Israel's front-line thugs

Consistent stands against the depravity of the West Bank's lawless settlers are the only way to put an end to their crimes.


Seth Freedman guardian.co.uk, Thursday August 07 2008 08:00 BST

News that 'leftwing' activists are facing increased pressure to stay out of the West Bank is a worrying development in local politics, especially at a time when settler attacks on Palestinians are on the increase. Rather than clamp down on the settlers perpetrating the violence, the authorities are pursuing a path of locking the doors to the outside world and pretending that nothing at all is amiss.

Not all settlers are inherently violent; to portray their entire subgroup as such is as disingenuous as claiming that all Palestinians are fanatics just because there are radical elements in their midst. However, just because all settlers shouldn't be tarred with the same brush doesn't excuse the inaction and indifference on the part of the Israeli authorities when faced with the crimes of the extremists among the settler population.

Of late, there has been a steady stream of brutal assaults carried out by settlers against their Palestinian neighbours in the West Bank, right under the noses of the lackadaisical army. The phenomenon is, sadly, nothing new; what has brought the story back into the spotlight are the efforts of human rights groups, such as B'Tselem to film the violence and document the shocking reality on the ground – which is why, it seems, the authorities are so keen to clamp down on their activity in the region.

However, the settlers don't confine their vindictive and vicious attacks to Palestinians; they are not averse to attacking their Jewish peers either. Two recent incidents amply demonstrated the extent to which the Wild West Bank has become bandit country, with no sheriff's posse daring to stand up to the rogue elements holding the region at ransom.

First up was a Breaking the Silence tour to Hebron, whose bus was surrounded by jeering settlers who blocked their path and showered those aboard with abuse. Instead of intervening on behalf of the victims of the threatening mob, the police "did not manage to disperse the mob", "no arrests were made", and in the end they simply ordered the tour group to return from whence they came.

Then another Breaking the Silence group came under attack from settler vigilantes, who doused the participants with boiling water after confronting them in the streets of Hebron and heckling them with cries of "traitor", and other such hostile invective.

For anyone who's been to Hebron, Kiryat Arba, or any of the settlements which play home to the extremist hardcore of the settler movement, incidents such as those in Hebron, or the assaults in Susiya, are by no means surprising. Being subjected to settler abuse and attack is part and parcel of the experience for Israeli left-wingers and Palestinian locals alike. Sordid as it may be, the depths to which many settlers have sunk is merely a symptom of the malaise infecting Israeli society, rather than the cause.

Radical elements exist in every religion, in every ethnic group, and in every country. Human nature dictates that there will always be those for whom conforming to societal norms is antithetic to their bigoted, boorish ways – but that is when those charged with keeping order in society are meant to be put into play. In Israel, the state apparatus should, in theory, be mobilised to full effect to quell any illegal activity, whether carried out by right- or left-winger, Jew or gentile.

The security forces are, of course, by no means scared to act when it suits them. Palestinian demonstrations are routinely put down with excessive force: rocks flung by pre-teens are countered with rubber bullets, tear gas, and – often – live and indiscriminate fire.

But when it comes to clamping down on violence emanating from the settler community, a different set of rules apply, and the authorities' reeking hypocrisy is exposed as endemic to the way in which they view the different strands of Israeli society.

I've witnessed the double standards for myself countless times, from the kid-glove treatment my platoon used when evicting the settlers of Homesh to the heavy-handed brutality meted out by the border police in the Palestinian villages of Bil'in and Nilin. What is explained away as "necessary in the interests of security" in one situation is turned on its head in another; softly-softly replacing an all-out show of force, simply because the assailants in question are religious Jews rather than Muslims.

The longer the duplicity is allowed to thrive in the military and political spheres in Israel, the worse the violence will get on the part of the settlers' lunatic fringe. Giving them carte blanche to engage in low-level crime only encourages them to see how much more they can get away with, in their attempts to intimidate and bully anyone they see as against them in their holy war.

