The Nazi zionists will not stop until they have stolen the whole of Palestine and driven the Palestinians out of their homeland
Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.
Cross-posted from Whitbeck blog
Originally posted in Haaretz
Photo licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
In the West Bank, no one has heard about the cease-fire in Gaza: not the army, not the settlers, not the Civil Administration and, of course, not the 3 million Palestinians who live under their tyranny. They do not feel the end of the war in the slightest.
From Jenin to Hebron, there is no cease-fire in sight. For two years there has been a reign of terror in the West Bank under the cover of the war in the Strip, which serves as a dubious pretext and a smoke screen, and there is no sign that it is about to end.
All the draconian decrees imposed on Palestinians on October 7 remain in effect; some have been made harsher. The settler violence continues, as does the involvement of the army and the police in the riots. In Gaza fewer people are being killed and displaced, but in the West Bank everything continues as if there were no cease-fire.
The Trump administration, so active and resolute in Gaza, turns a blind eye to the West Bank and lies to itself about the situation there. Blocking the annexation is enough for it. “It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries,” President Donald Trump said last week, while behind his back, Israel is doing all it can in the West Bank to destroy, dispossess, abuse and prevent the possibility of life.
It sometimes seems that the head of the IDF Central Command, Avi Bluth, being loyal and obedient to his superior – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a minister in the Defense Ministry – is conducting a human experiment, in common cause with the settlers and the police: Let’s see how much we can torment them before they explode.
The hope that their lust for abuse would subside together with the battles in Gaza was dashed. The war in the Strip was only an excuse. When the media avoids the West Bank and most Israelis – and the Americans – don’t really care what happens there, the torment can continue.
October 7 was indeed a historic opportunity for settlers and their collaborators to do what they had not dared to do for years.
It’s no longer possible to be a Palestinian in the West Bank. It was not destroyed as Gaza was, tens of thousands of people did not die, but life there has become impossible. It is hard to see how Israel’s iron grip can persist much longer without an explosion of violence – justifiable, this time.
Between 150,000 and 200,000 Palestinians from the West Bank who had worked in Israel have been unemployed for two years. Two years without a single shekel of income. The salaries of tens of thousands of employees of the Palestinian Authority were also reduced significantly due to Israel’s withholding of tax revenue it collects for the PA.
Poverty and hardship are everywhere. So are the roadblocks and checkpoints; never before have there been so many, certainly not for such a prolonged period. There are hundreds of them now.
Every single settlement has iron gates that are closed, or that open and close in turn. There is no way to know what is open and what is not – and, more important, when. It’s all arbitrary. Everything is on account of pressure from the settlers, who have made the Israel Defense Forces their submissive servant. That’s how it is when Smotrich is the minister of the West Bank.
Approximately 120 new settlement outposts, almost all of them violent, have been established since the accursed October 7, comprising tens of thousands of acres, all with the support of the state. Not a week goes by without new outposts; also unprecedented is the scope of the ethnic cleansing that is their goal: Hagar Shezaf reported Friday that in the course of the Gaza war residents of 80 Palestinian villages in the West Bank fled for their lives out of fear of the settlers who have usurped their lands.
The face of the West Bank is changing daily. I see it with my own astonished eyes. Trump can boast about stopping the annexation, but the annexation has become more entrenched than ever.
From the command center that the U.S. military established in Kiryat Gat you might be able to see Gaza, but you cannot see Kiryat Arba, the settlement outside Hebron.
The West Bank is crying out for urgent international intervention no less than the Strip is. Soldiers – American, European, Emirati or even Turkish – someone must protect their helpless residents. Someone must rescue them from the clutches of the IDF and the settlers.
Just imagine a foreign soldier at a checkpoint stopping the settler thugs on their way to a pogrom. A dream.
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