'Settlers' or Terrorists
By Ghali Hassan
29 July, 2005
Countercurrents.orgA wounded Palestinian schoolboy, Hilal, was lying on the ground; several Jewish settlers keep stoning him while an Israeli soldier pretending to “protect” the boy. Another settler was dropping a big stone on the boy at point-blank range. A bearded Jewish medic hesitated to treat the boy when he heard the Jewish settlers threatening and chanting: ‘Let him die! Let him die!’ “’If you treat him, we'll kill you’. He turned back embarrassed, and left. The injured [schoolboy] was laying on the ground, his face covered with blood, losing consciousness”, reported Nir Hasson of the Israeli daily, Ha’aretz on 30 June 2005.
Can you imagine what will happen if the schoolboy was Jewish boy and the Jewish settlers were the native Palestinians? Chances are that the Israeli Army will kill several Palestinians and Western media, led by the BBC and CNN, and Western governments will justify Israel’s murderous action as “retaliation in self-defence”. The brutal attack on an innocent Palestinian schoolboy was hardly mentioned in Western media, and if it was, it was mentioned only in passing. I found nothing about this terrorist act in the Australian media, or the Murdoch media as it should be called. Palestinian schoolchildren are killed every day, but only a small fraction of the crimes are reported in Western media. In fact, Western media provide public sympathy for Israel and the illegal Jewish settlers by deliberately ignoring their crimes against the Palestinians.
In 1947 the indigenous Palestinian Arab population owned - privately or publicly - 93% of the country (with the Jewish community owning only 6-7%). Today Palestinian private land has decreased to around 15% of the total land area, of which about 10% is in the West Bank and Gaza as a result of Israel’s expansionist policy Israel’s illegal settlement increased daily. There are currently at least 210 settlements and 217 settlement outposts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip built illegally for Jewish settlers on incontestable Palestinian land.
Jewish settlers are heavily armed gangs constitute of mainly Israeli reservists protected and paid by Israeli state. They are Zionism’s hardcore Freikorps violent paramilitary and should be called Jewish terrorist in order to differentiate them from decent Jewish citizens. There are some 9, 0000 settlers in Gaza and between 300,000 to 400,000 settlers in the West Bank, and increasing dramatically. In Gaza the settlers control 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and most of the water. In the West Bank the settlers control 60% of the land, and most of the water resources.
One of the most known leaders of the settlers is Rabbi Baruch Marzel. Marzel and his friends have committed countless murderous crimes against Palestinians, including the massacre of 29 Palestinian worshippers by Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein. Marzel quarter in Hebron is rightly called the “Hebron terrorists”, quarter by Israeli literary critic, Ran HaCohen. They are a “criminal gang actively nurtured by the State”, a group of 450 settlers protected by 4000 Israeli troops. The Jewish settlers have “ransack Palestinian shops, cut electricity lines and water pipes, wreck cars, and attack schoolchildren” on their way to school or home. They oppose any peaceful agreement with the Palestinians and their ideology is to “redeem the land” of Palestine from no-Jews. They are the driving force behind Israel’s policy of Palestinians dispossession.
The settlers’ aim is the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine through the violence of terrorism. Their manifesto, the Hadaka (Jewish religious law) commands the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians ‘in the name of God’. “What unites them is a primitive, atavistic morality that says that ‘we’ are a superior race, God's chosen people, a master race, etc., while ‘they’ are inferior races, untermenschen. We may do to them whatever we please, with a clear conscience; they are not allowed to do to us anything at all”, wrote Israeli Peace activist Uri Avnery. “It is impossible to know how many, if any, of [Palestinian] civilians are killed by Arrangement Yeshivot – West Bank settlement religious leaders – soldiers, or soldiers commanded by kippa-wearing officers, added Uri Avnery.
Since its creation by Western powers, Israel has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, and forced another 4 millions into refugee camps in neighbouring countries. From September 2000 to May 2005, Israel has killed 4,075 Palestinians, including 880 children and 270 women. The number of Palestinians killed by Jewish settlers during this period is about 72 Palestinians. In addition, there are 36,585 injured Palestinians as a result of the daily violence perpetuated by the Israeli Army and its offshoots, the Jewish settlers.
The settlers have the full support of the Israeli Army and the state of Israel, and their violence is often condoned by the Israeli government. "We are afraid that Israeli government's laxity and inaction toward the settlers might embolden them to commit real massacres against our people”, Ahmad Subh, a Palestinian Foreign Ministry official told Al-Jazeera. In many cases one sees the settlers using Israeli Army jeeps and armours to attack peaceful Palestinians farmers picking their crops. In March 2005, the heavily armed Talmudic settlers from the settlement of Yitshar near Nablus attacked a nearby Palestinian village, Asira al Kibliya, smashing windows and injuring a number of Palestinian workers and instilling terror in Palestinian children.
In addition, the Israeli government is confiscating Palestinian land to build and expand the illegal Jewish settlements and bring more settlers into Gaza and the West Bank. Every day, Palestinian homes are demolished by the Israeli Army and new Jewish settlements are built. The construction of the Apartheid Wall – declared illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – on stolen Palestinian land serves to enforce the physical irreversibility on the ground.
