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| Tents set up by Israeli settlers near the West Bank village of Bruqin, west of Salfit, 23 May 2025. Photograph: Alaa Badarneh/EPA |
I told the truth about the West Bank and was threatened and assaulted.
Now I’m relying on you to act
Each of the 22 illegal settlements
approved by Israel last week is another nail in the coffin of the peace
process, hammered in by the complicity of western governments and
corporations. Israeli settlements are not benign civilian neighbourhoods
– they are primary instruments of dispossession, control and apartheid.
Settlements are closed militarised zones on Palestinians’ stolen land,
cutting off our access to our resources, our farms, our schools, our
jobs and each other. Palestinian lands rapidly shrink, our livelihoods
are devastated, our rights are systematically violated and our identity
is undermined.
Western lawmakers look on,
expressing commitment to peace through a two-state solution but choosing
to do nothing to achieve this goal. Instead, their policies and
inaction enable yet further settlement activity.
In
the West Bank we live in an obvious two-tier system, yet most lawmakers
continue to shun the word “apartheid” despite Palestinian, Israeli and
international human rights organisations concurring on its accuracy and
the international court of justice (ICJ) reaffirming it last July. The Settlers,
the BBC documentary by Louis Theroux, helped expose this reality,
showing me being prevented from even walking on the same streets as
Israelis in the neighbourhood of Hebron, where I was born.
In
response to the documentary, Israeli settlers and soldiers broke into
my yard, vandalised it and assaulted me. Soldiers made no arrests but
instead threatened to arrest me if I filed a complaint. Then
one morning at 4am, young settlers made a bonfire on private Palestinian
land outside my home and chanted that they hoped to see me killed. One
individual showed up right in front of my house in army fatigues and
with a semi-automatic rifle to intimidate me. Settlers then stole my
pan-African flag, given to me by Black Lives Matter, and burned it among
a pile of Palestinian flags.
It is the same story in nearby Masafer Yatta, featured not only in The Settlers but also in the Oscar-winning film No Other Land.
Directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham called for interventions last
week to help stop its destruction, and co-director Hamdan Ballal was detained and beaten in reprisal for its production.
The
ICJ found Israel responsible for the crime of apartheid, yet western
leaders bite their tongues. It found that not only Israel’s settlements
but also its whole occupation of the West Bank,
including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip are unlawful, and that the
international community is obliged to help dismantle the settlements,
evacuate the settlers and end the occupation as quickly as possible. Why
are western leaders inert?
It seems that western governments would rather undermine the international justice system than hold Israel to account... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/03/israeli-settlements-west-bank-international-law-illegal
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