The tiny settlement overlooking the Bedouin village of Ein Rashash is named “Angels of Peace”, but, says Sliman al-Zawahri, its residents have visited only violence, fear and despair on his family.
This week the Bedouin community packed up most of their belongings and drove all the women, children and elderly people from the West Bank ridge they had called home for nearly four decades, perched above a spring and beside an archaeological site.
Men from Angels of Peace are part of a broad, violent and very successful political project to expand Israeli control of the West Bank that has accelerated, say activists, since the 7 October attacks by Hamas launched a war with Israel.
“This has been the most successful land-grab strategy since 1967,” said Yehuda Shaul, a prominent activist who is director of the Israeli Center for Public Affairs thinktank, and a founder of Breaking the Silence, an NGO that exposes military abuses in occupied areas.
Along with demolitions, evictions and restrictions on movement and construction, the attacks on herders created “a coercive environment that contributes to displacement that may amount to forcible transfer, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva convention”.
In the most extreme cases, villagers are so frightened of travelling on roads controlled by settlers that Israeli activists from groups that try to protect Bedouin communities – living with them, walking with them as they herd flocks and documenting abuses – are bringing them food and water.
The original article contains 1,322 words, the summary contains 241 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This region is so complex. You can’t easily point on who‘s the good and who’s the bad. I just stopped thinking I would ever understand it. I‘m so sorry about all the „standard“ people who just want a „standard“ life that is safe and reliable. Those people without an agenda on both sides.
Both sides Israeli and Palestini have blood on their hands. There is no good one and there is no one who has the natural right for the land. It’s probably both.
It is complex and yet it isn't. There are understandable psychological and historical causes for the current state. It is not black and white. But nothing is. We just want to make things to fit nice boxes.
If you want to understand it, you need to understand radicalization and how it applies to MENA including Israel. Actions do not come from the vacuum and people are messy. Every person has an agenda.
At the same time, in this specific situation, there are what according to well-established parameters amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. While there is terrorism committed by Palestinian groups, these crimes are largely committed by Israel. It might be that if the power imbalance were a little less we would see similar actions from the Palestinian state. But it is not.
Just in the last week, we have seen apartheid, ethnic cleansing, what could be genocide, collective punishment, embargo and cutting vital supplies to the area you are occupying. This list is not exhaustive. This is univocally wrong.
The most complex part is not understanding it. The most complex part is solving it.
So, you say something like terrorists take hostages and kill innocent people. Run away and hide between innocent people - use them as shields. If some reaction of the attacked side happen, those attackers are to blame? That’s too black/white for my opinion.
Anyway, social media isn’t good for nuanced discussions, it’s build for emotional reactions. It’s too complex.
I‘m out of this thread.