Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

According to his blog, themagneszionist.blogspot.com, “Jeremiah (Jerry) Haber is the nom de plume of an orthodox Jewish studies professor who divides his time between Israel and the US.” Today “Jerry” posted the following graphic description of settler violence by David Shulman. Speaking of this account, Haber writes: “My brain screams when I read things like this….” Mine does too.

The “Gerald” Shulman refers is Gerald Cromer, the author of A War of Words: Political Violence and Public Debate in Israel. Cromer recently died of cancer.

The Magnes Zionist: David Shulman’s New Testimony, April 27, 2008

Um Zeituna, April 5, 2008

Things are heating up in the hills south of Hebron. We’re not sure why. One guess is that someone in the Civil Administration, that is, the Israeli occupation authority, has taken a deliberate decision. Or it may simply be the further, continuous entrenchment of the occupation itself, with its natural effects—the remorseless appropriation of more and more land, the consequent harassment of Palestinian civilians living on or near these lands, the expansion of the settlers-only road system, the soporific, shameful legal system that mostly serves the soldiers and the settlers. In any case, there is no doubt about what is happening on the ground. Two weeks ago Palestinian children were viciously attacked by settlers, and several wounded, as they were walking to school. The army escort that was supposed to protect them stood by passively. Over the last weeks, each time our volunteers have come down to escort shepherds to their grazing lands, they have been assaulted. Amiel and a small group near the settlement of Maon were surrounded, beaten, and nearly lynched. Meanwhile, one of the settler Rabbis has published a legal opinion setting out a calculus of human value in the occupied territories: one Jew, says the Rabbi, is worth a thousand Palestinian lives.

It’s clear we’re needed. The rains failed this year, the earth is dry, and the grazing grounds are much reduced. The cave-dwellers depend on their herds of sheep and goats for subsistence. For now, at least, there are still a few green wadis suitable for grazing, and the shepherds have to make the most of them. In theory, a rough modus vivendi was worked out with the soldiers: Palestinians can graze their flocks in the flat bed of the wadis between the settlements, but they are forbidden to let the sheep graze anywhere on the hills. Never mind that these hills have belonged since Biblical times to these same shepherds. In practice, moreover, the settlers drive the shepherds away even from the wadi bed, too, usually beating them for good measure.

We walk down the rocky slope, thick with thorns, to join Ahmad, who is grazing his herd just below the cow-barn of Maon. Ahmad is from Tuba, with its tents and caves, a kilometer or so away over the hills. Lambs bleat in the fierce sun. It is early morning. Within minutes, a discovery: small piles of parched maize are scattered over the bed of the wadi; beside them lie a few dead birds and rodents. Ahmad says he thinks they’re coated with poison—a repeat of the episode three years ago when settlers from Chavat Maon spread poison through the fields in Twaneh, just down the road. Later we hear that children from Tuba saw several young people from Maon spreading the suspicious maize last evening, the whole length of the wadi. Carefully, we collect samples, which we will have tested in Jerusalem. We mark the many sites with piles of stone, and we send word to the other shepherds to keep their sheep away from this wadi, the main access route to the village.

Henry Siegman: Grab more hills, expand the territory, LRB, April 10, 2008

Lords of the Land and The Accidental Empire reveal the massive scale of Israel’s theft of Palestinian lands and the involvement of every part of Israeli society in advancing the settlement enterprise in clear and deliberate violation not only of international law but of Israel’s own laws. Gorenberg reports that when asked by the foreign minister, Abba Eban, in 1967 about the legality of settlements, Theodor Meron, the foreign ministry’s legal counsel, responded: ‘Civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.’ The prohibition, he stressed, is ‘categorical and is not conditioned on the motives or purposes of the transfer, and is aimed at preventing colonisation of conquered territory by citizens of the conquering state’.