The building of the Apartheid Wall – financed by $3.4 billion US-European ‘aid’ to Israel– has disrupted the daily life of the Palestinian people like never before. “To make room for its path, entire orchards and olive groves have been uprooted. Farmers have no access to what little remains of their arable land. Thousands of Palestinian homes -- over 42,165 in the West Bank -- have been demolished by the Israeli military. Tens of thousands of dunams (1 dunam = 1000 square metres) have been confiscated by the Israeli military in this systematic process”, wrote Andrew Rubin of Georgetown University.
“Check-points and road-blocks obstruct Palestinians' unfettered access to schools, health clinics, and work. Families have been physically separated; and, in one instance, a house was purportedly divided in half. In Qalqilya, the wall rises to such a height that, it is said, one can no longer see the sun set”, added Andrew Rubin. The entire Palestinian population of the West Bank are reduced to isolated prisons – like the large prison of Gaza – controlled by the Israeli Army and the whole fabric of the Palestinian society is being fractionated and destroyed.
In Gaza, according to Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem (ARIJ), “settlements have also grown over the past two years. Although the Israeli government has repeatedly stated that it intends to 'disengage' from the Gaza Strip, Israel has failed to make any progress in this regard. Instead, Israeli occupying forces have built new additions to settlements in Gaza. In this context, the 'Disengagement Plan' appears to be little more than a cleverly disguised ploy to divert attention from events unfolding in the West Bank. It is also noteworthy that Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its definite borders and is not bound by UN Resolutions. Israel is simply a ‘rogue state’ driven by imperialist policy.
In addition to the destruction caused by the Apartheid Wall, the Israeli government is exacerbating the problem by encouraging pollution from surrounding settlements to pollute Palestinian land. In April 2005, Israel allowed its Jewish settlers to convert a Palestinian quarry in the West Bank into a dump for industrial waste from Israel and Jewish colonies. More than 10,000 metric tons of wastes are set to be dumped at the site each month.
Furthermore, Jewish settlers are excessively polluting and poisoning the Palestinian environment. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported recently that about 200 olive trees around the West Bank town of Qalqilya have been poisoned and died as a result of contamination by industrial sewage pumped from nearby Jewish settlements. Other farmlands around towns and villages in the West Bank and Gaza are experiencing the same attack by Jewish settlers. According to William J. Martin of the University of Central Florida, “Israel has destroyed 12,000 Palestinian homes and over one million olive and citrus trees since it captured [and occupied] the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in 1967”. Israel has illegally used the land to built settlements and expands its boarders.
A Report by Friends of the Earth reveals that about “25% of sewage pollution in the West Bank is produced by Jewish settlers”. In addition, the Report found that only “6% of Israeli settlement adequately treat their sewage”. For example, the settlement of Ariel in the West Bank has no sewage treatment plant and simply discharging it waste polluting the underground water aquifer that serves the Palestinian people there.
According to Amnesty International (AI), Jewish settlers have attack local Palestinians and poisoned their farms and live stocks. AI reveals that, “In recent weeks, toxic chemicals have repeatedly been spread on fields located near the villages of Tuwani, Umm Faqara and Kharuba in the southern Hebron region”, in the southern areas of the West Bank. “Scores of sheep as well as other animals have been contaminated by toxins and several have died”. “Palestinian farmers have been forced to quarantine their flocks and stop using the milk, cheese and meat for them, effectively depriving them of their livelihood”, added AI. The aim is to terrorise and intimidate Palestinians to leave their land by burning down Palestinian olive groves, shooting at Palestinian farmers, closing off roads used by Palestinians and, most recently, poisoning water sources in the area.
Palestinian water sources have been contaminated and proved to be unsuitable or dangerous to human health. Palestinian children have fallen ill after swimming in a local stream polluted by untreated sewage pumped from the Jewish colony of Givat Zeev. Farmers complain that the sewage washes through the area when it rains, attracting insects that eat their crops and making animals sick. In February 2005, heavily armed settlers from the settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus, vandalised and sabotaged the water supply on which the nearby village of Madama depends. Several children in the village were hospitalised and were diagnosed with liver infections and many others developed stomach pains as a result of drinking contaminated water.
Furthermore, Jewish settlers’ ideology is not only anti-Muslims, but also anti-Christian ideology. Jewish settlers are routinely attacking activists and aid workers from Christian organisations who accompanying Palestinian school children. In October 2004 an aid worker with the Christian Peacemaker Teams have witnessed violent attacks on peace activist by Jewish settlers, in which one Italian activist suffered a broken jaw and an American citizen was assaulted. Jewish settlers have also made threats against Israeli politicians (MPs), including the war criminal Ariel Sharon (the father of the settlers), who are ‘negotiating’ with the Palestinians.
Israel is a large US military outpost, but Israel is very vulnerable to economic sanctions. As rightly argued by Samir Amin, the world’s most eminent economists, Israel wrote Amin, “is incapable of resisting for more than few days even moderate sanctions such as the Western powers inflicted on Iraq Yugoslavia and Cuba”. If Western powers are serious about fighting terrorism, there is a place where they can make changes, and end Israel’s permanent terrorism in the region.
Western powers are too busy condemning retail terrorism, while turning a blind eye to Israel’s policy of daily acts of terrorism against the Palestinians. For these reasons Israel should be condemned and force to abandon its policy of genocide against the Palestinian people.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.
