It has the feeling of a ghastly ending, one pushed along by desperation and eagerness. First, levelling Gaza and turning it to an uninhabitable moonscape, with the promise of a territory free of Palestinians. Then, displacing and destroying the already precarious holdings of Palestinian residents in the West Bank, all the time subjecting them to curfews, arrests and detentions while aiding vigilante Jewish settlers, firming up the system of segregation and snuffing out any prospect of autonomy.
The campaign of rendering the Palestinian cause for sovereignty extinct has become an article of faith for Israel’s security forces, and spectators stare, glumly, at its crude, unceasing momentum. On February 23, the IDF announced that tanks from the 188th Armoured Brigade were being deployed to Jenin as part of what it claims are “counterterrorism efforts”, a feature of an operation dubbed “Iron Wall”. The justification for the decision lay in the planting of three bombs on empty buses in the Tel Aviv area. These prematurely detonated on February 20. Two further explosive devices were discovered on additional buses, but these failed to cause any casualties.
The impetus for the failed bombings, it was argued, came from the West Bank, though we are none the wiser about any further details, since a gag order was imposed on February 21, intended to last till March 12.
The move is ominous as being the first time tanks have been used in the West Bank since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. Defence Minister Israel Katz also issued a chilling instruction to the IDF to clear “nests of terror”, to eliminate infrastructure and destroy weapons “on an extensive scale.” But this operation, as with others conducted by the IDF, is characteristically brutal, involving the effective expulsion of 40,000 Palestinians from refugee camps. According to Katz, “40,000 Palestinians have so far been evacuated from the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps, and are now empty of residents. UNRWA [UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees] activity in the camps has also been stopped.”
The measure taken here has the rank smell of permanent displacement, albeit dressed up as a calculated, temporary action intended to protect Israeli security. The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates was in no doubt that the latest efforts perpetuated Israel’s “genocide, displacement and annexation”. The Knesset’s Cabinet Committee for Legislation has also expressed its proprietary feelings towards the territory this month by approving a bill replacing the term “West Bank” with “Judea and Samaria”. On January 29, the Knesset passed a preliminary reading of a bill permitting Israeli settlers to register themselves as legal owners of property in the West Bank.
The IDF, according to Katz, have been “instructed … to prepare for a long stay in the camps that were cleared, for the coming year, and not allow residents to return and the terror to return and grow.” He spoke of not returning “to the reality that was in the past”, suggesting an even more radical targeting of Palestinian refugees, blended, as they are, in the mash of “terror centres” and “battalions and terror infrastructure” aided by “the Iranian evil axis, in an attempt to establish an eastern terror front.”
The Israeli operation has also involved raids against Kobar and Silwad north of Ramallah, the Beitunia neighbourhood of Ramallah, and Hebron. The long term plan here is to establish corridors similar to the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza, intended for the movement of IDF personnel and equipment. Al Jazeera reports that the IDF, in addition to conducting mass expulsions, is also engaged in destroying roads, imposing and enforcing lengthy curfews, blocking critical access points to towns, executing arrests and seizing homes for military use.
No arrangements have been put in place for the Palestinian expellees, leaving them to seek temporary and precarious shelter in community centres, event halls and mosques. The cessation of UNRWA activity in the West Bank camps has also effectively concluded the most vital link of aid to the refugees.
The Israeli advocacy group, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), has noted shortages in food, power and medical supplies, along with incessant IDF efforts to obstruct “Red Crescent vehicles and humanitarian services, delaying their ability to provide first aid or transport patients for … treatment.”
The blunt savagery of these latest actions, as with the broader campaign against militant groups by Israel, continues the reductive logic that celebrates force over peace, the use of weapons over considerations of diplomacy. The direct targeting of refugee camps in the West Bank shows that the Israeli method is one distinctly hostile to the approach Winston Churchill described as “meeting jaw to jaw”. In doing so, Israeli is fecundly engendering the next generation of fighters that will, in due course, return the deadly serve with remorseless dedication. In the short term, there is also a serious risk that the West Bank operations will fray an already withering truce between Hamas and Israel in Gaza. Not that this seems to bother Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who promises a return to full scale war in Gaza if necessary.
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Is it too cynical to suggest that the bombs on buses were planted by the IDF or Mossad, given that no evidence has been supplied and a gag order implemented?
And to be even the slightest bit critical of the Israelis is being antisemitic.
With such unrelenting cruelty by Israel I wear the label of ‘antisemite’ with pride. The meaning of ‘antisemite’ has changed to ‘humanitarian’.
How can we sit back and watch this happen?
Not too cynical at all, PG; the Israeli spook industry has long mastery of the dark arts along with black ops and false flag operations. Examples: USS Liberty incident in 1967, 9/11 attack on the USA in 2001 (as any unbiased appraisal would concur), the more recent walkie-talkie & pager bombings in Lebanon etc. etc.
That they would attack American assets again & again is indicative of the deeply embedded pathology in the Israeli psyche; the centuries of stigmatisation, whether rightly or wrongly, have clearly generated a society of paranoid ‘kill or be killed’ individuals for whom anybody not Jewish is suspect and many within that society too – the ever-present Judases. To murder & maim their own would be rationalised as necessary in order to maintain the degree of white-hot malevolence towards their enemies…
That their leaders, ongoingly, are also criminals, murderers, assassins, terrorists, tells one all that needs to be said about that society and its priorities.
I am just one of those who might be challenged by superstitious drenched devotees, and by rotten law based on superstition. There is no abrahamic god and never was. There is no proof. There is no promised land, no chosen race, master race, special places up somewheere, no paradises, nirvanas, so hosanna and amen to the lies that sustain this rotting festering superstition, There was a Palestine under British contrived control up to May 1948. There should be one Palestine now, even with a jewish minority by illegal contrived methods over time, and in 1948 about 22 %. Palestinians, the only ones who lived there in 1948, were totally betrayed by those former jew hating criminal types from ages far gone, for Adolf didn’t invent it. Getting rid of jews and concentrating them far away seemed appealing to some, and jewish money and influence swayed such as Truman. There is not one jew who can have a proven, legal document going back centures even to Tiberius, claiming land. The Zionists are invaders and criminals, coming from afar, as only Rabin of the major ones was born in the old Palestine mandate area. This criminality cannot go on. In Australia, onlookers, anyone, be it jewish, orthodox christian, catholic, protestant, islamic, buddhist, confucianist, whatever, should be able to go about holding a belief, even if it is unsuppotable in honesty. Citizens have and deserve rights and protections. To speak strongly however, one now seems at risk. Telescopes, microscopes.., that is it. We must end the evils of triumphal murderous thieving supremacist righteousness forever, for real peace and progress. But, will anything good be done?
@Perry Gretton & Canguro
Agreed; I would not dismiss anything being possible with these buggers.
In fact you can ask: how good is their propaganda and influence?
One author looks at recent events in Aust and says it’s here, its co-ordinated and doing a lot of damage, but few people are looking in this direction.
https://johnmenadue.com/what-the-bankstown-hospital-nurses-affair-teaches-us/