Israel’s war in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of civilians in the wake of Hamas’ brutal attacks on October 7th. Still, a different area in the region, the West Bank, is home to over 3,000,000 Palestinians, cluding the eastern half of Jerusalem, as well as some of the holiest sites for Christians, Jews and Muslims. Gaza has overshadowed the West Bank, but it is a critical part of the larger struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. Everything concerning the West Bank and Israel’s occupation of it is incredibly contentious to the point that even small decisions concerning it can cause headlines.
A key reason the West Bank is so tense concerns the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers living there. While that tension can be expressed at the international level or by proxy, it can also be communicated face to face, as in this viral video from a few years ago in which a Palestinian woman confronts the Israeli settler who was living in the family home that she’d been forcibly evicted from, “Jacobi, you know this is not your house. You are stealing my house.” It is both ridiculous and tragic that this woman’s only recourse against the man occupying her home is yelling at him. The ousting of that woman from her home in East Jerusalem is just a microcosm of the larger issue of Palestinian displacement and Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
What’s happening there is essential to understand, both because it’s inextricably linked to the fate of any possible peace process and because things there have recently deteriorated exponentially. Let’s discuss the West Bank settlements – how they came to be, who lives there, and what their presence means for everyone in the region.
Here is a brief overview of how we arrived at this point. Very basically, Israel was founded in 1948, fulfilling the long-held hopes of the Zionist movement at a time when Jews were reeling from the collective traumas of persecution and genocide in the Holocaust. It was established through what Israel calls “the war of independence” and what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or catastrophe. 700,000 Palestinians suffered their own collective trauma when they fled or were driven out of their homes amid violence and, in some cases, massacres of entire villages. Some ended up in neighbouring countries as refugees, while others settled in the part of Palestine, now known as Gaza and the West Bank.
For decades, there were significant tensions between Israel and its neighbours, and then came the Six-Day War in 1967, where Israel defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan, and in doing so, captured vastly more territory, including the West Bank. Almost immediately, it started building settlements there while also annexing East Jerusalem.
To be clear, both those actions constitute violations of international law. When you occupy territory as an outcome of war, you are not allowed to expel people or move your own citizens in. Israel knew this at the time. Its foreign ministry’s own legal adviser warned in a top-secret memo that the civilian settlements would contravene explicit provisions of the 4th Geneva Convention. Still, they built settlements anyway and continued to do so for decades.
There was a moment in the 1990s when it seemed there might be a possible pathway to a peaceful resolution, as outlined in the Oslo Accords. That historic peace process gave a new framework for the West Bank, dividing it into three distinct areas. Area A gave Palestinians total control over security and government, Area B was designated for Palestinian government control while retaining Israeli security control, meaning the Israeli military remains very present, and Area C remained completely under the Israeli army and government control. That’s about 60% of the West Bank, and that is what the West Bank map looks like today.
That is one of the most politically fraught areas on earth, colour-coded away, that looks like what would happen if Shrek just fell into a puddle. Crucially, this entire setup was only meant to be temporary while a larger peace deal was negotiated. But after Oslo fell apart for reasons including, but not limited to, continued settlement expansion and terror attacks by Palestinian militants. Israeli hardliners assassinated the Prime Minister who brokered the deal, Yitzhak Rabin. That temporary arrangement was basically frozen in place, and Israel continued building more and more and more settlements. In fact, every Israeli government has invested significant resources in expanding them, and all of that has brought us to where we are today. There were approximately 250,000 settlers in the West Bank when the Oslo Accords were signed, and there are currently around 700,000.
Talking about the settlers themselves, because when you think of them, you may envision someone like the blundering guy you saw earlier or hardliners on an ideological mission to claim the Holy Land in the name of the Jewish people. But that is not the whole picture. In fact, 70% of those who live in the West Bank are so-called quality-of-life settlers. The way they describe their communities does make them seem very attractive. Spend 10 minutes in a settlement today, and you sometimes feel that you could just as easily be in a New Jersey suburb – clean roads, big houses, quality parks, good schools, close-by shopping, a university. You ask people why they moved out here, and instead of the original mission to push forward the Israeli state, you hear things like a perfect educational system and a very nice Country Club. “It’s a great place to raise kids. We were looking for a Jerusalem suburb that we could afford, which had a manageable commute. The quality of life is so much better. It has nothing to do with politics.”