The settlements were carefully investigated in 2005 by a commission headed by Talia Sasson, who was cynically appointed by Ariel Sharon to uncover the illegal activities that he himself had orchestrated. Sasson found that the settlements – illegal according to Israel’s own laws – were established with the secret support of virtually every government ministry, the IDF and Shin Bet. Feigning shock when Sasson presented her findings, Sharon and his ministers promptly buried the report.

Zertal and Eldar make clear that the settlers lord it not only over the Occupied Territories and their subject population but over the state of Israel as well. It is important to remember that the majority of Israel’s settlers are driven not by ideology but by economic and quality-of-life considerations, and are attracted by the heavy subsidies the government supplies to the settlements. Some of these ‘non-ideological’ settlers are secular Israelis, while others are members of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities that are deeply ambivalent if not opposed to the Zionist national enterprise. But the driving force behind the settlements is a small religious-nationalist group, whose members are widely considered the most savvy, well connected and effective political operators in Israel. Their ideology combines an intense form of religious messianism with an extreme nationalism that has far more in common with the religious and ethnocentric nationalism of the Serbian Orthodox militias of Mladic and Karadzic than with any Jewish values I am familiar with. That Sharon and some of his settler friends were virtually the only politicians in the West (other than Serbia’s Slavic supporters) who opposed military measures to prevent Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo was not an accident.

The religious-nationalist leadership now seems to have lost much of its authority with the far more radical younger generation born and bred in the settlements. This new generation draws inspiration from the ‘hilltop youth’, young people who responded to Sharon in October 1998 when, as foreign minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, he called on settlers to ‘grab’ hilltops in the parts of the West Bank from which he and Netanyahu had agreed to withdraw, as stipulated by the Oslo Accords. ‘Grab more hills, expand the territory,’ Sharon urged on Israel Radio. ‘Everything that’s grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don’t grab will be in their hands.’

The ‘hilltop youth’ reject the authority of the Jewish state and its institutions. They run around in what they imagine to be biblical dress, assaulting Palestinians, stealing and destroying their homes, crops and orchards, occasionally beating them and every so often killing them. Occasionally the IDF intervenes, but their efficacy is undermined by their belief that their main job is to protect the settlers, not the population under occupation.

Shragai, Hilltop youth say they no longer believe in ‘the rule of heretics’ - Haaretz, January 20, 2008

The past three weeks have further exacerbated the recourse to isolation and feelings of alienation from the institutions of the state, which part of the National-Religious youth have felt ever since the evacuation of Gush Katif [in 2005], and all the more forcefully following the major clash over Amona, some two years ago.

It was enough to view a few days ago the dozens of girls, most students at religious girl’s high schools in the West Bank’s Benjamin region, who protested outside the Jerusalem Magistrates Court and sang with hoarse voices - almost unbelievably - the anthem of anti-Zionist Haredi sect Neturei Karta:

“In the rule of heretics we don’t believe, and their constitution we don’t acknowledge. In the way of the Torah we will go, in fire and in water. In the way of the Torah we will go sanctify the name of the heavens.”

“In my view, Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan Valley is a Jewish state,” said Shaul Goldstein, mayor of a group of settlements that form the Gush Etzion Regional Council, at his home in Neve Daniel.
(Ilan Mizrahi / For The Times)

Richard Boudreaux, A West Bank struggle rooted in land - Los Angeles Times, December 27, 2007

Goldstein is a tall, energetic and articulate defender of the settler movement and one of its more moderate leaders. He boasts of “very good relations” with his construction company’s Palestinian employees and most of his Palestinian neighbors, and says they must be accommodated in what he calls the land of Israel.

But he complains that his initiatives to cooperate with Palestinian village mayors on issues such as earthquake preparedness and water purification have been vetoed by the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. He depicts the Nassar family’s legal battle, which blocks his settlement’s expansion, as an example of the same rejectionist stance.

“It is very difficult to make coexistence and civil relations with people who consider themselves part of a society that declared war against you,” Goldstein said.

Israel says it has a special claim to this part of the West Bank, dating to David’s biblical kingdom.

