For Palestinians, the Future Is Being Bulldozed

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For Palestinians, the Future Is Being Bulldozed

By Megan K. Stack

Photographs by Samar Hazboun

Dec. 9, 2023, New York Times

 

 

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"The men came alone that morning, leaving families and sheep behind, and climbed the hill to see what was left of their village. On the sun-bleached crest, they found a scene of wreckage: The windows of the makeshift clinic had been smashed, household furniture lay shattered; sections of the schoolhouse had been burned to ash. There were drifts of clothing and stray shoes spread on the ground throughout the abandoned village, small things dropped in haste when the families fled.

 

The Palestinians who live (or lived) in this hilltop hamlet had decamped in terror a few weeks earlier. A gang of Israeli settlers — their neighbors — had been tormenting them for weeks, they explained, beating them up and threatening murder if they didn’t leave.

 

Similar scenes are playing out across the West Bank these days as Israeli settlers, backed and sometimes aided by soldiers, force Arabs out of villages, farmlands and herding pastures. Human rights monitors say they are documenting an apparently coordinated campaign to bring vast swaths of land under the control of Jewish settlements (all of which are illegal under international law, and some of which are also illegal under Israeli law) while forcing Palestinians into densely populated cities and towns."

 

" I used to assume the international community, for all the fecklessness it has shown here, would stop Palestinians from falling too far, being killed in numbers that were too great, losing too much territory. Now I look at Gaza, and I look at the West Bank, and I’m not so sure."

 

"As a Palestinian civilian, Mr. Til is forbidden to own a gun, and even if the settlers hit him, he would be ill advised to strike back. Both law and practice are tilted against him. In the West Bank, settlers enjoy the full protection of Israeli civil and criminal law, while their Palestinians neighbors are subject to draconian military orders. That means, among other things, that Palestinians can be indefinitely imprisoned without charge.

Settlers, on the other hand, are routinely armed to the teeth. Many of them recently got government-issued assault rifles in a drive to harden Israeli defenses. The national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a settlement dweller himself, was filmed passing out rifles to settlers."

 

"Israeli officials make tortured arguments that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are legal. They’re not; international law prohibits occupying powers from transferring their own people to live on occupied land. And yet the settlements keep growing, feeding on the belief that Judea and Samaria (the biblical names preferred by settlers) are the God-given home of the Jews."

 

"Israel’s finance minister ... Mr. Smotrich has lamented that Israel’s founders didn’t “finish the job” of removing Arabs from Israel and argued in March that there is 'no such thing as a Palestinian people.'”