It has nothing to do with politics! I’m sorry, but it does very much. Just because it’s a nice place to live doesn’t make it any less illegal under international law. It’s not like the Geneva Convention says the occupying power shall not transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies unless there’s really convenient shopping and a super manageable commute to Jerusalem.
Additionally, part of the reason settlements can be so pleasant is that the government encourages people to move there. Life is massively subsidized in the settlement, with the government spending more per capita on things like education and infrastructure in them than it does within Israel itself. In recent years, the housing ministry has even offered subsidized apartments in the West Bank through a lottery system. The whole settlement project has been massively encouraged by the Israeli government to such a degree that it is hard to argue that living in one isn’t a political choice. Building on stolen land is an inherently political act. It is also, by the way, a form of copyright infringement.
For what it’s worth now, the Israeli government will say that it doesn’t officially support all settlements. Its official line is that there are two different kinds – so-called legally approved settlements, and outposts created by rogue settlers that are illegal under Israeli law. However, for the record, under international law, both are illegal. Also, Israel frequently offers all manner of resources to the so-called unlawful outpost, to provide them with military defence, access to public utilities, and sometimes even retroactively legalizing them.
Therefore, as this is particularly critical, the settlements point out that the line between the two types can become quite blurry. Settlement or outpost, what’s the difference? Well, usually someone refers to Israeli settlements, which the Israeli government officially approves, and there are outposts or Israeli settlements which had been built also by the Israeli government, but without official approval. Settlements and outposts usually are different, but can look strikingly similar.
But some sectors will insist that none of this matters because all they’re really doing is building in areas that no one’s using. “I know for sure that when we came here, we did not think anybody left because I saw that there was nobody here. No, it was the whole thing, there was still nobody around it, nobody was using it, nobody was bothering anybody.” But it doesn’t matter if anyone was using it if it’s not your land. You can’t just take it, and I do know that it is hard to take from someone using this particular accent, but there is a clear difference between property that nobody is using and property that nobody owns. That’s why we call those big things outside of stores parking lots and not help yourself car buffets. The argument is clearly ridiculous.
It also speaks to Israel’s larger strategy in the region, as one of the official means by which Israel acquires land is by claiming that if land hasn’t been cultivated within the prior three years, it can be declared state land. Tactics seem designed to ensure a lack of cultivation as sellers have driven Palestinians off their land through violence or intimidation. Also, it can be hard for Palestinians in the West Bank to build or cultivate in the first place due to the opaque permit process. There was this man patiently explaining, “It’s tough, the lenders then used anyway this on the top of the hills, that’s good, but why is it not news because we are not allowed to use it?”
It’s not exaggerating that Israel controls building permits in the West Bank, and by its own admission, it rejects over 95% of Palestinian permit requests. So it was not that the Palestinians don’t want to use the land, but that they are frequently not allowed to. Ultimately, it’s not their choice. I want this to be that, even as Israel has been heavily incentivizing construction for Israelis in the West Bank. When it comes to Palestinian homes, this is what’s been happening for years. Authorities have ordered hundreds of Palestinian homes to be demolished because they were built without the proper permits, which were almost impossible for Palestinians to get. They cost thousands of dollars, can take years to process and rarely get approved, which means Palestinians often build illegally, of course. Another shocking event, even before you get to the brain-destroying hypocrisy of Palestinians in the West Bank being told that their homes are illegal.
But building powers are just the tip of the iceberg. There are also the physical obstacles placed in the path of Palestinian’s everyday life, from this massive winding separation wall to the endless maze of checkpoints and gates Palestinians are forced to pass through. As this man points out, it can have extreme consequences: “You can’t come to my house, you know, the checkpoint, they close it at night. It’s only on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, with one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. We are allowed to pass a checkpoint, no visitors, no importance, it’s no kindergartens, no schools, no jobs, there’s an emergency, what do you do?” Nothing by holy fuck. In some situations, all you can do is sit there and wait to die, like if you’re stranded on a desert island or travelling on a Boeing aeroplane.
