘solutions’ for each of the different areas. Israel’s policy has been to encourage this sense of fragmentation, thus the seventeen-year siege of Gaza, thus the creation of non-contiguous Palestinian enclaves – Bantustans – on the West Bank, thus the fragile residency status of East Jerusalem Palestinians.

Unidirectional intent

Israel’s motives and intentions in Gaza must be viewed as part of a wider, well-established continuum, that ebbs and flows, but is of twofold unidirectional intent: the quashing of any hope of Palestinian self-determination; and, concomitant with this, the dispossession of as many Palestinians as possible from their land, this to facilitate the creation of an apartheid, Jewish supremacist state, from the river to the sea.  This aim slotting-in neatly to what is happening in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as set out above. Thus, so far as Gaza is concerned, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich makes no secret that he believes that Gaza should be depopulated of Palestinians:

If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not two million, the whole discourse about the day after will be different.

The thousands of Israeli killings have no line drawn under them. Rather, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow stand like vacant plots waiting for new, additional tranches of killed civilians – children and adults – to fill them. And still the Israeli public supports the sustained onslaught. And where protest is made, those few face the ire of an Israeli public held captive by its grief, desire for vengeance and racist conceptions of Palestinians.

Israel has sunk deep into a moral quagmire of its own formation. The ethical and humanitarian reference points that should guide, illuminate and restrain a nation’s conduct are now purposely obliterated, allowing, indeed encouraging, any and all acts of Israeli barbarianism in the Occupied Territories.