There's unlikely to be a sea-change any time soon in the upper echelons of Israeli politics, given their tacit support of the settlement enterprise in turning a blind eye to illegal construction, and the army's providing of military support to settlers the length and breadth of the West Bank. However, there has to be a concerted effort on the parts of all with an interest in human rights to follow B'Tselem's lead and apply sufficient pressure on Israeli judges to see court cases through to a satisfactory conclusion.

Only by taking consistent and courageous stands against the depravity of the lawless settlers will there be an end to their crimes. The police force and army seem uninterested in calling them to heel, or allowing activists to bear witness to their crimes; it can only be hoped that the legal system is made of sterner, and more moral, stuff than them.

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/07/israelandthepalestinians.mi

Zionism's Terrorists Told Brits: Quit Palestine Or Die
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article4360655.ece

When You Shoot the Messenger: Israel Brutalizes Palestinian Journalist http://www.publish.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/07/402564.html

Award-Winning Palestinian Journalist Brutalized by Israeli Shin Bet http://www.publish.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/07/402401.html

Israel shaken by troops' tales of brutality against Palestinians http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/21/israel

10-year-old subjected to torture by Israeli soldiers
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m45397&hd=&size=1&l=e

Palestinians Catch Settler-Extremist Attack On Film http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/06/400996.html

In Bid to Provoke Gaza War, Settler-Extremists Fake Kidnapping http://www.israel.indymedia.org/newswire/display/9236/index.php

Settler-Extremists Fire Mortar Into W. Bank Village
http://www.israel.indymedia.org/newswire/display/9281/index.php

Israeli settlers bind Palestinian teacher to pole and club him
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=30340

Israeli Settlers Attack British Diplomats
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/08/405746.html

Israeli Settlers Prevent Christian Service in Beit Sahour, Assault Worshippers
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/08/405771.html

As Predicted: Soldiers Filmed Shooting Bound Palestinian Escape Prosecution
https://publish.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/08/405938.html

Settler-Extremists Throw Palestinian Boy Off Roof
https://publish.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/08/405937.html

Despite a veritable MSM blackout on this, the truth about Israeli Extremism is still getting out. There is no longer any doubt about who rejects peace, and who the belligerent party is.

Imagine what the headlines would be if any of these actions had been carried out by an Arab against an Israeli.

No Middle East Peace Without Tough Love
Henry Siegman Al-Hayat - 23/04/08//

We now have word that Tony Blair, envoy of the Middle East Quartet (the UN, the EU, Russia and the United States), and German Chancellor Angela Merkel intend to organize yet another peace conference, this time in Berlin in June. It is hard to believe that after the long string of failed peace initiatives, stretching back at least to the Madrid conference of 1991, statesmen and stateswomen are recycling these failures without seemingly having a clue as to why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is even more hopeless today than before these peace exercises first got underway.

The scandal of the international community's impotence in resolving
one of history's longest bloodlettings is that it knows what the problem is but does not have the courage to speak the truth, much less deal with it. The next peace conference in Germany (or in Moscow, where the Russians want to hold it) will suffer from the same gutlessness that has marked all previous efforts. It will deal with everything except the problem primarily responsible for this
conflict's multi-generational impasse.

That problem is that for all of the sins attributable to the Palestinians - and they are legion, including inept and corrupt leadership, failed institution-building and the murderous violence of the rejectionist groups-there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state primarily because Israel's various governments, from 1967 until today, have never intended allowing such a state to come into being.

It is one thing if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a
Palestinian state until certain Israeli security concerns were dealt
with. But no government that is serious about a two-state solution to
the conflict would have pursued without let-up the theft and
fragmentation of Palestinian lands that even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible.

Given the overwhelming disproportion of power between the occupier and the occupied, it is hardly surprising that Israeli governments and their military and security establishments found it difficult to resist the acquisition of Palestinian land. What is astounding is that the international community, pretending to believe Israel's claim that it is the victim and its occupied subjects the aggressors, has allowed this devastating dispossession to continue and the law of the jungle to prevail.

