West Bank Palestinians are defenseless in the face of Israeli violence

A Palestinian family from the West Bank flees their home due to threats from Israeli settlers

The Haaretz lead editorial on 18 December 2023:

At a time when everyone’s eyes are trained on Gaza, serious developments are taking place in the West Bank that are creating new facts on the ground, many of them irreversible.

Many settlers see the war in Gaza as an opportunity to effect fundamental changes in the West Bank and do things they would never dare to do in ordinary times. They are abusing their Palestinian neighbors, attacking them and vandalizing their property more violently than ever in the past.

The Israel Defense Forces has not only failed to stop them but in many cases has backed them up, acting aggressively and with excessive lethal force against the Palestinians.  The two developments are connected and have produced the same results, namely to force Palestinians to leave their villages and their land, in particular in two places – the southern Hebron hills and in the northern Jordan Valley.

There, an entirely defenseless population – communities of shepherds with no means of protecting themselves – have become victims of what is in effect a transfer that no one in Israel is talking about.

Since the war began, the residents of 16 shepherd communities in the southern Hebron hills have been forced to abandon their villages under threat from settlers. In the northern Jordan Valley, 20 families have left their villages for the same reason.

Meanwhile, more and more Palestinians are being killed on an almost daily basis, all across the West Bank, many of them innocent of any offense. In the Tul Karm area alone, 50 people have been killed since October 7; in the Ramallah area more than 30 have been killed. Many of the victims were shot to death by settlers whose fingers are lighter than ever on the trigger knowing that between the Gaza war and the extreme right-wing government in power, they will face no consequences.

Soldiers, too, shoot Palestinians with unacceptable ease while deadly air attacks on dense concentrations of people frequently occur in the refugee camps near Jenin and Tul Karm.

With the killings comes the destruction: Gideon Levy and Alex Levac reported last week that the damage done to the Jenin refugee camp has turned it into a Little Gaza. The Washington Post described it in similar terms in a special report from Jenin.

In the northern Jordan Valley, the army has played a role in all this, for example, by preventing the supply of water to the residents of villages in the area for several days. To the already difficult economic situation arising from the ban on West Bank Palestinians working in Israel, dozens of additional internal barriers have been erected since the war that further embitter the lives of Palestinians.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed miserably on October 7. Now, with the backing he is giving to the settlers and the army, and his venomous rhetoric against the Palestinian Authority, he is setting Israel up for the emergence of a second front in the West Bank.

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