Now and then, there’s an episode of settler violence in the West Bank that’s so grotesque that it kind of breaks through a little bit in American media. I mean, settler violence—again, especially under this government, especially since October 7th—is so pervasive that generally, it’s just kind of noise for the American media. It doesn’t really get picked up very much, or in the American Jewish community. But occasionally something is so terrible that it breaks through, and it’s interesting to watch the way that Israel’s defenders in the United States tend to respond to this.
Generally, you find that there’s a kind of condemnation of settler violence, and people say this is really terrible. And this is not, you know, this is not who Israel is, this is not who Israel should be. That kind of thing. It’s a little bit similar sometimes to the way those same people talk about Itamar Ben-Gvir. When they have to talk about Itamar Ben-Gvir, they’ll say, Itamar Ben-Gvir is an extremist, he’s a radical, you know, he’s not a good guy, he’s not like those other mainstream Israeli politicians.
I want to suggest that there’s something fundamentally incoherent about this response. That just as Itamar Ben-Gavir can’t be disassociated from Israeli politics as a whole, given that his rise was facilitated by Benjamin Netanyahu, who needed to help broker the deal with him and the other national religious parties in order to bring him into the government to create a coalition. So, he’s not a rogue actor. He’s actually a very critical ally, someone who’s been very critical to Benjamin Netanyahu’s continuing in power.
Settler violence is also not a rogue activity. It’s not something that happens separate from the Israeli state, or the Israeli mainstream. And I want to quote from a report that B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, did, which was called, Settler Violence = State Violence. And they write: ‘the state takes over land openly.’ They’re talking about Israeli state taking over land in the West Bank from Palestinian land. They’re saying:
‘The state takes over land openly using official methods sanctioned by legal advisors and judges, while the settlers, who are also interested in taking over land to further their agenda, initiate violence against Palestinians for their own reasons. Yet in truth, there is only one track. Settler violence against Palestinians is part of the strategy employed by Israel’s apartheid regime, which seeks to take over more and more West Bank land. The state fully supports and assists these acts of violence, and its agents sometimes participate in them directly. As such, settler violence is a form of government policy aided and abetted by official state authorities with their active participation.’
Now, that’s not to say there aren’t Israeli officials who might be genuinely upset or even appalled by things that settlers do. They may think it’s terrible PR. They may even think that they’re morally wrong.
Again, to use a kind of crude analogy, we can imagine a situation in the Jim Crow South where there were things that the Ku Klux Klan did that segregationist leaders wished they hadn’t done. It was a bad reputation. It just wasn’t the way they wanted to do business. But the general thrust of the policy, right, in the Jim Crow South was to keep Black people down, to deny them their basic rights, their basic freedom, through a whole mechanism of violence, some state-sanctioned and some outside of the state, but which could not take place—the Ku Klux Klan could not have operated without the fact that the white-controlled judicial system gave them, you know, almost total impunity.
Similarly, settlers can only do what they do, the settlements require government support to exist in the first place, and the settlers could not continue to act this way against Palestinians without the base large-scale impunity that they exist in a political system in which the people who they are victimizing don’t have citizenship, don’t have the right to vote, are not truly represented by the state, and therefore can’t take meaningful legal action against them, except in the rarest of circumstances.
So, Israel’s defenders who say, this settler violence is terrible. I’m opposed to it. They may genuinely think it’s terrible. They may genuinely think they are opposed to it. But they’re not really opposed to it unless they’re willing to do something that would make it stop. And the thing that would make it stop would be to change U.S. policy towards Israel, right? The only thing that would make it stop would be if there were severe consequences for the Israeli government for allowing it to continue, right?
And so, the question I think one should ask any defender of Israel, whether it’s a, you know, Jewish official, or a politician, or a kind of someone in the media who says, I’m against settler violence, is, would you be willing to condition American military aid—all of it, or even some of American military aid on Israel stopping this settler violence? Would you be willing to support a process in international legal institutions to punish Israel for allowing the settler violence that terrorizes Palestinians?
Overwhelmingly, the answer to that question will be, no, we are not willing to support that. Because although we say we oppose settler violence, our most fundamental commitment is unconditional U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support for Israel. And so, because of that, we will say we oppose settler violence, but we’re not actually willing to support any of the tangible consequences by which the U.S. could use its substantial leverage over Israel to actually end the status of impunity that allows Israel to do this.
And that’s why I think the claim by supporters of Israel and the United States that they oppose settler violence is fundamentally hollow. Again, they may believe they oppose settler violence, but there’s often a difference between what people believe and what their actions actually do, right? We can tell what people’s truest belief systems are by the actions they pursue, right? And if the actions you pursue is unconditional U.S. support for Israel period, then you’re not actually opposed to settler violence, because you don’t want your government, the United States government, to do the things that might actually stop settler violence.
Actually it's a continuation of a previous article under the title" A good analysis" again from the very interesting site by Peter Beinart, I divided the article into two parts to better fit our blog, the other part will appear soon on our blog, the subjects are sort of related, as they deal with Israel and its occupation and behavior towards its Palestinian population by its present political regime. Again this article will shed more light to the sad and tragic situation over there.
My many thanks to all.
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