As long as Israel knows that by delaying the peace process it buys
time to create facts on the ground that will prove irreversible, and that the international community will continue to indulge Israel's pretense that its desire for a two-state solution is being frustrated by the Palestinians, no new peace initiative can succeed, and the dispossession of the Palestinian people will indeed become irreversible.

There can be no greater delusion on the part of Western countries
weighed down by guilt about the Holocaust than the belief that
accommodating such an outcome would be an act of friendship to the Jewish people. The abandonment of the Palestinians now is surely not an atonement for the abandonment of European Jewry seventy years ago, nor will it serve the security of the State of Israel and its people.

John Vinocur of the New York Times recently suggested that the
virtually unqualified declarations of support for Israel by Merkel and
French President Nicolas Sarkozy are "at a minimum an attempt to seek Israeli moderation by means of public assurances with this tacit
subtext: these days, the European Union is not, or is no longer, its
reflexive antagonist." But the expectation that uncritical Western
support of Israel would lead to greater Israeli moderation and greater willingness to take risks for peace is blatantly contradicted by the conflict's history.

Time and again, this history has shown that the less opposition Israel
encounters from its friends in the West for its dispossession of the
Palestinians, the more uncompromising its behavior. Indeed, Olmert's reaction to Sarkozy's and Merkel's expressions of eternal solidarity and friendship have had exactly that result: Olmert approved massive new construction in East Jerusalem- authorizing
housing projects that were frozen for years by previous governments because of their destructive impact on the possibility of a peace agreement-as well as continued expansion of Israel's settlements. And Olmert's defense minister, Ehud Barak, declared shortly after Merkel's departure that he will remove only a token number of the more than 500 checkpoints and roadblocks that Israel has repeatedly promised, and just as repeatedly failed, to dismantle.

That announcement shattered whatever hope Palestinians may have had for recovery of their economy as a consequence of the seven billion dollars in new aid promised by the international donor community in Paris last December. In these circumstances, the donor countries, not to speak of the private sector, will not pour good money after bad, as they so often have in the past.

So what is required of statesmen is not more peace conferences or
clever adjustments to previous peace formulations, but the moral and
political courage to end their collaboration with the massive hoax the
peace process has been turned into. Of course, Palestinian violence
must be condemned and stopped, particularly when it targets civilians. But is it not utterly disingenuous to pretend that Israel's
occupation-maintained by IDF-manned checkpoints and barricades,
helicopter gunships, jet fighter planes, targeted assassinations and
military incursions, not to speak of the massive theft of Palestinian
lands-is not itself an exercise in continuous and unrelenting violence
against more than 3 million Palestinian civilians? If Israel were to
renounce violence, could the occupation last even one day?

Israel's designs on the West Bank are not much different than the
designs of the Arab forces that attacked the Jewish state in 1948 - the nullification of the international community's partition resolution of
1947. Short of addressing the problem by its right name-something that is of an entirely different order than hollow statements that
"settlements do not advance peace"-and taking effective collective
action to end a colonial enterprise that disgraces what began as a
noble Jewish national liberation struggle, further peace conferences,
no matter how well intentioned, make their participants accessories to one of the longest and cruelest deceptions in the annals of
international diplomacy.


* Henry Siegman, director of the US/Middle East Project in New York, is research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Siegman is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.

That's not relevant here, Plant.

That's not relevant here, Plant. Change the Subject is Disinfromation. As you know ...

Two days ago, another British delegation, brought into the W. Bank by "Breaking the Silence" was attacked by fanatical Settler-Extremists, desperate to keep the reality of their war from the world.

This time, their 'leader' actually confronted the delegates. It's becoming unmistakably clear who the belligerent party here, and world's shameful Appeasement of this Fascist, Apartheid state is soon to end.

"Gee, these Brits sure are tough, if they get yelled at or if someone kicks an ARMOURED car, they are 'under attack.' "

Remember that the next time the IDF shoots an eight year old in the head for throwing rocks at a tank ...

This is simply part of an emerging pattern of increasingly-violent Settler-Extremist terrorism.