But there shouldn’t be an inevitable outcome just because you happen to live behind an Israeli checkpoint. These checkpoints are a nightmare. Palestinian women trying to get to the hospital to give birth have been delayed at them so many times that there’ve been dozens of documented roadside births, as well as cases of maternal and infant deaths. And these delays are inconveniences that can be deliberate, sometimes strategically placed to cut Palestinian communities off from one another. One outpost placed in a commercial hub openly declares on its Facebook page that its location intends to disrupt contiguity between three Palestinian villages.
The way Palestinians are fenced in can get truly absurd. One home sits on his ancestral land, surrounded by this imposing metal fence – a house within a cage encircled by Israeli settlements. His 11-year-old son Sabri was detained for six hours when his football rolled near the settlement’s boundary. He springs with youthful bravado, claiming he wasn’t scared, but his sister pipes up “Yeah”, but she was. Everything about that is bonkers, from the idea of living in a house almost surrounded by a military fence to a childhood that includes the possibility that a stray football could land you in detention for six hours. What on earth is the point of detaining an 11-year-old for six hours when you’re really hoping to get out of questioning because that is all they talk about. There’s a good reason for that girl to be scared because the legal rights of Palestinians in the West Bank are tenuous at best.
There are actually two sets of laws that Jewish settlers enjoy: access to civilian law, due process, and complete protection of civil rights. Palestinians live under Israeli military law, so if they’re accused of a crime, they are tried in military courts, which, to put it mildly, have significantly fewer protections, and that clearly separates them. An unequal two-tier justice system means Palestinians also have little recourse when they’re the victims of the crime because, despite both Israeli and international law say Israeli soldiers have an obligation to protect Palestinian residents of the West Bank, in practice, when it comes to attacks by settlers on Palestinians, there has been a history of silence, avoidance, and abatement by Israeli officials. In fact, when an Israeli human rights group looked at more than 1600 cases of settler violence, it found that just 3% resulted in a conviction. Still, 3% is too low and presented just how extreme settlements can be. Take Deborah, a city home to about 200,000 Palestinians and 700 hardline Israeli settlers have chosen to live literally above them. Life in heaven is full of constant reminders about whose safety is prioritized. Just over a year ago, a remotely controlled gun, reportedly for crowd dispersal, was installed above this checkpoint.
The Palestinian authorities have had to build an overhead fence to catch rubbish and projectiles thrown down by settlers. “Yeah, yeah, I did throw everything down.” Twelve shops are closed. The settlers attack Palestinians without any accountability. I feel very sad – from the most beautiful market to closed shops and outposts. For me, it illustrates that it’s really Tyler, someone from the settlement above his, throwing a beer bottle at his head. So, I got a piercing, or maybe it cut you, that’s terrible. I’m not sure which part of that situation seems less livable – saying hello to the barrel of a remote-control turret every day or the constant weather forecast of cloudy with a chance of tetanus.
Settlers will argue that they live in constant fear of violence. It is true that over the last 16 years, 150 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in the West Bank, though it is worth noting that in that same period,, Israelis have killed more than 10 times Palestinians, the vast majority directly by Israeli security forces.
Maybe the clearest illustration of the impunity some settlers feel is the practice of so-called price tag attacks on Palestinians, which were sensible acts of revenge but can be utterly indiscriminate, as this settler calmly explains. “Can you explain to us where these price tag attacks are, what they mean, the after-hours rules and anything wrong that happened? We showed that we won’t stay quiet. It has a price, and it’s called a price tag. It could just be any random error; it doesn’t matter whether they’re involved enough. It doesn’t matter because they sit here and believe it’s theirs, and they’re all involved. And for you, that’s guilty enough. Just being here makes them guilty, yeah, yeah, that makes them guilty.” It’s a bit jarring to hear someone say something so wildly disturbing in such a sedate manner. She’s advocating for random violent hate crimes.
