Israel Prevents Palestinians From Defending Themselves as It Empowers the Settlers

Relatives mourn during the funeral of 19-year-old Palestinian Qosai Mi’tan, in the West Bank village of Burqa, last week.

The sweeping ban is enshrined in military legislation, in praxis that is entrenched in the Israel Defense Forces and among prosecutors and the courts amid an atmosphere of Jewish supremacy, as well as in the Oslo Accords. It’s a complex matrix in which every component is linked to another and holds it in place.

It’s no wonder that the Shin Bet and the army are worried. There’s no need for information from collaborators or sophisticated eavesdropping equipment to know that this outrageous reality is like a container of cluster bombs, which any smug settler with curly sidelocks and a kippa and rifle could blow it up. But the Shin Bet and the army – including the military prosecutor and the military court – are hamstrung by a reality that they themselves have shaped and maintained. This matrix explains how the attacks are made possible and why they and their perpetrators are proliferating among Jews who are purportedly observant and God-fearing.

Let’s start with the military rule. According to international law, it has an obligation to protect the well-being and welfare of the (occupied) protected civilian population. The IDF is not respecting the law, because Israel’s land-theft project, which it protects, conflicts with the very definition and existence of the well-being and welfare of that civilian population. The army isn’t protecting them from violent Jewish civilians because its primary mission in the West Bank is to protect Israeli citizens. Or more precisely, the Jews among them, particularly those carrying out the dispossession project in which the settlements are engaged.

Even if not all of the commanders and soldiers have identified with the settlement project from the beginning and with its dictates, over the years the obligation to defend the Jewish settler alone has been internalized. Generations of soldiers have been tamed to believe that failure to protect Palestinians is a value, axiom and order. And what follows from that is repeated scenes of soldiers standing on the sidelines in the face of pogroms, or even helping the Jewish rioters attack Palestinians and expelling them from their land. Therefore, when left-wing activists accompany the Palestinians, the fact that they’re Jewish doesn’t help them. The soldiers attack and expel them too by declaring areas closed military zones.

“No march, gathering or picketing is to be held without a permit from the military commander …,” Order 101 from August 1967 states in connection with the ban on incitement and hostile propaganda. Palestinians therefore know that if 20 or 100 of them set out to protect a shepherd or a farmer, the soldiers “will disperse” them as an illegal gathering through the means at their disposal: from teargas and beatings to live fire.

For some reason, the army wasn’t on the scene last Friday when devout Jews set out to graze their herd on Burqa’s land a short time before the onset of the Sabbath. That was strange, because on an almost regular basis, both day and night, the army stations a vehicle near the Ramat Migron outpost. But even if soldiers had been there, there’s no doubt they would have immediately dispersed “the illegal gathering” of the residents of Burqa and not the invading settlers. That’s what has and continues to happen at every Palestinian village whose land or springs are taken over by settlers, or at Palestinians’ groves that they vandalize.

It has actually been happening, for example, in recent months at the village of Qaryut north of Ramallah. Every Friday, a group of Israelis from the nearby settlements (Eli, Shiloh and their outposts) come to bathe in the spring in the heart of the village, as a means of expropriating it (after already taking over three other villages’ springs in the area). The army is in the vicinity (and even arrives before the settlers do) to prevent the Palestinian residents from driving out the invading settlers, who include small children.

Then come the army’s nighttime raids on the homes of the villagers who dare resist the trespassing: with arrests and trials in front of Jewish military judges, followed by several months in prison and heavy fines to ensure that the residents give up in despair and stop trying to drive the trespassers from their land. Military legislation bars the Palestinians from possessing or using weapons. As stated in Security Order No. 1651 from 2009: “The carrying, possessing or manufacture of weapons without a permit from the military commander or someone on his behalf, or that is not in accordance with the conditions of the permit certificate, is grounds for life in prison.”

Israeli settlers, who (when it suits them) are subject instead to Israeli law, are issued weapon permits by the National Security Ministry’s license division. Members of the Palestinian security forces receive permits from Israel to possess weapons, but only in the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority enclaves designated as Area A. They are also allowed to carry them for limited periods in Area B (which is under Palestinian civil control and Israeli military control) following exhausting coordination. Beyond these enclaves, the Oslo Accords bar them from acting. And in any event, even in the enclaves of Areas A and B, they are barred from operating as agencies enforcing law and order when Jews attack Palestinians. Palestinian police aren’t even allowed to display their weapons to deter Jewish rioters who harm their fellow Palestinians, let alone use them. (If they did, they would be arrested as terrorists.) They are also not allowed to arrest Jewish rioters in the Palestinian enclaves, let alone beyond them.

The Palestinian Authority is prohibited from prosecuting Jewish rioters in a Palestinian court for incursions and vandalism. “The Palestinian police will be responsible for handling incidents concerning public order involving Palestinians only,” reads Article 13 of the interim Oslo agreement. The PA, led by Mahmoud Abbas, continues to respect this clause religiously and has failed to adjust its methods and tactics to suit the new reality.

Article 15 of the Oslo Agreement, called “Prevention of Hostile Acts,” says: “Both sides will take all necessary measures to prevent acts of terrorism, crime and hostility directed against each other, against people under the authority of the other side and against their property, and legal measures will be taken against criminals.”

There is a lot of false symmetry in this sentence, because the PA is not a sovereign state, and, like its people, it is subject to Israeli military occupation, which has shown again and again that it has no intention of thwarting settler violence. Forbidden to protect its people from violent Jews, the PA is left with the obligation to act against its people.

The PA police, security, and civilian and military intelligence arms, which arrest Palestinians for speaking against the Palestinian leadership and which Israel wants to resume operating in Nablus and Jenin, are not at all present in the dozens of villages and communities in Areas B and C, where their own people are subjected to daily terror by Israeli settlers.

Just this week, Al Qabun, a Palestinian community of shepherds that counts 12 families (86 people), was forced to pull up stakes in the Jordan Valley due to the harassment from the surrounding outposts. This is the fourth community in the area forced to flee in recent months to Area B, due to a combination of settler harassment, building and movement bans by Israel’s Civil Administration and the absence of any force to protect them.

This obvious contradiction and the injustice it reflects are surely troubling and painful to many Palestinians who serve in the PA security forces. They certainly should trouble their leaders and senior members of the Fatah movement and the PA. It is not clear how long and at what personal and political cost they will be able to continue to contain the growing popular rage against them.

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