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A Cancer on the West Bank
by Ellen Cantarow

In 1979, I made the first of what would turn out to be decades of
periodic visits to Israel and the West Bank. I traveled there for the
New York alternative publication The Village Voice to investigate
Israel’s growing settler movement, Gush Emunim (or the Bloc of the
Faithful). The English-language Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post,
then reported that settlers from Kiryat Arba, a Jewish West Bank
outpost, had murdered two Palestinian teenagers from the village of
Halhoul. There, in one of the earliest West Bank settlements
established by Gush Emunim, a distant cousin of my husband had two acquaintances. Under cover of being a Jew in search of enlightenment,
I spent several days and nights with them.

Gush Emunim: The Origin of the Settlement Movement

Zvi and Hannah Eidels, my hosts, lived in a four-room apartment in the settlement, which jutted out of an otherwise lovely Mediterranean
landscape dotted with stone terraces, olive trees, fruit groves, and
grape vines. Kiryat Arba flanked the Palestinian city of Hebron and
was an eight-minute car drive from Halhoul on which I wrote a separate
article about the murder of those two teens.

My initial evening with the Eidels happened to be on the holy day of
shabat.

The rush to finish cooking ended just before sundown and 32-year-old
Hannah, very pregnant with her sixth child, turned to me. “Do you
light?” she asked. For a moment I thought she was asking how I coped
with power failures in the American economic twilight. She took me to
the 10-by-12-foot living room. Just above a photograph of the
spiritual father of Gush Emunim, Rabbi Avraham Kook, a bearded man
with a fur-trimmed hat and heavy-lidded eyes, stood a row of candles
on a tiny shelf. I suddenly recalled Friday evenings in my
grandmother’s apartment in Philadelphia and was unnerved to find
myself, an assimilated Jew – an atheist, no less – standing in Kiryat
Arba, once again brushing up against Orthodoxy. I nonetheless took the matchbox, lit the candles, and stood there quietly for what I hoped
was a decent interval.

Later, Hannah filled me in on her theory of Jewish superiority: all of creation, she assured me, is suspended in a great chain of being. On
the bottom: inanimate non-living things. A link farther up: animate
vegetation. Then, non-human animal life. Next, animate non-Jews. On
the top, of course, were the Jews. “This may shock you,” she said,
“but I don’t really believe in democracy. We believe,” she faltered
for a moment, glancing at Zvi who was sitting quietly beside us
cracking sunflower seeds and spitting the husks expertly onto a plate,
“in theocracy. Right, Zvi?” “Not exactly,” said Zvi. “Not a theocracy.
The government of God.”

Gush Emunim was both religious and militant. In a curious blend of ultra-Orthodoxy and historically secular Zionism, “the Faithful”
claimed as their own some of the territories conquered in the Six-Day
War, the 1967 conflict Israel fought against a coalition of Arab
states, during which it took the West Bank, which its leaders called
“Judea and Samaria.”

“Here began our first place,” one movement leader told me, “in
Schechem [Nablus], where Jacob bought a plot of land. Here is the true
world of Judaism.”

“Some people think the goal of Zionism was peace,” another Gush
activist explained. “That is ridiculous. The goal of Zionism is to
construct a people on its land.” But, he continued, “there were moral
problems. There were Arabs living here. By what right did we throw
them out? And we did throw them out… All the stuff about socialism,
about national redemption, may be true, but that’s only one part. The
fact is, we returned here because the Eternal gave us the land. It’s ridiculous, stupid, simplistic, but that’s what it is. All the rest is superficial. We came back here because we belong.”

And so began the settler movement, which, to this day, has never ended
or stopped taking land from the Palestinians.

The Alon Plan

Even before that Jewish supremacist incursion, Yigal Alon, Yitzhak
Rabin’s deputy prime minister, drafted a plan calling for settlements
that would extend Israel’s political boundaries to the Jordan River.
Such new Jewish settlements would ring Palestinian villages and towns
and separate them from one another. In 1979, when I interviewed the
mayor of Halhoul, where those two teens had been murdered, he took me
to a hilltop, pointed to Kiryat Arba, and said all too prophetically:
“The settlements are a cancer in our midst. A cancer can kill one man.
But this cancer can kill a whole people.”

