From Huwara On

When hundreds of Israeli settlers rampaged through Huwara and surrounding Palestinian towns in the occupied West Bank on February 26, 2023, an article in the CNN says, “what unfolded was violence so brutal that the Israeli military commander for the West Bank called it a ‘pogrom‘.”

A few months earlier, in December, 2022, Netanyahu once again became Prime Minister of Israel. He formed the “most right wing government in Israel’s history,” an accomplishment in itself.

The settler “rampage” in Huwara was in response to the killing of Israeli settlers by a Palestinian. This will sound oddly familiar.

The West Bank started as a modern description of a place following the creation of Israel in 1948. The Oslo Accords in the 1990s divided the West Bank into areas A, B, C – administrative zones with some facade of Palestinian control in some parts of the West Bank. In February an article in the Washinington Institute for Near East Policy thinktank titled “Annexation by Design: How Israel’s New West Bank Policies Are Reshaping the Conflict and Testing U.S. Strategy” said it expects a risk of escalating violence in the West Bank caused by Israeli settlers engaging in arson an property damage.

There is no good starting point to talk about the history of the West Bank, so Huwara seems like a good place to convene a description of current ongoing events in the West Bank.

Huwara is south of the city of Nablus, surrounded on three sides by Israeli settlements. It’s almost directly south of Burin, a village (or small town) of a few thousand residents known for it’s annual Kite Festival.

Northwest of Huwara and Burin, and southwest of Nablus is the Palestinian village of Tell. In what the Times of Israel calls a “deadly gunfight” settlers were killed by a Palestinian a couple weeks ago, on Friday, July 24, after the settlers “illegally entered” Tell. As a result, there was a “coordinated wave of retaliatory violence sweeping across the West Bank within hours” by settlers.

Immediately after the “deadly gunfight” in Tell Israel responded with collective punishment as usual. It immediately arrested dozens of Palestinians across the West Bank. With increasingly clear support since October 7, the Israeli government, arms, funds, and protects the settlers. Within hours and days hundreds of settlers had set homes and vehicles on fire in Sarra – west of Nablus – burned Palestinian farms in Jiljiliya and Urif, damaged homes in Far’ata (near Qalqiliya), poisoned a farmer’s flock, uprooted dozens of olive trees in Masafer Yatta, and bulldozed olive groves in Tell. Near Burin, settlers gathered on stolen land and began breaking ground for a new outpost, using the day’s chaos as cover to expand their ethnic cleansing.

UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese described Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians across the occupied West Bank as “pogroms”, the same term of targeting livelihood of a minority group that an Israeli commander used to describe Huwara, three years earlier.