THE following article by Wafa Aludaini appeared on the Hamas website ‘Palestinian Information Centre’. She is a Gaza-based journalist and activist, reporting on how Palestinians live under the Israeli occupation:
‘IN THE intensive care room in the Bethlehem Arab Society for Rehabilitation (BASR) lies four-year-old Jibreel Sawarka.
The Palestinian toddler is in an extremely critical condition after being hit in a car ramming attack by an Israeli settler in the Palestinian village of Kisan, east of Bethlehem in the Occupied West Bank.
Jibreel was playing near his house with his brother when the settler struck him with his car and then fled.
Jibreel’s father, Mohammed, said: ‘My 13-year-old Yehya came holding his brother covered in blood – it was a very gruesome sight.’ Mohammed noted that the street where his son was attacked is used by both illegal Israeli settlers and Palestinians who live in Kisan. However, Palestinians are not allowed to drive down the road, instead they must walk the length of it.
There have been multiple hit-and-run attacks on this stretch of road, and they have recently increased in frequency.
OCHA has documented 591 settler-related incidents resulting in Palestinian casualties, property damage or both in the first six months of 2023, reaching a monthly average of 99 attacks this year.
Settler terrorism has persisted in the occupied West Bank for years. The attacks have risen since Israel swore in its most right-wing government in December. Now, illegal settlers are in power in the Israeli Knesset and are working to legalise settler violence under the definition of ‘self-defence’, even as they incite violence and hate.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich outlined his ‘Decisive Plan’, a vision in which he called for ‘victory through settlement’. The plan, proposed and penned in 2017, would require ‘the encouragement of tens and hundreds of thousands of residents to come live in Judea and Samaria’, the Biblical name for the occupied West Bank, and almost double the number of settlers in the occupied territories.
The government has given Smotrich practically all control over the expansion of existing settlements.
During the past week alone, two Palestinians were executed by Israeli fire. In the town of Silwad, east of Ramallah, a 17-year-old Palestinian teenager succumbed to the wounds he sustained days before after an illegal Jewish settler opened fire at him while he was in a car near the illegal settlement of Ofra.
In a separate incident, armed Jewish settlers raided the Palestinian village of Burqa and opened fire at residents, executing 19-year-old Qusai Maatan. The teen’s father, Jammal, said: ‘My son was defending us.
‘When he heard the screaming of the villagers during the invasion, he ran out quickly to confront the Zionist settlers and stop them.’ Qusai was the family’s bread-winner.
‘We only have stones to prevent them from continuing to terrorise our people and razing our properties,’ Jammal said, adding that the settlers also set fire to two Palestinian vehicles. ‘The settlers also brought their sheep to a plot of land in an apparent attempt to seize it for the benefit of establishing a pastoral outpost.’
Israeli newspaper Ynet News reported that recent Israeli terror attacks can be described as premeditated and well-organised acts of provocation, specifically designed to target Palestinian civilians.
The settler who murdered Maatan had served as a spokesperson for a member of Israel’s Knesset who is a member of racist minister Otamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit Party. He came from the illegal Ramat Migron outpost.
After his arrest, he was released and the case was closed, with investigators convinced that the settler acted in self-defence. In a bold and clear statement, Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister praised the murderer and indicated that he should get a ‘medal of honour’.
Haaretz also recently revealed videos of Israeli settlers, escorted by heavily armed occupation forces, invading Palestinian homes in the West Bank villages of Tuba and El-Abid in the southern Hebron Hills in the same week as the attack on Burqa.
The video shows Israeli settlers ordering a Palestinian woman to open a storage closet in her home.
In another video, a settler is seen entering a home as a soldier stands at the entrance. Settler violence against Palestinians takes many forms, including setting fire to fields and livestock, physical violence, shooting, car-rammings, theft and vandalism of property, trees and crops and intimidating farmers and their families, among other attacks.
This after less than a year of this right-wing government being in power. What awaits the Palestinian cause is extremely dangerous if the Israeli occupation authorities continue to fund and encourage the relentless Israeli settler violence and attacks.
- A second opinion piece from the Hamas news website comes from Eitay Mack, an Israeli lawyer and human rights activist located between Jerusalem and Oslo. He represents Palestinians who were harmed by Israel’s security forces in the occupied West Bank.
