Area C, where I am heading today, constitutes over 60 percent of the West Bank. This area contains the most Israeli settlements in the West Bank, besides those in East Jerusalem, and has about 400,000 settlers and 300,000 Palestinians. It is under complete IOF control. As many people know, settlements are illegal under international law. It is also a war crime for Israel to transfer its civilian population into occupied territories. But in the face of this fact, 24,300 new Israeli housing units were built in the occupied West Bank in the last year, and the Biden Administration recently authorized another $14 billion in further military assistance since October of last year.
Donate to sustain the work, here!
Settler violence has been on the rise, and there have been hundreds of murders as well as 1,143 officially documented attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. The actual number is much higher, though, as the vast majority of crimes aren’t reported. This is because the IOF either won’t do anything (the conviction rate for settler assailants is less than 3%) or will arrest the Palestinians who were targeted.
While the United States, by and large, does not seek accountability and justice for acts of violence against civilians in the West Bank, one small way our government pushes back is through sanctioning some Zionist companies and individuals. Through sanctions, U.S.-held assets are frozen and funds kept in the U.S. are blocked. Sometimes a travel ban is imposed. The 27 nations that make up the European Union, as well as Japan and Canada, have also enacted sanctions.
Groups in the occupied West Bank that have been sanctioned by the U.S. include a group called Hilltop Youth, which we commonly interact with in the south. They repeatedly poison or prevent access to water wells, destroy homes and other property, vandalize churches and mosques, commit mass arson, kill livestock, uproot olive trees, and beat up and murder Palestinians. They call these “price tag” attacks, meaning anyone operating against their interests must pay a price. For Palestinians that is simply existing.
Other sanctioned groups include Amana, which has encouraged attacks and provides funds to many dangerous people already sanctioned, Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva, a religious school embedded in the Yitzhar Settlement that promotes violence against non-Jewish people, and Torat Lechima, which provides funding and resources to illegal settler outposts as well as settlers themselves. In addition, the extremist group Lehava, which opposes intermarriage and the assimilation of Jews with Arabs, and has promoted violence against non-Jews, has been been sanctioned. Lehava criticized the sanction, saying the group will not stop its actions. “[The U.S.’s] measures won’t deter us – we’ll continue to act fearlessly to save Israel’s daughters, much to the dismay of Biden and Israel’s other enemies,” the group said in a public statement.
Hashomer Yosh, an organization that provides volunteers for illegal outposts, has similarly been sanctioned. Earlier this year, Hashomer Yosh fenced off the Palestinian village Khirbet Zanuta, preventing displaced residents from returning to their homes. However, Hashomer Yosh, like many Zionist companies, receives political and material support from the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Environment, and from individual Zionist lawmakers.
How effective are sanctions when settlers and settlements are backed by the Israeli government? And when they give impunity to those who commit crimes? The IOF soldiers don’t just back the settlers, they are the settlers. Netanyahu puts extremist Zionist settlers in top ministerial positions where they can seek retribution against organizations tracking settler violence. For example, settler and Israeli Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich, party leader for Religious Zionism, and member of the Defense Ministry, diverted 75 million shekels to illegal settler outposts in the West Bank. And convicted criminal Itamar Ben Gvir became the Minister of National Security and gave explicit orders to the police to stand down on nationalist crimes committed by settlers.
Recently, Israel’s settlement-planning authority gave permits for nearly 3,500 new housing units in occupied Palestinian territory. A sanction by a foreign country is a small slap on the wrist. They do not challenge the Israeli government in any way, but instead reinforce the narrative of “a few bad apples.”
The U.S.-based human rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) said that “the sanctions will never put an end to settler violence unless they start targeting the state institutions and politicians who treat settlers as a tool of their expansionist policies.” But as long as sanctions only target individual violent settlers and politicians while ignoring the state infrastructure that backs them, violence will continue. The settlement enterprise, along with the entire Zionist system, needs to be dismantled to ensure peace.
On my way to Masafer Yatta we stopped in Hebron / Al-Khalil to visit with human rights defender Badee Dweik. We met him in the old part of town at the Friends Hostel. When I mentioned staying at the Natural History Museum in Bethlehem last spring, Badee told us about how he and Dr. Mazen Qumsiyeh (the founder) once organized a protest — based on the Civil Rights Freedom Riders movement in the U.S. — where they and four other Palestinians boarded an Israeli apartheid bus.
The group began the action by the bus stop near the illegal settlement Kochav Ya’acov at 3:30. They planned to go on the route to East Jerusalem / Al-Quds, and arranged in advance to have journalists waiting nearby where they predicted they would eventually be arrested. Dr. Qumsiyeh had a secret camera pinned on his shirt to film the entire event.
The first five buses did not stop for them because, as Badee told us, the drivers could tell they were Palestinian based on the color of their skin. While they were waiting, an IOF military jeep filled with soldiers parked nearby, but finally the sixth apartheid bus stopped for them and they boarded. Once on, they waved a Palestinian flag, which was illegal and grounds for imprisonment during the First and Second Intifadas, and still is considered a bold symbol of resistance.
They made it to the Hizmeh Checkpoint before border police and army surrounded the bus. Soldiers entered and told them to leave, but they refused. When the bus driver was questioned, he said that it was a mistake and that he never would have stopped if he had known they were Palestinians.
The bus stood for an hour, during which Badee was pulled off the bus and dropped on the floor. But he returned to his seat. Eventually the entire group was forcibly dragged out and into the military vans. They were not released until almost 10 at night. They knew the only reason they were not put in prison, or worse, was due to the media attention.
While it is illegal for Palestinians without Israeli permits and ID cards to go to the holy city of Al-Quds / Jerusalem and to pass through Jewish-only settlements, nowhere does Israeli law say those without them can’t ride the segregated public transport system. The group wanted to protest the racist colonial regime and to gain international attention to share how Israel has stripped them of human rights. Through this action they highlighted the injustice of the occupation and showed how segregation of Palestinians is very similar to how the U.S. treated Black people in the 1960s (and still treats BIPOCs today).
Zionists and white supremacists are the same. In an interview, Basel, one of the people arrested, said “the settlers are to Israel what the KKK was to the Jim Crow South — an unruly, fanatical mob that has enormous influence in shaping Israeli politics today, and that enforces these policies with extreme violence and utter impunity all over the occupied Palestinian territory.” I would argue that all Zionists are racists on par with the KKK, Nazis, and all other extremist supremacist groups.