Lets think about this display of bravery and hyperbole by these Brits.

These British Israel haters go to specifically incite and provoke. When their provovcation doesn't result in the 'settler violence' which they desire, they decide to charecterize being yelled at and having an ARMORED car kicked as an 'attack.'

Typical fascists

unbelievable functional failure
Nothing ever said or posted is ever seen or read by these cultists if it shows the reality of these vicious and petty racists.
The list of abuse is not confined by zionist shysters as "kicking an ARMORED car" as they would like to invent this strawman [ no one, except the psychopathic zionists would invent this ] to then flail against.
Scroll up and check out the links.
It would be nice if these racists confined their actions to such ridiculous inversions of reality.

check out the links in the header whom the zionists would rather distract you from.
There is far more here than kicking cars. And zionazi jabber.

Was anyone actually even touched? Certainly no one was injured. Yet these brave Brits charecterize it as ATTACK.

Yeah, we're all impressed

Boy, talk about numbing moronicy. Or unrelenting jabber.
Like the spam they are assaulting this IMC with.
Strawmen of their own making, as usual. On the boards, ferverishly typing to smother any truth with zionazi parrot talk.
Hey zionists, dress like a civilian in Gaza and throw some rocks or kick at an IDF tank.

Everyone else
check out the links the zionsts don't want you to follow.

"Gee, these Brits sure are tough, if they get yelled at or if someone kicks an ARMOURED car, they are 'under attack.' "

Remember that the next time the IDF shoots an eight year old in the head for throwing rocks at a tank ...

This is simply part of an emerging pattern of increasingly-violent Settler-Extremist terrorism.

I'd like to hear the Plant address the many other examples of recently-exposed Settler-Extremist violence. Actually, no, I'd rather see it banned, as so many other IMCs have done.

I find it interesting that this "article" is posted under the racism feature catagory of this website.

This article certainly smacks of racism, but of the anti-Semite variety. Most people who follow middle east media reporting come to realize that the BBC and other UK based media groups are heavily biased toward their arab reader's viewpoints.

Of course folks who believe the drival reported by these media hacks cannot fathom the point that every single arab state and the PLO has vowed to wipe out the Jewish state. Whereas the Jews have re-created an existence for themselves in their ancestral homeland, after the Nazis and the ARAB Caliph tried to exterminate them during WWII.

So it is not too surprising that these so-called media reporters take to the tactics of the Nazi regime and spew anti-Semitic rhetoric against the Jews in their pro-arab reporting.

Indymedia properly classified this article in the "RACIST" feature catagory. The author is a thinly veiled anti-Semite.

As well we should expect the zionist racist enterprise and the operatives who support it, would attempt to confuse the reader with ancillary topics.
Check out the many examples of this thuggery in the links at the header.
Shyster talk doesn't change the facts on the ground and fabricating tired echos of the preposterous exclamation of 'anti-semetism'[ !!! ] when ever they're caught doing what they do to make life a living hell for the people of occupied Palestine.

Jewish self defense offends these "anti-zionists. Tough. Shet'l dayss are over. Dhimmi time is gone. Once we were persecuted and slaughtered because we were weak and un-armed. Now they despise use for defending ourselves with strength. Guess which sounds better?

You zionist offend most Jews.
I'd call that self offence.
The zionist state is a murder machine painted with peace signs as it goes about grinding the people of occupied Palestine into the bloody dust of their homeland.

Let's reconsttitute the Arab nation of 'Palestine' with EXACTLY the same borders as it had in 1880, same dynasty of kings, same currency, same unique language religion and culture as it had then.

where the zionsts use the nazt like technique of delegitimization towards a people.
And the editorial staff ignores the "hate/insult" tag for these latter day nazis.

Let's reconstitute the Arab nation of 'Palestine' with EXACTLY the same borders as it had in 1880, same dynasty of kings, same currency, same unique language religion and culture as it had then.

Let's reconstitute the zionist nation of 'israel' with EXACTLY the same borders as it had in 1880.