Here, he makes the comparison between Israeli and South African apartheid:
Between 1990 and 1994, South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk no longer outlawed African liberation movements, released Nelson Mandela from prison and negotiated with him, and led a series of reforms to dismantle the apartheid regime.
The Truth Commission report, released in December 1995, described in detail how one of the reactions to the dramatic reforms was the strengthening of the activities of far-right militias and the so-called ‘Third Force’ – ‘anonymous’ elements that were neither officially connected to the regime nor its opponents in the liberation movements.
The ‘Third Force’ was responsible for the rise of political violence and instability in South Africa ahead of the general elections in April 1994, seeking to sabotage the country’s transition to democracy.
Among other things, the clandestine group orchestrated violent incitement, random shootings, attacks on public transportation commuters which killed hundreds, murders of pro-democracy activists and large-scale massacres.
The report found no sufficient evidence directly tying the ‘Third Force’ to the top echelons of the regime or proving that the group was part of a hidden strategy of the de Klerk government.
However, it exposed current and former members of the security forces, including senior officials, as members of the group, which the de Klerk government did not effectively shut down.
During the Seven Day War, which took place between 25-31 March 1990 in the Pietermaritzburg area, thousands of armed men of the Bantustan KwaZulu’s militia, together with white far-right activists, raided the homes of individuals associated with the African National Congress (ANC) and other liberation movements, killing about 200 people, destroying 3,000 houses and displacing 20,000 civilians who were forced to flee their homes.
Most of the victims were women, children, the sick and the elderly who could not escape fast enough.
The Truth Commission found evidence that police officers and soldiers supported the attackers with weapons and intelligence and even assisted in the commission of the crimes themselves, including transporting the attackers, standing by during the attacks and participating in the attacks.
Pretoria infiltrated secret agents into these groups whose legal limits in their activities were extremely vague, and they themselves participated directly in the armed activities of the militias.
The Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), the central armed far-right organisation, even claimed that about 40 to 60 per cent of the soldiers and police were supporters of the far-right militias.
Until the mid-1980s, these far-right groups were involved in isolated and random armed acts.
From the moment de Klerk announced the political reforms in early 1990, the violent activity of the extreme right groups became more intense and coordinated.
It included the deliberate murder of anti-apartheid activists, indiscriminate slaughter and shootings, random attacks on Africans and the widespread use of explosives.
Similar to the extreme right in South Africa, the Israeli extreme right also switched to violent attacks with multiple participants. In previous decades, Israeli far-right groups operated mainly underground and in secret cells. In cases where attacks were carried out in public, the perpetrators were usually masked.
Against the background of Netanyahu’s far-right government, since the beginning of 2023, the far-right activists no longer feel the need to hide.
In February, about 400 far-right activists participated in the pogrom in Huwwara, where they spent hours setting dozens of houses, apartments, chicken coops and shops, and hundreds of cars on fire.
And in June, about 150 far-right activists arrived in the village of Orif and threw stones at Palestinians; about 100 activists carried out a pogrom in the village of Luban Ash-Sharqiya that included vandalising and setting fire to dozens of businesses, vehicles and houses; and about 200 activists carried out a pogrom in the village of Turmus Ayya that included the burning of dozens of homes and cars.
The Israeli far-right activists no longer have a reason to operate underground. The pogroms were openly organised on social networks and WhatsApp groups, with the participation or knowledge of members of the government and its coalition in the Knesset and their assistants.
The physical movement of the hundreds of activists towards the Palestinian villages and their entry into them was immediately identified and reported by Israeli media, Palestinian residents and human rights organisations that are in contact with them.
As in South Africa, Israeli policemen and soldiers stood by and allowed far-right activists to complete the pogroms.
The Israeli military was not even ashamed to publish a statement that the Israeli rioters were preventing it from dealing with terrorism, meaning that the right-wing activists themselves are not terrorists and the pogroms are not acts of terrorism.
Defining the pogroms as acts of revenge is also misleading. The attacks on Israeli settlers are only the excuse for choosing the date of the pogroms, but they are not what motivates them. In fact, these are events to celebrate Israeli apartheid and Jewish supremacy.
The pogroms are a natural development in the evolution of Israeli apartheid when members of the government and the coalition are avowed supporters of the far-right Rabbi Meir Kahane, and incite for committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population on both sides of the Green Line.
The pogroms are not a means but the goal itself.