It is a truly horrendous situation, as what you saw earlier points out, is actually a term that describes all this cautious torture when two groups live in the same territory. They’re officially separated in terms of political, economic, and legal rights. The key to this separation is entirely arbitrary, whether you were born to an Arab mother or not. What would you call it if it smells like apartheid, looks like apartheid, sounds like apartheid, then it’s apartheid. He’s right, although, if it smells like a boxer, does apartheid actually have a smell? Until now, I was pretty sure it only produced one type of Musk. He’s not alone in the assessment. Former head of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad has referred to the West Bank as an apartheid state. This former general has called the situation total apartheid, adding that the IDF is standing by, looking at the settlers and is beginning to be a partner in war crimes.
We should discuss the USA’s role in this situation, as it is considerable. America opposes settlements officially, but very much soft pedals its criticism of them. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have referred to them as illegitimate but declined to call them illegal to avoid the possibility that Israel would face international sanctions. Some presidents have gone even further.
Trump was incredibly cozy with Netanyahu, as you can tell from the unnervingly smug look on Beebe’s face. His administration not only moved the US embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, an incredibly provocative act in itself, but also made a significant change in foreign policy the following year. The Trump administration said it no longer considers Jewish communities built on Palestinian lands known as settlements to be against international law. The announcement made by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling the establishment of civilian settlements inconsistent with international law hasn’t worked; it hasn’t advanced the cause of peace. It turns out Mike Pompeo and I actually agree on something. The status quo hasn’t worked. I think we might disagree on what to do next is one of the many things that we seem to disagree on, along with what he should have named his book, because, in my opinion, “Never Give an Inch” sounds like the autobiography of a micro penis, but Mike clearly feels differently.
But it’s not just government support that wealthy American individuals funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars into settlements. It’s worth noting that many of Israel’s strongest advocates aren’t Jewish individuals or groups; they’re actually evangelical Christians, like this man, pastor Jon Hagey, who’s done more than you might expect. Pastor Hagey founded Christians United for Israel, which is the largest pro-Israel lobbying organization in America, even bigger than the organization most people assume dominates the American Israel lobby. A good deal of their money for Israel is spent on buildings and organizations in the Israeli settlements gave him that land they owned by OK if you told me to picture a mega church pastor, that is precisely who I’m imagining swings back silver hair, headset mic looking like an elderly Chris Farley and Easter pimp drag that is on the nose casting right there.
Interestingly, the reason many evangelicals are so invested in Israel is that they believe Jewish people being in that region is one of the prerequisites for their vision of Armageddon when that day comes. The thinking goes, Christians will be raptured, and I’ll let this man fill you in on what he thinks happens to Jews in Israel. “After 1000 years, blindness is welcome peeling off the Jewish mind and those of us that with Jesus who to the Christians have been raptured out all who are born again Jesus company called from you in the air yeah and then we will come with panoramic thing unfolding as the Jewish people turned their Messiah would be converting people by the hundreds of thousands during this time. It’s gonna be the best of times and the worst of times.” Yeah, that makes sense. Apparently, evangelicals will grow Victoria’s Secret Angel wings, flap up to Jesus, and sit with him in his Lisa Frank ball gown and smugly watch as Jews realize how wrong they’ve been.
On one hand, I get why some in Israel might encourage this. There was a cynical utility to taking idiots’ money. Still, someone expressing anticipation for the day 2000 years of blindness come wheeling off my mind might make me wanna keep a certain distance from them, and yet what is Hagey? A few years ago, I introduced a special guest star to his followers. Would you please welcome my friend and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu? “Thank you, pastor Hagey, you are always there for us. We have no better friends on earth. You, I guess, that makes sense. Some friends drive you to the airport, others see your suffering as their ticket to getting Christ blasted by a flying Raptor. Jesus’ friendship takes many forms.
And in recent years, everything I’ve shown you has only gotten worse in 2022. Benjamin Netanyahu, to hold on to power from the governing coalition by allying with leaders of far-right parties, created the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, putting extremist politicians, some of whom have set themselves in significant positions of power. His current finance minister openly advocates for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and his minister of national security lives in Hebron, you know, the fun place with the flying bottles and remote-control machine guns. He’s also been convicted of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. All this was a massive win for hardline settlers. Just listen to this Israeli soldier gloating to Palestinians in Hebron about what Ben’s assent would mean. “And your actions are illegal is a bull shit attitude, it’s the sort of thing an American cop would only be comfortable tattooing above their sleeve, like things were already getting bad.
