Palestinian killed as settlers rampage in Huwara after deadly terror attack

[Israeli]

2. The pogrom is the point

When Israeli officials call on settlers not to take the law into their own hands against Palestinians, they are actually saying 'let the army do the job for you.'

By
Orly Noy
February 27, 2023

Source : https://www.972mag.com/huwara-pogrom-settlers-elimination/

There are images that never leave your mind. The kind you can almost smell. And the images from the Israeli settler pogrom in Huwara on Sunday night, following the killing of two settler brothers in the West Bank town, are just that: they smell of soot, of horror, of rot. Our rot.

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The phenomenon known as “settler violence” is a daily and endless sequence of assaults, of which only the tip of the iceberg ever reaches the Israeli media. Under the banner of a “war on terror,” soldiers can commit intolerable crimes, many of which, too, are rarely reported. The mass of the crimes, their frequency, their pervasiveness, and the explicit endorsement of them by Israel’s leadership and public opinion, are all designed to produce a reality in which the law of elimination becomes a law of nature.

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Meanwhile, MK Tzvika Fogel of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, who heads the Knesset’s National Security Committee, said he viewed the pogrom “positively,” adding: “A closed, burnt Huwara — that’s what I want to see. That’s the only way to achieve deterrence. After a murder like yesterday’s, we need burning villages when the IDF doesn’t act.” Likud MK Tally Gotliv refused to condemn the pogrom, saying she “could not judge people when they mourn.” Imagine the fate of a Palestinian who dared to write something similar about Jewish Israelis.

The fact that Israel’s leadership derives pleasure from instilling fear in the Palestinians is not only an indelible moral stain on us as Jews, but a terrible harbinger of things to come. Ahead of the new coalition’s swearing in, Amir Fakhoury and Meron Rapoport warned that this could be Israel’s “second Nakba government.” Yet even they may not have guessed the determination, bloodthirstiness, and speed with which the coalition would advance its agenda.

Since the start of the year, for example, Israeli forces have claimed the lives of more than 60 Palestinians in the West Bank — the deadliest in the territory in two decades — expedited plans for settlement expansion, and pushed through legislation that would revoke the citizenship and residency of Palestinians. During the Huwara attack, Knesset members pushed forward a bill to legalize the death penalty.

Several miles away, a state of fear grips the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who take to the streets every week to protest the government’s constitutional overhaul — and rightly so. But the Israeli regime, with its absence of limits, is measured not by what it is willing to do to Jews, but what it is willing to do to Palestinians. The pogrom in Huwara, and the reactions of the Israeli leadership, make it clear how far they are willing to go in its war of elimination.