Masked settlers beat Palestinian farmers near Nablus - Haaretz, December 25, 2007

Masked Jewish settlers beat and injured Palestinian farmers in a field near the West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday, Palestinian witnesses and doctors said.

The settlers sprayed four Palestinians who were planting wheat with pepper gas and then beat them with sticks, the witnesses said. Two were injured, one moderately, and treated at a local hospital, doctors said.

“They parked on the road and we thought they were just hiking but suddenly they put on masks and they sprayed me in my eyes and beat me and I couldn’t see who it was,” said farmer Hussein Asida, 46. A Palestinian youth, 15, was among those attacked, Asida said.

The Palestinians said the attackers spoke Hebrew among themselves. Settlers from the nearby illegal outpost of Havat Gilad have attacked Palestinian farmers in the past.

Amos Harel, Experts: Extreme rightists will use violence if settlements are evacuated - Haaretz, December 20, 2007

Extreme right-wing activists are expected to use severe violence to disrupt any move to evacuate outposts or settlements, even the destruction of a few homes, according to an evaluation recently presented to the government by the security establishment and law enforcement officials in the territories.

The evaluation states that the violence during any attempt at evacuation would be more serious than that seen during the evacuation of Amona two years ago.

However security officials do not at this stage foresee an increased threat to the lives of senior politicians, because the extreme right does not appear to believe the Annapolis process will succeed and therefore the settlements are not in danger.
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After the evacuation of Amona two years ago, the ideological foundations and plans of actions were reformulated against future evacuations. In a booklet distributed at one of the extreme-right rallies, the message was that violence might deter the government from additional evacuations.

“The war must be brought to the field of the enemy,” the booklet said. “In this matter and in this situation [evacuation], the IDF is the enemy.”

The security establishment believes that any attempt to evacuate settlements will result in violence against the security forces, large-scale disturbances, and endangerment of human life. The experts also see widespread refusal of orders in the IDF.

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / “This village will be erased” - Haaretz, December 16, 2007

The shattered marble panels of the Hashalom factory, some of which were designated for the kitchens of settlers, testify like a thousand witnesses to the events of the night of revenge. The weeping of Naama Masalha, who had to hide with her young children in the bathroom while the settlers smashed the windows of their house, also tells the story of that night of horror. In the small village of Al Funduq on the Qalqilyah-Nablus road, where Israelis, mainly settlers living in the area, still repair their cars and go shopping, they are now licking their wounds and assessing the damage.

…Now just fear, fury and frustration remain in peaceful Al Funduq, which paid the price for the killing of settler Ido Zoldan, 29, a resident of Shavei Shomron, who was shot on the road that passes through the village five nights earlier.

On that Saturday night, hundreds of settlers stormed Al Funduq under the protection of Israel Defense Forces soldiers - who, according to testimony, even assisted in the destruction - and rioted in the village that was under curfew. Two days later it was reported that Israeli security forces had caught the gang suspected of killing Zoldan: three members of the Palestinian National Security organization, from Kadum. Last week the settlers went there, too.

The group of young settlers recently took over an abandoned Palestinian house overlooking the road leading to Al Funduq, and painted it pink. But the sight on that road, which passes below the rogue outpost of Shvut Ami, is not at all rosy: It is strewn with stones that the settlers now throw at Palestinian cars that use it….

The atmosphere in the local council building is heated. The secretary, Jaber, says that about 400 settlers stormed the village on that black Saturday night. Zakariyah Asade, coordinator of field activities for the Rabbis for Human Rights organization, who lives in the neighboring village of Jit, says that the soldiers illuminated the area with their flashlights for the settlers, so that they could sow their destruction more easily. “They showed them where to break things,” says Asade….

