The return to power of Israel’s “far right” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the end of 2022 set off a ferocious escalation in terrorist settler attacks against the Palestinian people in the West Bank region of Palestine. According to Palestinian authorities, 144 such assaults took place across the West Bank on a single day—January 28.
To get a sense of what it feels like to live under 24-7 threat of one these settler attacks, put yourself in the shoes of Bashar Eid, a victim in an attack late last year:
Bashar Eid—a tall, stocky 49-year-old farmer—was shot, beaten, stoned, his bones broken and his olive trees burned by his neighbors, the Jewish settlers who live on the top of the hill above the Palestinian man’s land in Burin, a village in the West Bank. (Time magazine)
In this particular instance, 50 outraged Jewish Israelis came to help replace Bashar Eid’s olive trees. Time reported that as they did, “about 20 young settlers armed with rocks, clubs and gasoline, masking their faces with torn T-shirts, charged down the hill like soldiers on an ancient battlefield. They beat and stoned the Israeli volunteers, including men and women in their 70s and 80s, as well as, once again, Eid. Then they set a Jewish volunteer’s car on fire.” Despite the whole assault being caught on video, Israeli police and military refused to intervene or make arrests.
That was emblematic of the reign of settler terror against Palestinians before Netanyahu returned to power. Netanyahu’s return (for his fourth time as prime minister) is defined by an all-out alliance with the most rabid, openly racist, fascists (religious and secular), along with dark-ages misogynist Jewish fundamentalists who insist they have a mandate from “god” to violently seize all of Palestine. In a particularly alarming move, one of these fascists, a settler himself, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has been appointed Israel’s National “Security” Minister!
The intensifying reign of terror in the West Bank is by any measure a massive crime against humanity by a regime the rulers of the U.S. uphold as a “bastion of democracy and enlightenment,” and must be opposed by all decent people.
What is behind all this? Israel faces an existential crisis driving it to abandon pretenses of being both a “democratic” and a Jewish state. Bob Avakian makes an incisive assessment of, and sets a moral pole in response to that crisis, in this video, including contrasting two opposite stands in relation to the horrific crime of the Nazi holocaust that murdered millions of Jews. Watch it and spread it wherever people are waking up to, questioning, confronting, or opposing Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
Bob Avakian on the Existential Crisis Facing Israel
