From the Observer:
“Gefen Ami is not just any pastoral community. It is part of something much bigger: an unprecedented surge in Jewish settlement growth and settler violence in occupied territory since Benjamin Netanyahu became Israel’s prime minister at the end of 2022 – a surge that British sanctions, expected to be announced within days, will finally seek to curb. Ed Miliband’s warning last week of measures to stop UK companies’ involvement in settlement-building was a marked shift in policy on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. More than 140 Labour MPs, among them all of the party’s select committee chairs, have called for a ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements.
Miliband and Andy Burnham have rejected calls, which include a letter signed by 100 former British and French diplomats, to suspend its trade agreement with Israel. They will make clear that the measures target settlements – illegal under international law – and not Israel itself. But they have also rejected the argument made by leading figures in the British Jewish community that they should hold off further action, especially in the volatile pre-election atmosphere prevailing in Israel.”
“A total ban on imports from settlements is hard to enforce because goods such as agricultural produce sometimes cross into Israel proper and are then exported without their origin being made clear. But supporters of a ban argue it could still hit the settlement economy. They are certain to provoke an angry reaction from Israeli leaders such as Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s foreign minister, who warned last week that Britain would be making a “big mistake” by imposing sanctions and would face retaliation. Washington is also likely to oppose the move.”
“More than than half a million Israelis live in West Bank settlements, as well as another 250,000 in East Jerusalem. Gefen Ami is one of half a dozen strategic Israeli settler outposts created over the past two years and bordering Halhul, a town deep in the West Bank whose hinterland is known for vineyards and fruit orchards cultivated by Palestinians for generations. Its land, and that of the neighbouring village of Beit Ummar, straddle Route 60, the main arterial highway between Bethlehem and Hebron in the middle of the West Bank.”
“According to the long-established Israeli NGO Peace Now, 185 Jewish outposts have been created across the West Bank. Farming outposts of one kind or another, Peace Now says, control more than 420 sq miles of Palestinian land, three-quarters of it seized, often by force, in the last three years, and especially since Hamas’s massacre of 1,200 Israelis on 7 October 2023.
The economic effect of the outposts has been severe, cutting many scores of Palestinian farmers and their dependents from their livelihoods. According to Dror Etkes, one of the leading Israeli monitors of settlement growth, these new outposts around Halhul and Beit Ummar, protected by the Israeli military, have made about 1,500 acres of farming land inaccessible to their Palestinian owners. Local growers estimate losses on crops this year will run into tens of millions of pounds.”
“One of those landowners, Mohammed al-Baw, received a call 20 months ago from a neighbour who told him that settlers, accompanied by soldiers, had taken over 15 acres of vines and peach trees his family have owned, he says, for centuries. (He has a document showing that his forebears were paying taxes on it from Ottoman times.) Since then, despite repeated efforts, settlers and Israel Defense Forces units have prevented him from reaching the land. During one attempt, he says a settler clubbed his 80-year-old uncle, who was hospitalised for a week. Israeli soldiers told him at the site that it was now a “closed military zone” – as Baw puts it, “closed to me but not the settlers”.”
“On a drive through the area last month, we saw the “caravillas” (temporary housing units) on a hilltop west of Route 60. Baw pointed out a yellow gate through which the settlers – who have a key to it – now reach the land on a road that until early 2025 he was able to use unmolested to reach his vineyard and orchard. The previous Saturday he had managed with six other farmers to get 500 metres inside the gate before being stopped during an angry altercation with settlers, at least one of them armed with an assault rifle. Soldiers arrived within minutes. Baw says that when the Palestinians protested, one of the soldiers told them: “They [the settlers] are our brothers.”
These days, there is nothing unusual about the loss of the Baw family’s land. More unusual is his own history. There can be few Palestinians whose relations with Israelis have been more volatile than his”
“In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, Israeli troops shot dead Baw’s younger brother Firas as he walked towards a checkpoint on his way from Halul to see a friend in the neighbouring village of Sa’ir.* *Baw says the troops thought Firas, who was 22 and doing business studies at Hebron university, constituted a threat. He was carrying nothing more than his ID card. “He was shot with 30 bullets,” Baw says.
The episode was almost unbearable for Baw, now 48 and married with four children. Although they were separated by a year in age, the two brothers, he says, were like twins. “My first thought was to get revenge, but then I thought even if I killed all Israelis it wouldn’t bring Firas back. I went through a really rough patch.””