The owner of the tractors, Shari, adds a warning: “There are no shaheeds [martyrs] in Al Funduq, but [after] what they’re doing now to the children, in another 10-15 years, when they grow up - you’ll be hearing what happens here.”…

When her brother Mohammed arrived at the house, it was surrounded by a large number of settlers, among them soldiers and policemen. In order to record the event, he activated the recording device on his cell phone, after realizing that he would not be able to photograph anything because of the blackout.Now he plays the recordings for us: “Erase this village - erase this house,” one can hear a woman screaming in Hebrew, in a hoarse voice. And then one hears the sound of blows. Mohammed says the intruders banged on the windows with their weapons, throwing stones at them, and that they also had sticks and iron poles in their hands. The soldiers and policemen stood by and watched. The woman continues to scream on the recording: “People of Funduq, pay attention: You will suffer, this village is erased. In blood and in fire, this village will be erased. Come out, come out of your homes.”

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

In the outpost of Shvut Ami, next door to Palestinian village of Funduq, settler youth plastered the walls of a building owned by a Palestinian family.

Isabel Kershner, Young Israelis Resist Challenges to Settlements - New York Times, December 8, 2007

SHVUT AMI OUTPOST, West Bank — For two months, Jewish youths have been renovating an old stone house on this muddy hilltop in the northern West Bank. The house is not theirs, however. It belongs to a Palestinian family. And their seizure of it along with the land around it for a new settlement outpost is a violation of Israeli law. The police have evicted the group five times but they keep coming back.

Yedidya Slonim, 16, one of the renovators here, who grew up in another West Bank settlement, Tzofim, said of the police: “We come back straight away, as soon as they’ve gone. They come every week for half a day. It doesn’t bother us so much.”

The cat-and-mouse contest here lays bare a key dilemma of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute: Israel has pledged that it will permit no new settlements in the territory it has occupied since the 1967 war, no more expropriation of Palestinian land and the dismantling of unauthorized outposts — like this one — erected since March 2001, but it has never applied the muscle needed to do so.

“Shvut Ami is a chronicle of failure of law enforcement,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer who represents the Palestinian owners of the house on behalf of Yesh Din, an Israeli volunteer organization that fights for Palestinian rights. In this respect, he said, the area is “a jungle.”

Security forces trying to prevent a protester from entering Havot Ma’on in the West Bank Saturday. (Tomer Appelbaum)

Palestinians: Settlers throw stones at boy, steal his donkey - Haaretz, December 3, 2007

By Mijal Grinberg

West Bank settlers threw stones at a Palestinian boy and stole his donkey in the village of Tuba on Saturday, according to Palestinian reports.

The incident reportedly occured after some 150 left-wing activists marched in protest against the long route Palestinian children are forced to take to get to school from their South Hebron Hills village.

Children from Tuba go to school in Twane, a nearby village, via a lengthy and indirect path, in order to avoid harrassment from residents of the Havot Ma’on settlement.

The Ta’ayush Arab-Jewish Partnership activists, upon receiving word of the settler aggression, marched to Havot to retrieve the donkey, but were stopped at the settlement entrance by police.

During the march earlier in the day, the activists initially arrived at an area blocked by police and Israel Defense Forces, who told them they could not travel from Twane to Tuba.

As the security forces did not present the marchers with an order declaring the area a closed military zone, the activists continued along the path, evading the police and IDF troops who attempted to stop them.

Hatem Moussa/Associated Press

JERUSALEM Thousands of Israeli demonstrators gathered Monday to show their opposition to concessions to the Palestinians.

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

GAZA Two of Hamas’s top leaders, Ismail Haniya, center, and Mahmoud Zahar, right, at a Palestinian conference on Monday.

Hamas Urges Taking Hard Line Against Israel, New York Times, November 27, 2007

By ISABEL KERSHNER and TAGHREED EL-KHODARY
Published: November 27, 2007

JERUSALEM, Nov. 26 — The leaders of Hamas espoused a hard line against Israel at a conference that they and the militant Islamic Jihad faction convened in Gaza on Monday, the eve of the American-sponsored Middle East peace gathering in Annapolis, Md.
Also on Monday, Israeli right-wing activists stepped up their campaign against possible concessions to the Palestinians with demonstrations in Jerusalem.