Following the Six-Day War, leaders of the Faithful supplied the shock
troops for those growing settlements. It was common wisdom then that
the situation “on the ground” was changing from month to month in
favor of the Israelis. When I first started reporting there, a trip
between East Jerusalem and Ramallah took about 20 minutes. However,
once settler-only highways had been built and checkpoints put in place
for Palestinians, the trip became at least twice as long. Initially,
just soldiers posted on the roads, such checkpoints would later be industrialized with footpaths, tunnels, and turnstiles that looked
like the ones in the subway system of New York where I later lived. Palestinians were then often forced to wait, sometimes for hours,
before being allowed – or not – to proceed to their destinations.

The Israel-U.S. Peace Process

In 1993, a “peace process” was launched in – yes, you could hardly get
farther away – Oslo, Norway. It “changed the modalities of the
occupation,” as Noam Chomsky put it, “but not the basic concept…
[H]istorian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that ‘the Oslo agreements were
founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on
the other forever.’” The U.S.-Israeli proposals at Camp David in 2000
only strengthened that colonialist urge. Palestinians were to be
confined to 200 scattered areas. President Bill Clinton and Prime
Minister Ehud Barak proposed the consolidation of the Palestinian
population into three cantons under Israeli control, separated from
one another and from East Jerusalem.

From then on, Israel only continued its relentless occupation of
Palestinian land. In 2002, it started erecting an enormous barrier
wall along the Green Line and parts of the West Bank. At its most
dramatic, that wall is a series of 25-foot-high concrete slabs
punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.

After 1979, every time I traveled to the West Bank I saw new Jewish
settlements in formation, with their characteristic red-tiled roofs
and white walls. Meanwhile, the Israelis restricted Palestinians from
building new homes or even additions to current ones. In the West Bank
city of Ramallah, that prohibitive situation has resulted in an
uglified city center with ever taller buildings. Today, in photos of
Ramallah’s contemporary downtown I can’t even recognize the place I
last visited in 2009.

Violence

From the very start, Jewish violence has accompanied the proliferation
of settlements. In 1979, settlers and soldiers were already
terrorizing residents of the Palestinian village of Halhoul and
committing violence elsewhere. “A rash of civilian acts of vandalism
occurred last spring,” I wrote that year. “Settlers… uprooted several
acres of grapevines belonging to farmers from Hebron… Kiryat Arba
residents also broke into several Arab houses in Hebron and wrecked
them.” A four-year-old boy slipped out of his house during one of the
curfews (levied by the Israelis on Halhoul, but not, of course, on
Kiryat Arba). That child was then stoned by Israeli soldiers. Five
months later, I reported speaking with his mother. She “thrust the
child toward me and pointed at a scar that still showed on his
forehead. ‘What can we do?’ she implored me. ‘We have no weapons. We
are helpless. We can’t defend ourselves.’”

In 1994, an American extremist settler, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinian worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and
wounded another 125 of them. He was a supporter of the extremist Kach
(Thus) movement founded by American rabbi Meir Kahane. In 1988, that
movement and a split-off from it called Kahane Chai (Long Live Kahane)
were declared to be “terrorist” in character by the Israeli
government. It mattered little, however, since terrorism against
Palestinians continued to flourish.

Too Little, Too Late

Forty-five years after my first report on the settlements, New York
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that a farmer in his seventies
living in the West Bank village of Qusra, Abdel-Majeed Hassan, had
shown him “the blackened ground where his car had been set on fire,
the latest of four cars belonging to his family that he said [Israeli]
settlers had destroyed.” Six residents of Qusra had been killed in
such attacks, Kristof reported, between October 2023 and late June
2024. Israel’s government responded to the October 7th Hamas assault
in Gaza by endorsing “more checkpoints, more raids, more Israeli
settlements.” Almost duplicating the agonized statement of that
Palestinian interviewee of mine in 1979, another Palestinian, an
American engineer who had returned to the West Bank, told Kristof,
“I’m an American citizen, but if they attack me here, what can I do?
They can break my gate; they can kill me.”

His article was entitled “We Are Coming to Horrible Days.” Coming? The
horror began over half a century ago. Had the New York Times run
similar articles, starting in the late 1970s; had successive American governments not turned a blind eye to what was happening; had
Washington not continued funding Israel’s crimes with some $3 billion
a year in aid, that country’s land thefts and other crimes on the West
Bank could never have continued. In 1979, Israel was already
confiscating water from Halhoul and other Palestinian villages, while
in the ensuing years you could see swimming pools and lush lawns in
the Jewish settlements there, even as Palestinian villages and towns
were left to collect rainwater in barrels on housetops.