And then the appalling attacks of October 7th happened, and since then, things have gotten considerably worse. Israel imposed even tighter restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank. The checkpoints are increasingly closed, and many work permits were cancelled, making it impossible for many Palestinians there to make a living. Meanwhile, attacks on Palestinians have only spiked from where they were already at a historic high to the point that the UN has found at least 19 entire Palestinian communities have been displaced as a direct result of settler violence since October. In the midst of all of this, nearly four square miles of Palestinian territory were declared to be state land, the single largest land grab since the Oslo Accords. Is it any wonder that Israeli security chiefs have warned that the West Bank could be on the brink of a major eruption of violence?
And when you take all of this together, you do begin to understand why so many Israelis and Palestinians have despaired of ever achieving a two-state solution, as this seller pointed out nearly a decade ago. “That is basically the whole strategy. You can kiss the two-state solution goodbye. It’s not going to happen. We’re going to continue to move in there, and eventually we’re going to have more Jewish communities there, more Israeli electricity, more Israeli roads, more Israeli taxes. And then in the end, it’s just going to be Israel.” Relentless expansion has made the idea of peace talks a joke, and when I say joke, I don’t mean something funny, ha-ha. I mean something deeply depressing. You know a joke in the same way that this show is a comedy, which, as this audience that was excited to be in here half an hour ago will tell you, is stretching that turn to breaking point.
Where do we go from here? At this point, it feels presumptuous even to discuss a peace process, as we’re so far from being in a position even to begin. There’s actually a moment that I think sums that up pretty well. It’s the then-mayor of Ramallah speaking to a German delegation a few years ago. They asked him if he’d be willing to participate in some symbolic exchanges with his Israeli counterparts to demonstrate goodwill and help facilitate peace – you know, the standard ‘meet them in the middle’ rhetoric. And this incredibly diplomatic response. “When we feel that we are not treated as enslaved people and they are masters, we are ready to do everything. But when I have to take off all my clothes in front of all the people because a soldier of 16 years old is asking me to do so under the threat of his weapon, then it’s about dignity. Yeah, and when it comes to dignity, I think it’s something negotiated.”
Human dignity has to be a prerequisite for negotiating anything, and Palestinians in the West Bank have their dignity challenged hundreds of times a day, from having beer bottles thrown over their heads to being detained for kicking balls. The offences have been stopped while crossing checkpoints in ambulances, to having their home stolen, bulldozed and far worse. To be clear, dignity is the absolute starting point of what’s required for justice, and the call for that is growing louder. Just last week, the ICJ issued an opinion that Israeli settlements and the regime associated with them violate international law. Israeli presence in the occupied territories should come to an end as rapidly as possible.
That is why it has an obligation to provide full reparation for the damage it caused. However, the US State Department has already undermined that statement, stating that it’s concerned the breadth of the ICJ’s opinion will complicate efforts to resolve the conflict. However, the conflict is already quite complicated. Is the world’s highest court interpreting international law accurately, really going to make things any worse?
A phrase that gets thrown up a lot about Israel is “never again”, an anti-genocide slogan often invoked in memory of the Holocaust. It’s always been open to two interpretations. There’s the one that means this must never again happen to the Jewish people. And that means this must never happen to any people anywhere again. In the West Bank, as in Gaza right now, it couldn’t be clearer which one the Israeli government has favoured, especially as long as Netanyahu is in power. He’s clearly going to do whatever he and the worst people around him want.
But the US doesn’t have to continue to abet that or cover for it. The thing is, we do have levers at our disposal. We could put conditions on the billions in military aid we give Israel. We could stop vetoing UN Security Council resolutions critical of the Israeli government’s actions, which we’ve been doing for decades now. We can say what is painful. Everyone can see these settlements aren’t just illegitimate or even just illegal; they are immoral. Not only should we say that, we should then act accordingly. I know the bar here is incredibly low, but at the very least, I want my government to have the moral backbone that Ben and Jerry’s are showing.