In Gaza, Ismail Haniya, Hamas’s leader, said, “Let the whole world hear us: We will not relinquish a centimeter of Palestine, and we will not recognize Israel.” Mr. Haniya, who is usually associated with the more pragmatic wing of the Islamic movement, was responding to a refugee from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war who came up to the podium showing the deed for land he had left behind in what is now Israel.

AMONA, West Bank/Feb. 2006
A Jewish settler struggles with an Israeli security officer as authorities evacuate a West Bank settlement near the Palestinian town of Ramallah after Israel’s Supreme Court cleared the way for the demolition of nine homes at the site. This photo won first prize in The World Press Photo awards. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Teibel, Subject of AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo says God on her side, ap, 4/19/07

AMONA, West Bank (AP) — The photo caught the world’s attention: a lone 15-year-old girl holding back a wall of riot police moving in to demolish Jewish homes illegally erected in the West Bank.

Speaking for the first time since The Associated Press image won a Pulitzer prize this week, the girl, who would identify herself only as Nili, said God was on her side during the confrontation.

“In the photo you see me — one person as it were — against many. But that’s only an illusion,” said Nili, now two weeks shy of her 17th birthday, as she stood amid the ruins of the nine homes demolished in Amona in February 2006.

“Behind the many stood one man — (Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert,” who ordered the demolition. “Behind me stood the Lord Blessed Be He, and the people of Israel.”

Nili, a shy, gangly teen born in Israel to American parents, was one of several thousand Jewish protesters who barricaded themselves behind barbed wire and on rooftoops in an unsuccessful effort to keep club-wielding riot troops from demolishing the homes built on private Palestinian land.

What do you mean when you say ‘no’? - Haaretz, November 18, 2007

Of all Israel’s iniquities in the occupied territories - the brutality, the assassinations, the siege, the hunger, the blackouts, the checkpoints and the mass arrests - nothing serves as witness to its real intentions than the settlements. Certainly for the future. Every home built in the territories, every light pole and every road are like a thousand witnesses: Israel does not want peace; Israel wants occupation. Whoever is serious about peace and a Palestinian state does not put up even a shed.

From Oslo through Camp David and on to the road map, Israel has not put an end to the most criminal enterprise in its history. A short memory refresher: In article 7 of the Oslo Accords, Israel promised that “no party would undertake unilateral steps to alter the situation on the ground, prior to the completion of negotiations for the final status.” That really made an impression on Israel. During the 10 years that followed, the number of settlers doubled. What about the heroic peace efforts of Ehud Barak as prime minister? During the 18 months of his government, Israel began the construction of 6,045 residential units in the territories.

And why did Israel sign up to the road map two years later? “The government of Israel will freeze all its settlement activities, in accordance with the Mitchell report, except for natural growth in the settlements.” And what happened in practice? Accusations that the Palestinians are not implementing the agreements, and a boatload of new settlers. This was also the case in 2005, another major “year of peace”: the disengagement. And what did Israel do in its own backyard? Another 12,000 new settlers.

This terrible enterprise, whose purpose is to foil any chance for peace, is also a criminal enterprise. According to Peace Now, based on Civil Administration data that have been kept hidden for years, about 40 percent of the settlements were built on privately owned land of Palestinians helpless to safeguard what is in most cases their sole property that was robbed in broad daylight by an occupying state. This took place years after the Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that it is illegal to build on private Palestinian land. Indeed, while Israel is debating whether it is a state of laws, whether the prime minister was given a discount for the house on Cremieux Street, and whether we want a powerful Supreme Court, we should remember that what is happening in the territories is the real corruption that engulfs us.

Now we are on the eve of another peace event, yet during the past year another 3,525 new residential units were built in the territories, under the auspices of a government that talks incessantly about the end of occupation and two states. All the grandiloquent statements are void of substance when we read the data: Construction is at a peak in 88 settlements.