Twenty-three years after I made my first trip, the Israeli human
rights organization B’tselem reported that, in “the first decade
following the occupation, the left-leaning ‘Alignment’ governments
followed the Alon Plan.” It advocated settling areas “perceived as
having security importance” and sparse in Palestinian populations.
Later, governments under the far more conservative Likud Party began establishing settlements across the West Bank, not just based on
security considerations but ideological ones.

Jewish Supremacy

A word about the attitudes of Israeli Jews. In 1982, I interviewed a
group of Israeli teenagers, one of whom, the daughter of Israeli
leftist acquaintances of mine, told me that each new generation in her
country was more right-wing than that of its parents. On one of
several trips to Hebron in those years, I read this graffiti on a
wall: “ARABS TO GAS CHAMBERS.” It certainly caught the mood of both
that moment and those that followed to this day. For decades, in fact,
the cry “Death to Arabs!” could be heard at some Israeli
demonstrations. By the time Israel began its genocidal campaign in
Gaza in 2023, you could watch videos of Israeli soldiers dancing and
chanting “Death to Amalek! (The name Amalek refers to ancient biblical
enemies of the Jews.)

Kristof writes that “Israel’s ‘state-backed settler violence,’ as
Amnesty International describes it, is enforced by American weapons
provided to Israel. When armed settlers terrorize Palestinians and
force them off their land – as has happened to 18 communities since
October [2023] – they sometimes carry American M16 rifles. Sometimes
they are escorted by Israeli troops… The United States is already in
the thick of the West Bank conflict… Many settlers have American
accents and draw financial support from donors in the United States.”

But keep in mind that this is nothing new. Baruch Goldstein, that
infamous mass murderer of 1994, was an American and it was very clear
even then that American Jews were among the most rabid of the
settlers.

In 2021, fulfilling the prophecy of the very first Israeli settler I
ever visited, Zvi Eidels, the Israeli regime established what the
human rights organization B’tselem called “a recognition of Jewish
supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

It feels bitter indeed to me to be able to say, “I told you so.” My
accounts were largely ignored in those decades when I periodically
reported from the West Bank. After all, I wrote for The Village Voice
and other non-mainstream publications. The New York Times was largely
silent on the subject then and Kristof’s recent telling observations
sadly come decades too late. Even as I was finishing this article,
Israeli forces were bombing densely populated neighborhoods in the Nur
Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps in the northern West Bank. (The Nur
Shams brigade, which was an Israeli target, is an armed resistance
group affiliated, according to Mondoweiss, with the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.)

Raja Shehadeh, one of Palestine’s greatest writers, recently let me
know that even he – whom Israeli forces once recognized as an
illustrious person and allowed to travel in relative freedom – fears
venturing outside since the settlers are “all over” the West Bank. In
a recent Guardian article he wrote: “I spent the last 50 years of my
life getting used to the loss of the Palestine of my parents; and… I
might spend the remaining years of my life trying to get used to the
loss of Palestine in its entirety.”

I’ve known Shehadeh since 1982 and never in all those years had I seen
him despair. It’s unbelievably depressing to find him writing this
now. All I could write back was: “I’m afraid you may be right.”
Sometimes evil does triumph. Israel has now become a largely fascist
country with a deeply fascist government and it has been transformed
into that, at least in significant part, because my country has
profusely underwritten the most malignant developments there, which
are still ongoing.

Just as I was finishing this article, in fact, the Associated Press
reported that “Israel has approved the largest seizure of land in the
occupied West Bank in over three decades.” That land grab, its account
added, “reflects the settler community’s strong influence in the
government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the most religious
and nationalist in the country’s history.” Thus have the prophecies of
the religious-nationalist Gush Emunim been fulfilled.

[Author’s Note: I am forever indebted to Noam Chomsky, with whom I
first became friends in 1964, and whose 1974 book, Peace in the Middle
East?, taught me about the realities of Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians. For my first trip, he provided me with the name of a
person of great influence, the incomparable Dr. Israel Shahak, as well
as of other holocaust survivors opposing Israel’s occupation. Noam
Chomsky launched me on the long trajectory of my writing about
Palestine from 1979 to this very moment. He is now 95 years old and in
Brazil with his wife Valeria, recovering from a stroke. May he be
blessed through the ages.]


https://original.antiwar.com/Ellen_Cantarow/2024/07/16/a-cancer-on-the-west-bank/

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