“Then something unexpected happened. Baw’s grief-stricken father was visited by Palestinian members of the Parents Circle-Families Forum, a remarkable 30-year-old organisation of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost close family members in the conflict. The forum has survived the trauma of October 7 and the ensuing devastation and loss of Palestinian life in Gaza. About 160 new members who have joined since the Hamas attacks include Israelis bereaved on that day and Palestinians who have lost family members in Gaza.
When Baw’s father joined the forum in 2002, Mohammed wanted nothing to do with it. For two years he hardly spoke to his father beyond periodically asking him: “How could you go and sit with people that killed your son?””
“Eventually Baw’s father persuaded him to go to “just one meeting”. After his first encounter with Israeli and Palestinian members, he “felt like he could do something with them, like there’s a bit of hope that they can do something in the future”. Baw became an active forum member, paying dozens of visits to schools in Israel as part of the programme in which an Israeli and a Palestinian talk together to students about why they favour dialogue over revenge.
The schools programme, like the forum itself, has not found favour with the Netanyahu government or its supporters. Since 2023 it has had to appeal repeatedly to the Jerusalem District Court to have successive bans on the school visits overturned. In hearings, the government has argued that “any comparison between the bereavement of families of soldiers or victims of terror and the bereavement of victims of defensive IDF operations is unacceptable”.”
“In 2024 the government cited in anger a statement in which the Parents Circle had called for an immediate end to the Gaza war and a diplomatic solution to end the occupation. The statement also praised Moshe Ya’alon, a former defence minister and IDF chief of staff – seen in his time as a strong security hawk – who had said that “ethnic cleansing” was taking place in northern Gaza to make way for Jewish settlement there.”
“The forum has been subjected to harassment by far-right demonstrators; meeting venues have had to be kept secret until the last minute to avoid disruption.
But it won again in court this year, and school visits restart this month. The catch: they will involve Israeli members only for now. Since October 7, the Netanyahu government has revoked more than 100,000 permits that allowed Palestinians to cross from the West Bank into Israel.
Baw, who speaks fluent Hebrew, has no trouble distinguishing his Israeli friends and colleagues from those who have stolen his land – and that of tens of thousands and others. He now talks about his work everywhere, including with other Palestinians who find it more difficult to accept “the idea of peace between both sides”.”
“Yet he also feels deep frustration not only with the depredations of the settlers but also the failure of the IDF and the Israeli police to halt them.
Initially, police told Baw that the settlers had arrived illegally and would be evicted from his land – as they were, before coming back almost immediately and with impunity. Avi Bluth, the head of the IDF’s central command, was quoted in May as saying that at least one of the “farms”, Kerem Hamami, which had become a flashpoint, was illegal and would be evacuated. It is still flourishing.
According to Etkes, who runs the Israeli settlement-monitoring NGO Kerem Navot, the outposts in the Halhul area are “without exception” not only illegal in international law but illegal according to the Israeli authorities as well. “[But] everything continues,” he says. “No one prevents them. No one bothers. And they basically ruined the livelihoods of thousands of Palestinians.””
“Etkes says the residents – often relatively few – of the hilltop outposts like those here are in a position to control “basically large agricultural areas around them. Their ability to sabotage [...] to prevent people from accessing land is extremely effective because they have weapons and they enjoy complete cooperation and impunity [from the authorities].”
This may not be government policy, but it serves the government’s purposes, suggests Ayelet Eyal, the Israeli co-director of the Parents Circle and a bereaved sibling who lost her brother in the 1982 Lebanon war. “I guess this is the government policy. I mean, we all assume that the Israeli army and police, if they did want to do something about it, it’s within their power.”
She suggests there seems little hope of change while the extreme Jewish supremacist settler and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich – who has stated openly that he wants Palestinians to “emigrate” from the West Bank as well as Gaza – is in charge of civilian affairs in the occupied territories.”
“Looking to the Israeli election scheduled for 27 October, Eyal hopes that “just maybe we can have something more normal”. That wish poses two questions: can Netanyahu’s government be replaced by one led by his main rival, the more centrist former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot? And how far would an Eisenkot government be willing or able to halt the march of Palestinian home demolitions?
On 21 August on the edge of Sa’ir, a 17-year-old Palestinian was shot dead after a group of settlers, including at least one armed Israeli, approached the village on what was officially described as a “hike”. It’s not clear whether Karim Sanad Shalaldeh was shot by a settlement security coordinator or an IDF soldier. The boy was accused of having thrown stones at the settlers. His family says he was merely filming their incursion on his phone.”
Excerpt From
“Palestinians beaten, shot and robbed of their land while settlers smile for the cameras”
Donald Macintyre
The Observer
https://apple.news/AyzO5Xru_T_aCblFE3xJEBg
This material may be protected by copyright.