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For obvious reasons, the devastation of Gaza has gotten so much of the attention recently, but life, post-October 7th, has also been a nightmare on the West Bank. Among other things, the grotesquely right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, as the Associated Press reported recently, approved the seizure of more Palestinian land on the West Bank than at any time in the last three decades. We're talking about more than 12.7 kilometers (or 4.9 square miles) of land in an area where Israeli settler attacks have also been on the rise and those settlers have long been all too literally unsettling local Palestinians. In fact, the most recent land grab only supplemented a striking 4.2 square miles of such land taken in February and March. As Brett Wilkins of Common Dreams points out, "Combined, these are the biggest seizures of Palestinian land since the 1993 Oslo Accords."
Only recently, as Ephrat Livni of the New York Times reported, Israeli far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich announced that at least five illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank would soon be legalized. That's of the more than 100 outposts built illegally there since the 1990s that help house the more than half a million Israeli settlers now living on the West Bank. And all of this is anything but the end of the matter. It may, in fact, only be the beginning of a push by the present Israeli government to leave Palestinians in the region, whether in a thoroughly devastated Gaza or on the West Bank, as strangers in their own land.
It couldn't be a sadder development and where it leads -- and what kind of Israel it produces -- remain unknown. But let TomDispatch regular Ellen Cantarow, who has in her own unique fashion been reporting on the unsettling of the West Bank for decades now, take you into what has indeed become a world from hell. Tom
Settled
How the Israeli Extreme Right Has Achieved Victory
In 1979, I made the first of what would turn out to be decades of periodic visits to Israel and the West Bank. I traveled there for the New York alternative publication The Village Voice to investigate Israel's growing settler movement, Gush Emunim (or the Bloc of the Faithful). The English-language Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, then reported that settlers from Kiryat Arba, a Jewish West Bank outpost, had murdered two Palestinian teenagers from the village of Halhoul. There, in one of the earliest West Bank settlements established by Gush Emunim, a distant cousin of my husband had two acquaintances. Under cover of being a Jew in search of enlightenment, I spent several days and nights with them.
Gush Emunim: The Origin of the Settlement Movement
Zvi and Hannah Eidels, my hosts, lived in a four-room apartment in the settlement, which jutted out of an otherwise lovely Mediterranean landscape dotted with stone terraces, olive trees, fruit groves, and grape vines. Kiryat Arba flanked the Palestinian city of Hebron and was an eight-minute car drive from Halhoul on which I wrote a separate article about the murder of those two teens.
My initial evening with the Eidels happened to be on the holy day of shabat.
The rush to finish cooking ended just before sundown and 32-year-old Hannah, very pregnant with her sixth child, turned to me. "Do you light?" she asked. For a moment I thought she was asking how I coped with power failures in the American economic twilight. She took me to the 10-by-12-foot living room. Just above a photograph of the spiritual father of Gush Emunim, Rabbi Avraham Kook, a bearded man with a fur-trimmed hat and heavy-lidded eyes, stood a row of candles on a tiny shelf. I suddenly recalled Friday evenings in my grandmother's apartment in Philadelphia and was unnerved to find myself, an assimilated Jew -- an atheist, no less -- standing in Kiryat Arba, once again brushing up against Orthodoxy. I nonetheless took the matchbox, lit the candles, and stood there quietly for what I hoped was a decent interval.
Later, Hannah filled me in on her theory of Jewish superiority: all of creation, she assured me, is suspended in a great chain of being. On the bottom: inanimate non-living things. A link farther up: animate vegetation. Then, non-human animal life. Next, animate non-Jews. On the top, of course, were the Jews. "This may shock you," she said, "but I don't really believe in democracy. We believe," she faltered for a moment, glancing at Zvi who was sitting quietly beside us cracking sunflower seeds and spitting the husks expertly onto a plate, "in theocracy. Right, Zvi?" "Not exactly," said Zvi. "Not a theocracy. The government of God."
Gush Emunim was both religious and militant. In a curious blend of ultra-Orthodoxy and historically secular Zionism, "the Faithful" claimed as their own some of the territories conquered in the Six-Day War, the 1967 conflict Israel fought against a coalition of Arab states, during which it took the West Bank, which its leaders called "Judea and Samaria."
"Here began our first place," one movement leader told me, "in Schechem [Nablus], where Jacob bought a plot of land. Here is the true world of Judaism."
"Some people think the goal of Zionism was peace," another Gush activist explained. "That is ridiculous. The goal of Zionism is to construct a people on its land." But, he continued, "there were moral problems. There were Arabs living here. By what right did we throw them out? And we did throw them out" All the stuff about socialism, about national redemption, may be true, but that's only one part. The fact is, we returned here because the Eternal gave us the land. It's ridiculous, stupid, simplistic, but that's what it is. All the rest is superficial. We came back here because we belong."
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