WN: This is an overwhelmingly tragic story for Palestinians living within the Israeli state. Israel from the Nakba get-go is a marauding, murdering empire committed to the very inverse of human rights and democratic ideals. From my Front Page is this, about Empire, of which Israel is classic instance, known as settler colonialism: the steadfast elimination of peoples other than Jews wthin its confines:
Augustine recounts this story of Empire:
The king asked the fellow, “What is your idea, in infesting the sea?” And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, “the same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you’re called an emperor[Prime Minister/President].” (Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson, New York: Penguin Books, 1984, IV, 4, p. 139).
From the dawn of history the oppressor has always insisted that oppression was good for the oppressed. — Moorfield StoreyFurther: Each act of aggression, each new expedition of conquest is prefaced by a pronouncement containing a moral justification and an assurance to the victims of the imperial aggression that all is being done for their benefit. — Richard F. Petticrew — American Exceptionalism
Though even in the quote here is now fully dispensed with. Israel means pure, unadulterated aggression against Palestinians: settler colonialism in tooth and claw.
The Expansion of the Roman empire, which accusers were blaming Christ for having reversed, was not an automatic benefit to the human race; for “if justice has been abolished, what is empire but a fancy name for larceny?” — Augustine (The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture, Jaroslav Pelikan, 1997, p. 30.)
Roman historian Tacitus wrote so long ago:
To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire; they make a desolation and call it peace[democracy].
One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation (p. 133).
American public intellectual Edward Said wrote in the Preface of Orientalism (1978):
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest ‘mission civilisatrice.’
Such is the State of Israel.
Even a cursory look at what Palestinians refer to as Nakba7–fully endorsed at the time by the Western powers–immediately gives the lie to the cavalier way Ms. Robinson referred to the violent, colonial displacement en masse of Palestinians, and betrays embrace of a primary tenant of Zionism. She did subsequently apologize, and one hopes it was genuine. But her words were right out of the European powers’ playbook over many centuries, much of which is enshrined in worldwide colonized countries’ laws, including in North America, to justify and perpetuate the atrocities and their beneficiaries downstream . . .8
Decolonizing Palestine challenges the weaponization of biblical texts to support the current settler-colonial state of Israel. Raheb argues that some of the most important theological concepts -Israel, the land, election, and chosen people – must be decolonized in a paradigm shift in Christian theological thinking about Palestine. Decolonizing Palestine is a timely book that builds on the latest research in settler-colonialism and human rights to place traditional theological themes within the wider socio-political context of settler colonialism as it is practiced by the modern nation-state of Israel. Written by a native Palestinian Christian theologian who continues to live in the region, Decolonizing Palestine provides an insider’s perspective that disrupts hegemonic and imperialist narratives about the region.
An additional outstanding Christian liberation theology resource is: Sabeel. Its Canadian counterpart is: Canadian Friends of Sabeel.
Invocation. “Schindler’s List.” —violin solo by Braimah Kanneh-Mason
§ § §
Following Hamas’ brutal execution of nearly 1,200 Israelis on 7 October 2023, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s words have become infamous: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”But this present atrocity did not begin last October. In the days following the 14 May 1948 founding of the nation of Israel, some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled by Jewish militias from their homes or fled in fear for their lives. That infamy is designated as al-Nakba (“the catastrophe”), commemorated every 15 May by Palestinians. Then, in 2007, Israel put in place a complete blockade on Gaza and its 2+ million residents, tightly controlling access by land, air, and sea. Human Rights Watch refers to Gaza’s status as the world’s largest open-air prison.
To date some 36,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed during the Israeli Defense Force’s invasion. For up to date information on casualties in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, see “Israel-Gaza war in maps and charts: Live tracker.”
This story is told in three parts. The first [PART I. IMPUNITY] documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second [PART II. WARNINGS] shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third [PART III. A NEW GENERATION] explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.
…
Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.
Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy.
How we reported this article:
The reporters spent years interviewing more than 100 former and current Israeli government officials — including four former prime ministers — scoured secret government documents, and reported from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the West Bank and Washington. Natan Odenheimer, who contributed reporting from Israel and the West Bank, also obtained documents about how ultranationalist crimes went unpunished.
The interviews, along with classified documents written in recent months, reveal a government at war with itself. One document describes a meeting in March, when Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, gave a withering account of the efforts by Bezalel Smotrich — an ultraright leader and the official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank — to undermine law enforcement in the occupied territory. Since Smotrich took office, Fox wrote, the effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled “to the point where it has disappeared.” Moreover, Fox said, Smotrich and his allies were thwarting the very measures to enforce the law that the government had promised Israeli courts it would take.
