Unexpected things often happen during August’s political hiatus, but no one could have predicted that US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee would come out and condemn Israeli settlers who are laying siege to the three Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank.
Mr Huckabee, a Baptist preacher and pro-Israel advocate, has consistently made excuses for both the Israeli army and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This week, however, he called the settlers “Israeli terrorists” on his X feed and described their acts as “horrific” and “disgusting”.
He is right. The settlers have been vicious. According to UN figures, as of August 10, 76 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank this year, including 18 children. There have been more than 1,400 documented settler attacks, with about 3,800 Palestinians driven from their homes this year alone – nearly half of them children. Human rights organisations have warned that the violence risks tipping into mass atrocity. “The West Bank is at the breaking point,” said Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN’s Deputy Special Co-ordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.
The Israeli figures are also telling. In data released by security sources and reported by Israeli media, there was a 63 per cent jump in “nationalistic crime” in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year. Illegal West Bank settlements keep growing at a rapid rate; the UN says more than 12,000 new housing units have been advanced since January, backed by $431 million for 34 new settlements. Settler agricultural outposts now claim close to a fifth of the West Bank’s land.
The settlers keep coming. From Ukraine, Russia, Long Island. People with no claim to the land other than a historical belief in what they call “the land of Judea and Samaria”.
This summer, I am reading Rashid Khalidi’s masterpiece, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. It’s taken me years to work up to, because I knew the analysis would make me angry – it isn’t opinion or reportage, it’s straightforward historical fact. Khalidi traces the history of the Palestinian tragedy back to November 2, 1917, when then-British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour wrote a 67-word letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader in Britain’s Jewish community, pledging that the UK government would view “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
I have visited settlements in the West Bank over the past three decades – through the first and second intifadas, through failed peace deals, in the days of Baruch Goldstein – the settler from Brooklyn who murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron and is still seen by some settlers as a hero – in the terrible aftermath of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing extremist, and during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This autumn I hope to go back. What I always found with most settlers was their bloodthirsty drive for the land at any cost – with violence. Their mantra: overpower by force, backed by the Old Testament belief that they are the “chosen people”. All of those ugly concrete dwellings, all of those machine guns, are the direct result of the premise that Balfour articulated.
Israeli soldiers watch as villages are torched, settlers block ambulances trying to get bleeding Palestinian children, shot by a settler, to hospital – these are the direct consequences of Balfour’s legacy. Today’s settlers are the latest custodians of a logic that has treated the Palestinian presence on the land as an object to be removed like furniture.
This is the machinery that Balfour’s letter set in motion. Every olive tree bulldozed, every family that is displaced, every child that is killed or injured is the result of it. Cabinet ministers openly call for the destruction of Palestinian villages and the entrenchment of more settlements, filled with Ukrainians, Americans and French, among others. Even the settlers’ own advocates say they want to make a Palestinian state impossible.
None of this excuses attacks on Israeli civilians, and the dead on both sides deserve to be named and mourned. But if I have to point a finger, I’d like to go back to the British: a statesman giving away land he did not own and a mandate imposed without consent. The UN, for once, is right – this is a breaking point. It is not a cycle of violence – as though it began yesterday and both sides simply keep restarting it. It is about dispossession, and it is part of Israel’s governmental system. It is embedded.
If there is to be any resolution, it has to start with an honest reckoning with history. We have to go back – not to October 7, 2023, as some Zionist activists would have it, but to November 1917. The declaration that launched a homeland for one people did so by treating another people’s homeland as negotiable. One people lost their homeland; another gained one. The Palestinian West Bank, a piece of land so heartbreakingly beautiful, is paying the bloody price for it now.
