The West Bank village of Qusra was smoldering as I arrived. Clouds of black smoke swirled from a field where rampaging Israeli settlers had lit it on fire, while also setting fire to Palestinian homes and vehicles, according to Qusra residents.
“At any moment, we expect settlers to attack,” said Abdel-Majeed Hassan, a salt-of-the-earth farmer in his 70s. He showed me the blackened ground where his car had been set on fire, the latest of four cars belonging to his family that he said settlers had destroyed.
Six residents of this village have been killed in such attacks since October, when the Israeli government responded to the Hamas attack from the Gaza Strip. The result is a despair and fury that every Palestinian I spoke to predicted would lead to a bloody uprising.
There are places in the world with significantly worse oppression and killing, including in Arab countries like Sudan, Syria and Yemen, that draw less attention or protest. But Israel’s “state-backed settler violence,” as Amnesty International describes it, is enforced by American weapons provided to Israel. When armed settlers terrorise Palestinians and force them off their land — as has happened to 18 communities since October — they sometimes carry American M16 rifles. Sometimes they are escorted by Israeli troops.
With Israel possibly winding down the most intensive phase of its war in Gaza, we should be paying much more attention to the crisis building in the more populous West Bank. The United Nations reports that 536 Palestinians, including 130 children, in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the past eight months. During the same period, seven Israeli soldiers and five settlers have been killed here by Palestinians.
Israelis do have legitimate reason to be fearful, and Palestinians do throw rocks at settlers and occasionally kill or injure them. While on average fewer than one settler has been killed a month since October 7, that’s partly because settlers have guns, high walls and soldiers protecting them. Polls show growing support for Hamas in the West Bank, and many Israelis conclude that their survival depends on crushing Palestinians, not trusting them.
The anger about land theft and settler violence is compounded by a growing economic crisis. The World Bank estimates that about 300,000 people in the West Bank have lost their jobs since October 7.
The economic difficulties were compounded in May when a far-right Israeli cabinet minister, Bezalel Smotrich, began withholding Palestinian tax revenue from the Palestinian Authority, or PA. Along with other punitive financial measures taken by Israel, there are growing fears that the PA could collapse — but Smotrich is not concerned. “If this causes the collapse of the PA, let it collapse,” he reportedly said.
Palestinians believe that the Israeli right would like to provoke an explosion of violence and use it as an excuse for an ethnic cleansing.
For my part, I think a simpler explanation is more likely: Israel is once again acting shortsightedly, against its own security interests. To paraphrase what the former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban said of Palestinians, the Israeli right never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Policy to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is immensely complex, with infinite room for nuance. I’ve focused here on the security dimension, for I believe it’s in American and Israeli interests to create a Palestinian state. But one more thing must be said: The seizure and occupation of other people’s land is wrong. And it is not wrong in a complicated, finely balanced way; it is simply, straightforwardly wrong.
The occupation is as toxic to Israelis as it is to Palestinians. “We are losing our identity as people, as Jews and as human beings,” Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency, told journalist Christiane Amanpour.
Americans should call for Israel to grant Palestinians in the West Bank the same rights — including voting rights — that it gives settlers in the West Bank. That’s a way of reminding Israel that it cannot simply occupy land decade after decade. — The New York Times
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