Analysis: Israel’s government can’t disown West Bank settler violence

Israeli settlers have marauded across the occupied West Bank for months, attacking Palestinian towns and villages with impunity.

Events in Qusra, a village south of Nablus, where Israeli settlers have laid siege to three Palestinian households since Sunday, have even led to a rare condemnation of settler behaviour by the Israeli government, with spokesperson David Mercer calling the settlers’ actions “deplorable” and “unacceptable”, and promising that Israeli authorities would investigate and arrest those responsible.

Analysts, campaigners, and Israeli parliamentarians who spoke to Al Jazeera have reacted to that with disbelief and incredulity, pointing to the inability of the Israeli military to stop the siege, in which the settlers have cut off water and electricity to Qusra. Israeli soldiers were initially even seen mingling and even praying with settlers in Qusra.

Complicity

“Government attempts to distance themselves from the violence are ridiculous,” Aida Touma-Sliman, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the left-wing Hadash party, told Al Jazeera. “They can say what they want, but they’re complicit.”

“If you look at the West Bank, you can no longer differentiate between the army and the settlers,” she said, adding that many of the settlers had been allowed to carry out their military service protecting the same illegal settlements they had come from. “The government is supplying them, protecting and arming them. It isn’t opposed to them. Supporting them is policy,” she added.

“There is nothing new in what’s happening in Qusra,” Yair Dvir of the Israeli rights organisation B’Tselem said. “We’ve been seeing this for decades. When there’s international criticism of the violence, the government condemns it, the settlers withdraw, and then return as soon as attention shifts.”

“Let’s be clear, settler violence is state violence,” Dvir added. “They both have the same aim: to displace Palestinians and to take their land.”

The speed and brutality of the Israeli government’s encroachment upon Palestinian land, in defiance of both international law and the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that it should stop its illegal settlement of Palestinian territory, has increased in recent months. United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs monitoring shows settler violence to be increasing with every week that Israel’s October election – and the potential end of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government – draws nearer.

“We’re definitely seeking an escalation of violence across the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and in other areas, such as Gaza, in the build-up to the election,” saidNeve Gordon, a professor of International Law at Queen Mary University, London, and the author of “Israel’s Occupation”.

“The vote is like a rallying cry for that entire [settler] constituency that they have to do as much as they can, while they can,” he said of fears among settlers and the radical Israeli right that they might lose what many regard as their allies in Netanyahu’s coalition.

Settlement unchained

The Israeli government has done little to distance itself from the actions of the settlers. Instead, prominent members of Netanyhu’s Likud party have attended prominent settlement conferences, including those explicitly focused on ethnically cleansing Gaza. Netanyahu himself responded to recent violence in the Palestinian village of Tal – which prompted the United Nations to warn that the entire West Bank was at “breaking point” – by promising to recognise even more illegal settlements.

At the heart of government policy on settlements have been the polarising figures of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

Smotrich has proven to be one of the most consequential Israeli politicians in history in promoting the cause of illegal settlements.

As well as normalising political references to the annexation of the Palestinian territory, Smotrich made being granted partial administrative control over the occupied West Bank a key condition of his joining Netanyahu’s coalition. He has since overseen the expansion of illegal settlements at an unprecedented rate.

Smotrich has also boasted of making the two-state solution a practical impossibility with the announcement of the E۱ settlement project, joining occupied East Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement, in August of last year.

However, focusing on just two of the coalition’s more controversial figures was to miss the point, Gordon argued.

“It’s too easy to say it’s all the fault of these few people and if they were gone it would all be OK,” Gordon said. “It goes far wider.”

“The ethnic cleansing we’re seeing of the West Bank, as well as that being undertaken by the army in the territory’s refugee camps, such as Jenin, needs the complicity of the police, the attorney general, the military and, ultimately, the public,” the professor noted. “Without the umbrella they provide, none of this would be possible.”