This is a story, pieced together and told in full for the first time, that leads to the heart of Israel. But it begins in the West Bank, in places like Khirbet Zanuta. From within the village’s empty ruins, there is a clear view across the valley to a tiny Jewish outpost called Meitarim Farm. Built in 2021, the farm has become a base of operations for settler attacks led by Yinon Levi, the farm’s owner. Like so many of the Israeli outposts that have been set up throughout the West Bank in recent years, Meitarim Farm is illegal. It is illegal under international law, which most experts say doesn’t recognize Israeli settlements in occupied land. It is illegal under Israeli law, like most settlements built since the 1990s.
Few efforts are made to stop the building of these outposts or the violence emanating from them. Indeed, one of Levi’s day jobs was running an earthworks company, and he has worked with the Israel Defense Forces to bulldoze at least one Palestinian village in the West Bank. As for the victims of that violence, they face a confounding and defeating system when trying to get relief. Villagers seeking help from the police typically have to file a report in person at an Israeli police station, which in the West Bank are almost exclusively located inside the settlements themselves. After getting through security and to the station, they sometimes wait for hours for an Arabic translator, only to be told they don’t have the right paperwork or sufficient evidence to submit a report. As one senior Israeli military official told us, the police “exhaust Palestinians so they won’t file complaints.”
And yet in November, with no protection from the police or the military, the former residents of Khirbet Zanuta and five nearby villages chose to test whether justice was still possible by appealing directly to Israel’s Supreme Court. In a petition, lawyers for the villagers, from Haqel, an Israeli human rights organization, argued that days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, a raiding party that included settlers and Israeli soldiers assaulted village residents, threatened murder and destroyed property throughout the village. They stated that the raid was part of “a mass transfer of ancient Palestinian communities,” one in which settlers working hand in hand with soldiers are taking advantage of the current war in Gaza to achieve the longer-standing goal of “cleansing” parts of the West Bank, aided by the “sweeping and unprecedented disregard” of the state and its “de facto consent to the massive acts of deportation.”
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and the relief the villagers are seeking — that the law be enforced — might seem modest. But our reporting reveals the degree to which decades of history are stacked against them: After 50 years of crime without punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have become one.
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The violence and impunity that these cases demonstrate existed long before Oct. 7. In nearly every month before October, the rate of violent incidents was higher than during the same month in the previous year. And Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, looking at more than 1,600 cases of settler violence in the West Bank between 2005 and 2023, found that just 3 percent ended in a conviction. Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000 — speaking out now because of his concern about Israel’s systemic failure to enforce the law — says this singular lack of consequences reflects the indifference of the Israeli leadership going back years. “The cabinet, the prime minister,” he says, “they signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”
Ayalon’s assessment was echoed by many other officials we interviewed. Mark Schwartz, a retired American three-star general, was the top military official working at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021, overseeing international support efforts for the partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “There’s no accountability,” he says now of the long history of settler crimes and heavy-handed Israeli operations in the West Bank. “These things eat away at trust and ultimately the stability and security of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s undeniable.”
How did a young nation turn so quickly on its own democratic ideals, and at what price? Any meaningful answer to these questions has to take into account how a half-century of lawless behavior that went largely unpunished propelled a radical form of ultranationalism to the center of Israeli politics. This is the history that is told here in three parts. In Part I, we describe the origins of a religious movement that established Jewish settlements in the newly won territories of Gaza and the West Bank during the 1970s. In Part II, we recount how the most extreme elements of the settler movement began targeting not only Palestinians but also Israeli leaders who tried to make peace with them. And in Part III, we show how the most established members of Israel’s ultraright, unpunished for their crimes, gained political power in Israel, even as a more radical generation of settlers vowed to eliminate the Israeli state altogether.
Many Israelis who moved to the West Bank did so for reasons other than ideology, and among the settlers, there is a large majority who aren’t involved in violence or other illegal acts against Palestinians. And many within the Israeli government fought to expand the rule of law into the territories, with some success. But they also faced harsh pushback, with sometimes grave personal consequences. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts in the 1990s, on the heels of the First Intifada, to make peace with Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, gave rise to a new generation of Jewish terrorists, and they ultimately cost him his life.
Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.
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Even a cursory look at what Palestinians refer to as Nakba 7–fully endorsed at the time by the Western powers–immediately gives the lie to the cavalier way Ms. Robinson referred to the violent, colonial displacement en masse of Palestinians, and betrays embrace of a primary tenant of Zionism. She did subsequently apologize, and one hopes it was genuine. But her words were right out of the European powers’ playbook over many centuries, much of which is enshrined in worldwide colonized countries’ laws, including in North America, to justify and perpetuate the atrocities and their beneficiaries downstream . . .8
Please also see, by Ken Sehested, May 28, 2024: When discussing the war in Gaza, we must ask the question about genocide. In it:
