In the Guardian March 4, there is an article by Zak Witus titled I met the Israeli settlers Biden placed sanctions on. They’re bad – but part of a rotten system. Mr. Witus explains the sanctions:
This month, the US, British and French governments placed sanctions on more than 30 Israeli settlers for acts of violence and incitement against Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank. It was a historic move. Israeli and international human rights organizations have protested the lack of accountability for settler violence for years.
Now these settlers, with documented histories of arson, theft, physical assault and destruction of property, will have their assets frozen, travel abroad restricted, and ability to do business constrained.
However, Mr. Witus cautions that sanctions on these few “won’t solve the fundamental problem”:
These are not just a few bad apples. Sustained settler assaults on Palestinian lives and livelihood are part of systematic, longstanding Israeli government policy to push Palestinians off this land to expand settlements.
Two years ago Mr. Witus met some of those sanctioned and watched as they attacked Palestinians around the village of Zanuta. He saw them and their accomplices “repeatedly attack Palestinian shepherds and their flocks with dogs and aerial drones.”
They would try to scare them into leaving their land, and then graze their own sheep and goats on the Palestinians’ crops.
In the village of Susiya, Mr. Witus filmed the settlers “illegally building a road to a settlement outpost on private Palestinian land.” One settler with a bulldozer shoveled “huge piles of dirt on to a road in order to block the only entrance and exit to the village.”
Other activists filmed a settler setting his German shepherd to attack a man, biting his arm and abdomen, while settlers pointed guns at Palestinian onlookers. (The dog has been documented repeatedly attacking other Palestinian residents.)
Mr. Witus says:
During my time in the West Bank, I repeatedly witnessed the failure of the Israeli army and police to stop settler crimes. In fact, on several occasions, as Palestinian shepherds and activists pleaded for help, the authorities either stood down or guarded the marauding settlers – to keep the settlers safe.
Mr. Witus explains that Israeli state agencies “have contracted with an excavation and infrastructure company to carry out official demolition orders against Palestinian structures.” As a result, the Israeli government and military have been paying for Palestinian homes to be destroyed.
When the war in Gaza started on October 7, the settlers near Zanuta “grew bolder, coming in the night to destroy water tanks, piping, and electrical systems, even entering people’s homes to beat Palestinian shepherds.”
On 27 October, settlers told the villagers that if they did not leave within 24 hours, they would kill them. The next day, all 250 residents of Zanuta packed up and left. Over the course of the last month, settlers from the outpost built a fence around where the village used to be – so that the villagers couldn’t come back.
Mr. Witus says 2023 was “the worst year on record for settler violence.” Before the Hamas attacks on October 7, “settlers attacked Palestinians and their property in more than 1,200 separate incidents. They killed at least 10 Palestinian people. They torched dozens of houses.”
After the Hamas attacks, the Israeli military drafted and armed thousands of settlers, issuing them guns, uniforms and the protection of the state. At least 198 Palestinian households (1,208 people, among them 586 children) were forcibly removed from more than a dozen villages in November and December.
Mr. Witus points out that “settler violence is not a glitch in the system. It is a feature.”
While the state pursues a slow and steady strategy of dispossession by issuing demolition orders, night raids of villages and onerous checkpoints, settlers use vigilante violence and illegal construction to more quickly and directly achieve the same goals.
Mr. Witus concludes that sanctioning only a few individuals does not disrupt the system which allows Israelis “to militarily, economically and legally dominate” the Palestinian people on the West Bank. Mr. Witus urges:
For the sake of both nations who live in the land between the river and the sea, we must uproot that system of Jewish supremacy in order to sow the seeds of a shared future for all Palestinians and Israelis.
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Zak Witus is the young leadership & education coordinator at the New Israel Fund.