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Last Saturday, in the West Bank town of Jalud, a group of Israeli settlers armed with clubs beat, unprovoked, three members of an NBC news team and the Palestinian woman they were interviewing. This kind of violence, David Shulman writes in the Review’s September 24 issue, “is routine in the Palestinian West Bank. About two miles northeast of Jalud, in the town of Qusra, the settlers have been engaged in a monthslong campaign of bloody intimidation:

On July 26 settlers burned down the al-Rahma mosque in the village. Around that time armed settlers brutally attacked Palestinian farmers from the village and the Israeli and international activists who were trying to protect them; several were severely wounded. In March twenty-eight-year-old Amir Moatasem Odeh was killed by a settler; another stabbed his father. A few weeks earlier, on February 27, settlers stormed into Qusra and nearly clubbed to death two activists who are friends of mine; a third activist managed to film the attack. The settler assassins were arrested by the police and as usual released within a few hours. No action has been taken against them. Settlers are above and beyond the law.

And while the attack on the NBC crew has brought international attention to the West Bank, there does not appear to be any significant effort by the Israeli government to put a stop to the settlers’ pogroms. In fact, Shulman contends, the army obeys the settlers: “the orders come from the settlers, though just behind them sits the nefarious prime minister, intent on destruction, and the mindless ministers of his government.”

Below, alongside Shulman’s essay, are five articles from our archives about life in the West Bank.

David Shulman
Qusra Under Siege

Another Palestinian village in the West Bank has been attacked by Israeli settlers. The lack of response by the army and police reveals how deeply corrupted they are by the colonialist agenda.

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Molly Crabapple
The Land Remains

“The contradictions that plague any ethnonationalist project had all come to a bloody head with the reelection of Netanyahu last fall and his appointment of openly fascist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who have been encouraging settler rampages across the West Bank. Yet in some ways the oppression is just more obvious now. The checkpoints still resemble cages. The bombs still fall on Gaza. The West Bank Wall, that monument to cowardice erected after the second intifada, still defaces the land.”

—July 6, 2023

Nathan Thrall
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

“There was no question but that he would take them back to Ramallah, though they were less than a mile from municipal Jerusalem, which had superior hospitals. Palestinian ambulances bringing patients to Jerusalem had to wait at the checkpoints for unpredictable lengths of time before permission was granted, or denied, to carry the victim on a stretcher to an Israeli ambulance on the other side. Scores of people have died…because the passage of Palestinian ambulances was prevented or delayed.”

—March 19, 2021

Tareq Baconi
Israel’s Annexation Plan, a New Era in Palestinian Resistance

“The Trump plan has given a green light to the integration into Israel of up to 30 percent of the West Bank, including more than two hundred Israeli settlements and settler outposts and the larger part of the Jordan Valley, removing the illusion that the occupation is temporary.”

—July 2, 2020

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Robert I. Friedman
The Settlers

Gush Emunim planners working closely with the Begin government decided that in view of the dwindling supply of religious settlers, the only way to “Judaize” the West Bank was to offer huge public subsidies and attractive housing to lure secular Jews from inside the Green Line. The Likud government planned the construction of the new settlements close to Arab population centers, so that even if relatively few Jews moved beyond the Green Line, the concentrations of Jewish settlements around Arab towns and villages would “neutralize” them politically. The Likud’s aim was to build enough settlements inside the territories to form an interest group capable of blocking any hope of territorial compromise.

—June 15, 1989

Terence Smith
West Bank Blues

Israel is also, in my view, planting time bombs with each of the new settlements it carves into the West Bank. Physically, they are insignificant, often little more than work camps. But their psychological effect on the Israeli and West Bank populations is deep. Begin realizes this, of course, welcomes it, and builds more. But his successors will have to defuse the time bombs later, when it will be much more difficult. The chaos and bloodshed in the streets of Hebron reflect the passion these settlements arouse.

—June 12, 1980

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