Overhyped language remains an understatement when describing the horrors inflicted by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank. If you think slavery was humiliating for a human being, try living near so-called settlers. Brutal suppression of any dissent is an everyday occurrence, with torture, violence, insult and robbery—and regular killings—commonplace. Mothers, daughters, sisters and wives are addressed as “sharmutas,” whores, by settlers trying to provoke Palestinian reactions. I lived as a child under the German occupation, but have never seen such hateful faces as those of the settlers, or experienced anything like the horrors that take place every day in the Israeli governed West Bank. And I know of no coherent explanation for causing such horrors on innocents whose only crime is to have been born there. 

The brazen anti-Palestinian hatred of the settlers has not exactly been on the front pages of the news lately, if ever. To its credit, the New York Times recently reported yet another outrage committed by settlers against a Palestinian shepherd and his family (more on this anon). Israeli settlers have been waging a campaign of violence and land theft since the takeover of the West Bank following the 1967 war. It has intensified since the Hamas outrage of October 2023, and despite some 70,000 dead Gazans, it continues unabated. And while Israel and the U.S. are busy bombing Iran, the settlers have been busy killing West Bank Palestinians—at least 15 since the beginning of the war. 

The most recent horror saw around 20 armed Israeli settlers marauding through a Palestinian encampment, kicking and slapping children. This was witnessed by many including an American woman who reported it to the police. A Palestinian man was stripped naked, beaten, and his penis zip-tied. He was a shepherd whose 400 sheep were stolen by the setters. Three of his daughters watched the humiliation and the beating of their father. His entire livelihood gone, his house ransacked and some meager jewelry stolen, he is now contemplating moving away, as he cannot feed his children. Which was the settlers’ point to begin with: drive all Palestinians away and enjoy a total takeover of the West Bank.

Intimidation against Palestinian children and womenfolk by Jewish settlers works only too well. They threaten Palestinians with rape of their wives and tell them to leave. I have not witnessed this particular genre of outrage, but have watched settlers swaggering around and intimidating women and children in my time reporting from Palestine. The long-term plan is for Israeli outposts and colonies to make an eventual contiguous Palestinian state an impossibility; Netanyahu’s goal, which he has clearly stated, is to extend permanent Israeli control over the West Bank. Add to that parts of the Golan Heights, now parts of Israel proper, and large areas of southern Lebanon—with close to one million fleeing refugees—and you have Israel of the very near future. 

A small Israeli minority does protest, in vain, alas. The Israeli academic David Shulman writes about “the evil in the West Bank,” describing the people expelled and the villages destroyed by Israeli settlers. The latter are heavily armed and are under the protection of the army and the police. Yet they are allowed to openly steal from the Palestinians hundreds of the villagers’ sheep and goats. In the last two years 85 Arab villages have been destroyed by the settlers, many of whom have been brainwashed to hate anything Arab, and have also been trained to hurt and kill. These monsters believe in the arrival of a new Messiah and are totally out of control, yet the Israeli police and army do nothing about them. 

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The behavior of the settlers turns Israel’s long-cultivated persecution mania—everyone’s out to get us—into a joke. Its reckless behavior and insistence that all criticism is antisemitism can no longer be taken with a grain of salt. Over 1,000 people have been killed in Lebanon since the start of hostilities there, but they’re hardly a blip on the screen. After all, they are only Arabs, to be done away with like flies. 

And let’s face it. Israel has had plans for what it’s doing all along going back as early as 1937. When Britain proposed the partition of Palestine into two states, Zionist pioneers attempted to expand their territory by building settlements outside the proposed boundaries. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister to be, wrote that “Arabs have to be expelled and their places taken by us.” The destruction of Arab villages was a plan called Dalet, so plus ça change, as they say. 

So, while Uncle Sam and Israel are bombing the hell out of Iran, spare a thought for Palestinians on the West Bank being killed, harassed, and expelled from their poor dwellings by crazed settlers whose hatred for anyone who opposes them matches that once seen in Germany long ago among the black-uniformed troops. From the river to the sea might be an Arab slogan, but it is an Israeli reality.