Avishai Margalit, A Moral Witness to the ‘Intricate Machine’ - The New York Review of Books, Dec. 6, 2007 issue

“I am an Israeli. I live in Jerusalem. I have a story, not yet finished, to tell.” This is the opening line of David Shulman’s powerful and memorable book, Dark Hope, a diary of four years of political activity in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It is a record of the author’s intense involvement with a volunteer organization composed of Israeli Palestinians and Israeli Jews, called Ta’ayush, an Arabic term for “living together” or “life in common.” The group was founded in October 2000, soon after the start of the second Palestinian intifada.

“This book aims,” Shulman writes,

at showing something of the Israeli peace movement in action, on the basis of one individual’s very limited experience…. I want to give you some sense of what it feels like to be part of this struggle and of why we do it.

Struggle with whom? Shulman explains:

Israel, like any society, has violent, sociopathic elements. What is unusual about the last four decades in Israel is that many destructive individuals have found a haven, complete with ideological legitimation, within the settlement enterprise. Here, in places like Chavat Maon, Itamar, Tapuach, and Hebron, they have, in effect, unfettered freedom to terrorize the local Palestinian population; to attack, shoot, injure, sometimes kill—all in the name of the alleged sanctity of the land and of the Jews’ exclusive right to it.

His diary proceeds to show how this happens.

Shulman speaks of “the last four decades.” It is forty years since the Israeli victory of 1967 brought the West Bank under occupation.

A Palestinian farmer selects and sorts olive during the harvest

James Hider, Olive branch blossoms amid harvest of fear - Times Online, November 9, 2007

In an olive grove on the edge of Nablus, Fuad Amr and his sons keep one eye on the branches they are stripping and the other warily on the Jewish settlement that overlooks their land from a hilltop.

The settlers could descend at any time to intimidate them or even beat them and steal the fruit of their labour, as happens every year across the West Bank in the olive season.

The Palestinian farmers, however, have found unlikely allies - Jewish activists, some of them Orthodox rabbis, who risk violence to protect them.

“I am afraid,” Mr Amr said, as he flung black olives on to a plastic sheet, from which his wife gathered them into a sack. “I’m picking the olives and all the time I’m looking out for settlers. They come in buses, sometimes 20 or 30 of them.”

Last year one of his neighbours was hit on the head by a rock thrown by settlers, who cite the biblical-era Jewish settlements in the area as a claim to the land.

Every year, however, Israeli and foreign peace activists come to protect the Palestinians during the harvest and help them to pick their crops. Some of them have also been beaten by settlers, but they say that their presence prevents the Palestinians from being driven off their fields.

One of the Jewish groups is Rabbis for Human Rights, which aims to promote religion as a point of harmony and justice between Jews and Arabs.

B’Tselem - 19 Oct. 07: Hebron: The Israeli Settlement in the a-Ras Neighborhood

On 19 March 2007, a new settlement was established, in the heart of the a-Ras Palestinian neighborhood. In the months that have passed since then, despite the decision of the Defense Minister at the time to evacuate the settlement, the settlement has grown. Recently, the settlement was connected to the electricity grid, and construction and renovation work is taking place at the site.

Since the settlement has been established, the harm to the Palestinian residents has increased and they have suffered further infringement of their human rights. Palestinians suffer both from the settlers and from Israeli security forces who have been assigned protect the settlement.

Researchers from B’Tselem and the Association for Civil Rights found that establishment of the settlement and the failure to evacuate it, have led, for example, to the following:

* Extensive abuse and violence by settlers in the new settlement, carried out in front of the eyes of members of the security forces;
* Abuse and violence by security forces posted on or near the new settlement;
* Increased prohibitions on movement enforced by Israeli security forces.

Failure to enforce the law on violent settlers

During the course of the first six months of the new settlement, B’Tselem and ACRI documented scores of cases in which settlers attacked Palestinians in the area. The attacks include beatings, blocking of passage, destruction of property, throwing of stones and eggs, hurling of refuse, glass bottles, and bottles full of urine, urinating from the settlement structure onto the street, spitting, threats, and curses.