The Settlers' War

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

What are Israel and the United States hiding from us regarding settlement if the Arab and Palestinian condition continues in this state of flabbiness, weakness, and allegiance to the enemy? My assessment is that conditions in the West Bank will deteriorate further, and one day we will find the settlers waging a war against us in the name of a “war of liberation,” exactly as they did against Britain, albeit under different circumstances.

Israel will continue — regardless of which party or coalition governs — to encourage settlement, whether through establishing new settlements or expanding existing ones, and it will continue confiscating land and manufacturing various pretexts for its settlement activity. The pace of settlement construction rises at times and dips slightly at others, but the overall curve of settlement building will keep climbing, and the number of settlers residing in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, will keep rising. There are now two societies in the West Bank: a Palestinian society spread across population clusters that are widely dispersed except in the Jordan Valley, and Jewish population clusters multiplying in both numbers and locations. The Palestinian population clusters are linked to one another by underdeveloped infrastructure, making it easy for Israel to sever them from each other by means of checkpoints, while the Zionist clusters are linked by advanced infrastructure and services that make life easy, threatened by little more than a small amount of Palestinian resistance activity.

What I expect is that the settlers will reach a stage of taking up arms on a wide scale against Palestinians in the West Bank. They are qualified for this in training, organization, and armament, and under government supervision, using the pretext of self-defense against what they call terrorism and terrorists. They will attack the residents of Palestinian villages and towns to achieve two goals: expelling the population through security pressure and economic strangulation, and raising the degree of isolation between the clusters so that each becomes a satellite orbiting the settlements. The Zionists hope this will reduce the population in the West Bank, establish the supremacy of “Zionist society,” and turn Palestinian society into a mere dependent, living as strangers, marginalized on land over which they have no sovereignty.

…with the campaign to Judaize the Galilee, which succeeded to a large extent despite repeated Palestinian protests, most notably the Land Day protests of 1976. The same method is being carried out in the West Bank, with a difference in the pace of execution, since the task of Judaizing the Galilee was, for Israel, far easier than the task of Judaizing the West Bank, owing to the international dimension that looks toward a resolution of the ongoing conflict and the differing political circumstances of the two regions.

The United States will facilitate Israel’s settlement work just as it has facilitated it over the past several decades, spicing that facilitation with occasional condemnations and objections, along with a few placating phrases for its Arab lackeys. The United States supports settlement and backs Israel in everything it does, and if it objects, that is only to ease the embarrassment of its Arab and Palestinian allies and agents.

The settlers will carry out their gradual assault on the Palestinians of the West Bank, and gradually the role of Israel’s army will shift, in appearance, to that of a general overseer preventing bloody conflict between Palestinians and settlers. It will try to wear the mask of protector of Palestinians from settler attacks, or of the party separating the two sides of the equation. We will find the settlers taking the initiative and doing as they please, and we will see the army intervene from time to time in a manner calculated to draw media attention and win praise from Western states and some Arab states. Gradually there will emerge a Palestinian and Arab demand for the necessity of Israeli army intervention to protect unsafe Palestinian civilians. Let no one be surprised if one of the decisions of a future Arab summit conference is to call on the Israeli army to deter the settlers by entering Palestinian villages and towns and militarizing them, and to conduct a “fair investigation” into the killing of the residents of Awarta, al-Walaja, or Beit Ummar.

And if things continue as they are now, it is expected that the American envoy will not come to the region to discuss the negotiations process, but rather to persuade Israel to use its army against the settlers with greater firmness, and to work on curbing settler excesses. The American role will remain a merely representational one, and the West Bank will turn into a stage for the settlers, who will establish on it a self-rule connected to Israel, and we will find Israel itself becoming a participating member of the international movement to abolish this settler self-rule, so that the Palestinians can breathe.

Will we inevitably reach this stage? Things are moving in this direction, but my assessment is that the region is heading toward great and radical transformations because of the shift that has occurred in the balance of power, a shift for which Israel will pay a price. This price will affect the situation in the West Bank to the detriment of the settlers.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “حرب المستوطنين” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.