Over the past month and a half, Israel’s genocidal goals in Gaza have become increasingly clear. Not only is the Israeli army massacring civilians, but it is also bombing the enclave with the aim of destroying all civilian infrastructure intended to sustain life.
Hospitals, schools, water treatment plants, any source of electricity – including solar panels –, warehouses and farms were targeted. This made the Gaza Strip unlivable, forcing the Palestinians into another Nakba.
But it is not only in Gaza that Israel hopes to get rid of the Palestinian population. The Israeli ethnic cleansing effort extends to the occupied West Bank, where Israel is pursuing a similar – albeit more surreptitious – plan.
Annexation plans and a problem
Separating the continued genocide in Gaza from the broader Palestinian context is to deny that the target of Israeli crimes is neither Hamas nor the Gaza Strip, but rather Palestinian existence in historic Palestine as a whole.
This is not an imaginary Palestinian fear, but a reality that even the forefathers of the Israeli state constantly and openly admitted.
“There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, and to transfer them all, except perhaps for (Arabs from) Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem,” he said. said Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), wrote in his diary in 1940.
“Not a single village should be left, not a single (Bedouin) tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution,” he concluded.
The Jewish militias who carried out a campaign of massive ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to establish Israel did not take control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1948, not because they did not want to, but because they did not. They didn’t have the capacity. International pressure and the limits of their own military capabilities prevented this.
At the same time, these territories served as a destination for Palestinians expelled from the Mediterranean coast, towns like Yaffa, Safad, Lydd and surrounding villages, which the militias had seized.
The 1967 war gave Israel the opportunity to achieve its goal of ruling all of historic Palestine. It occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights, which remain occupied to this day.
Since then, various plans have been made to annex part or all of the West Bank and Gaza while pushing the Palestinian population either into isolated bantustans or into neighboring Jordan and Egypt.
The construction of more than 150 illegal Israeli settlements and 120 outposts throughout the occupied West Bank is a policy that flows from these plans. This was also the plan in Gaza until 2005, when Israel dismantled its settlements and besieged the strip two years later.
Under the pretext of “protecting” the 700,000 settlers, Israel has encroached on more and more Palestinian land, expelling more and more Palestinians from their communities and denying them access to their farms, pastures and olive groves. This has undermined Palestinian livelihoods and self-sufficiency.
It has also emboldened and encouraged settlers to harass, torture and kill Palestinians on their own land. This, combined with policies aimed at strangling the Palestinian economy and pushing the majority of Palestinians into a state of constant precariousness, has the ultimate goal of forcing the Palestinian population to leave “voluntarily.”
Preparation for the Nakba
Over the past year, the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has intensified these policies. By the time Hamas launched its offensive on October 7, the situation in the occupied West Bank had long been intolerable.
The year 2023 is shaping up to be the deadliest for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since the UN began tracking deaths in 2006. As of October 7, Israeli forces and settlers had killed some 248 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including at least 45 children. .
The Israeli army, in coordination with Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces, carried out violent raids and massacres across the West Bank, focusing on the northern districts of Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem.
The number of settler attacks on Palestinian communities has also skyrocketed and increased in scale and violence. In February, settlers carried out a pogrom in the Palestinian town of Huwara.
In June, the Israeli government and its Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced new measures facilitating and accelerating the annexation of Palestinian lands. By July, approved Israeli settlement expansions had reached record levels.
The Palestinian economy – already on the brink of disaster – suffered further from the destruction of infrastructure and restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by Israeli forces and settlers.
Demolitions of Palestinian homes and livelihood structures have increased. More than 750 such buildings had been destroyed by October 1, displacing more than 1,100 Palestinians.
All these processes, aimed at the definitive expulsion of the Palestinians and the annexation of their lands, were already underway before October 7. Israel then took advantage of the opportunity that arose after the Hamas attack on October 7 to accelerate them.
And while until then chants of “Death to the Arabs” could be heard publicly, mainly at settler rallies, after October 7, a majority of Israelis felt comfortable enough to express this sentiment openly among themselves. them and in front of the world.
Over the past 50 days, Israel has killed 249 Palestinians in the West Bank, including at least 60 children. Israeli raids on Palestinian villages, towns and refugee camps across the occupied West Bank have intensified in scale, severity and the use of lethal weapons, including automatic rifles, tanks and “Maoz” suicide drones.
We have reached a record number of Palestinians arrested and placed in administrative detention – Israel’s official version of kidnapping. At least 3,260 Palestinians have been arrested in the occupied West Bank since October 7, including many children. The 150 Palestinians released so far in the hostage deal will likely be rearrested.
Reports and video evidence of abuse and torture in detention have increased. Palestinians are also regularly harassed and beaten, even in their homes or on the streets.
Encouraged and armed by Israeli authorities, Israeli settlers have also become even more violent. They have intensified forced evictions of Palestinian Bedouin communities in the south, near the Jordan Valley, and in central areas, near Ramallah, displacing more than 1,000 people since October 7.
These practices have also had a devastating impact on the Palestinian economy. The Israeli army has closed major checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, almost completely paralyzing transportation. Day laborers are struggling to earn a living, while food stocks are dwindling and imports are staying longer in Israeli ports.
The healthcare sector is also in crisis, unable to handle the growing number of injuries alongside patients. To make matters worse, the Israeli army also began besieging hospitals in the West Bank.
These tactics all serve to sow fear and despair among Palestinians, ultimately preparing them for annexation and expulsion.
Eliminate resistance
Today we see the continuation of the Nakba in Gaza and the West Bank. The Israeli goal is to expel the Palestinians and attempt to assimilate the survivors, as it attempted to do with the 1948 Palestinians.
Today, these survivors have Israeli citizenship, but are treated as second-class citizens and are often exposed to discriminatory and violent practices by Israeli Jewish citizens and authorities.
Faced with this imminent catastrophe, the Palestinians of the West Bank are left to their own devices.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is the only Palestinian actor with access to weapons, but it has done nothing to protect Palestinians from Israeli violence. The 10,500 members of the national security forces are trained by the United States and Jordan to maintain order and not to confront another armed force.
Worse still, these forces and intelligence units have directly helped Israel attack and dismantle all pockets of armed resistance in the West Bank in recent years. Contrary to what Israeli propaganda claims, the youth who decided to take up arms – mainly concentrated in Jenin and Nablus – are not part of Hamas; some are members of Fatah or defected from Palestinian Authority forces, but many have no political affiliation.
Since October 7, the Israeli army has worked to eradicate these resistance groups so that the civilian population of the West Bank is completely defenseless in the face of violence, dispossession and expulsion.
But as Israel escalates violence, Palestinian resistance comes to the fore. Palestinians will not stop fighting against occupation and apartheid simply because they cannot afford it.
No one wants to live on the edge of survival, pushed and held at gunpoint by a foreign regime.
The least the world can do is stop falling for Israeli propaganda and stand up for the right of Palestinians to resist their colonizer and oppressor in their quest for liberation. Now is the time to muster the courage to speak out and put an end to Israel’s genocidal campaign. This is where the history books offer us the sad recognition that violent apartheid states founded on massacres are neither legitimate nor sustainable.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
