There Is Never 'Quiet Time' in the West Bank
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-there-is-never-quiet-time-in-the-west-bank-1.10410731
by Amira Hass 24 November 2021. Haaretz
Haaretz military commentator Amos Harel wrote on Monday that “the West Bank has been relatively quiet lately,” in contrast to the mood a day earlier due to a shooting attack in Jerusalem’s Old City and a stabbing attack in Jaffa.
Harel added the following qualifier to his description of the quiet: “Other than local incidents, some of which have involved friction between neighbors: Palestinian villagers and residents of adjacent Jewish outposts.”
These words must be translated into the language of reality. Being written from an exclusively Israeli-security point of view, they provide readers with a distorted and deceptive picture.
For the majority of the readers who don’t follow the posts and tweets of the leftist activists, who report on what’s happening in that same supposedly relatively quiet West Bank, Harel’s words anaesthetize them from a true understanding of the situation.
First of all, the “West Bank” is an area that does not exist in itself, it’s an expanse Israel deliberately stole. The Palestinians are imprisoned in pens, each one surrounded by some or all of the following: fences, walls, surveillance cameras, drones and balloons, soldiers programmed to be indifferent to non-Jewish pain, watchtowers and shooting, settlements, outposts and travel restrictions.
Second, settler terrorism against the Palestinians is not “friction” between neighbors. It is a sophisticated tool in the arsenal of Israel’s methods of expropriation, and on the route to greater wealth and material success for more Israelis.
And third, if we stick to the Hebrew root “peh-gimmel-ayin,” which means to cause harm or to attack, in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israel and Israelis are harming all the Palestinians all the time (the same is true in the Gaza Strip and in Israel itself, but we’ll focus on the West Bank, as an example).
- Israeli soldiers awoke, gathered and illegally recorded Palestinian minors
- Israel surveils Palestinians in West Bank in massive facial recognition program
- 'On Shabbat, settlers swarm Palestinian villages with clubs. They pull people out of their homes'
Most of these harmful acts are not immediately lethal. Their destructive harm is cumulative, they affect people’s souls, pockets and health, the latter because they contribute to high blood pressure, diabetes and other illnesses directly related to chronic tension and anxiety.
Every length of fence that prevents people from reaching their land is an attack. So is every cocked rifle that frightens children in their beds, every bureaucratic order that restricts movement, every demolition order for a cistern or a sheep pen, every refusal to register in the Palestinian population registry women who have been living here with their families for decades.