By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

The West Bank is on fire again. In fact, that patch of sand hasn’t stopped burning since Benjamin Netanyahu hijacked the Knesset late last year. In a seven month stretch that shameless gangster has taken Israel’s seven-decade Nakba and pushed it into increasingly genocidal territory. 190 Palestinians have been killed, 174 of them in the first half of 2023 alone. Israel’s American armed gestapo in the IDF have carried out near daily raids in the West Bank while swelling mobs of openly fascist illegal settlers have matched them with their own sweeping pogroms, burning entire villages to the ground.

This latest wave of mutilation is all part of a Faustian bargain that Bibi has made with Israel’s rising far right. As long as this coalition of religious whack-jobs and Jewish supremacists agrees to keep that hoza’s pink ass out of the slammer he is more than happy to hand them what’s left of the West Bank on a spit. This was made obscenely clear with Bibi’s promise to expand Israel’s illegal settlements by 13,000 homes and his decision to toss his openly genocidal finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the keys to the Nakba with his own customized private army in the Ministry of Defense.

The result has been a whistling pressure cooker of creeping ultraviolence that finally exploded in Jenin this month with a two-day raid that set a new precedent for ethnic cleansing in the West Bank but also raised the bar on their increasingly desperate citizenry’s refusal to go down without a fight. For 48 hours the entire weight of Israel’s hulking military might rained down on this tiny, impoverished refugee camp. Swarmed by over 2,000 heavily armed troops with hundreds of armored vehicles, Jenin was encircled and completely cut off from the outside world, with bulldozers obliterating all roads leading out of the camp and destroying its capacity to provide its citizens with clean water and electricity.

Between airstrikes from Reaper drones and Apache gunships, IDF loudspeakers instructed the besieged population to abandon their homes or be obliterated. More than 3,000 civilians out of a population of just over 20,000 heeded their warning under a storm cloud of tear gas. But those who stayed behind had the final word with a brazen message written in fire reading ‘fuck around and find out.’

12 Palestinians were killed and over one hundred were injured but they held their own against one of the most ferocious armies on earth with little more than glorified zipguns and bottle rockets. Ultimately, they left the hopelessly bogged down IDF with little option but to retreat. This David-and-Goliath spectacle was made all the more stunning by the fact that the militants in these poorly armed brigades were quite literally children, teenage boys with a whole life of oppression ahead of them and nothing to lose but blood and anguish. The oldest casualty was 23 and five of the dead were minors. Israel retreated with its pointed red tail between its legs, promising to come back for more with their hoza-in-chief declaring the operation to be “open ended.” Their unshaken teenage targets shouted back, ‘Bring it!’ with their fists balled and bloodied at their sides and the watching world shuttered.

The only thing more delightfully consistent than Israel’s failure to take their victims seriously in the streets of their own neighborhoods is Palestine’s ability to kick their fucking ass with its arms tied behind its back. However, Bibi was right about at least one thing. This isn’t over and there is no reason to believe that it won’t get worse. If the latest attempt to ethnically cleanse Jenin failed with flying colors to break the iron will of a few very pissed-off Arab kids, it sadly succeeded in proving that even the most obnoxiously PC administration in White House history still doesn’t give a single solitary fuck about brown lives on the wrong side of the Dead Sea.

After the Biden Administration made all the usual cowardly noises about their Zionist Gollum’s inalienable right to defend itself from crumbling ghettos packed with orphans, Israel’s Defense Ministry proudly announced its plans to buy another 25 stealth F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin by 2027 with $3 billion of the American taxpayer’s hard-robbed money in military aid. In other words, put your wallet away Bibi, the next ten bloodbaths are on us.

My old comrades on the far left will blame this ongoing holocaust on Bejamin Netanyahu and the rise of Israeli fascism that he is presiding over in exchange for a pardon for his corruption spree and they won’t be wrong, but they will be missing the point. The most tragic detail about this deadly new stage of the Nakba is that its results became inevitable the day that Yasser Arafat forfeited the duties to defend the West Bank to its fucked-over orphans by signing the Oslo Accords in 1993. It pains me to no end to admit this, but the roots of the bomb in Jenin were formed by a fuse lit with a flaming peace deal called the Two-State Solution and too many good people on the left continue to foolishly warm their hands by the embers of its smoldering ashes.

READ MORE