Ethnic cleansing by Israeli colonists in the West Bank is currently one of the biggest issues dividing the Biden administration and Israel. President Biden complained about the terrorism against Palestinians two weeks ago. Yesterday, Vice-President Kamala Harris explicitly told the Israeli president of “the need to increase stability and security in the West Bank and hold extremist settlers accountable for violent acts.” Overnight, a group of US senators including the chairs of the intelligence and armed services committee wrote to Biden calling for him to do more on the issue. American officials are concerned that assault rifles sent to Israel might end up being used by colonists against Palestinians, forcing the Israelis to promise they’ll only be given to government agencies.
It’s not just in the US: the shadow foreign secretary in the UK, David Lammy, has urged the UK government to pressure Israel to end the attacks by colonists (the Tory government has a record of condemning terrorism by Israeli colonists and of openly and clearly opposing more colonies in the West Bank).
According to the Times of Israel, Netanyahu overnight said that a “small handful of extremists” were carrying out the attacks, but then tried to row back on the statement — before the formation of a war cabinet, Netanyahu’s fragile coalition was heavily reliant on extreme right pro-colonist political parties, including a senior minister who has called for measures to prevent Palestinians from harvesting crops. Netanyahu’s new line on the attacks today is that he told Biden “Accusations against the settlement movement are baseless… There is a small extreme minority that does not come from the settlement movement.”
As the Times pointed out, this was a clear lie — colonists are among the relatively few Israelis arrested for attacks on Palestinians.
The dramatic upsurge in what was already a high level of terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank this year has seen the daily number of attacks on Palestinians more than double to seven a day and a death toll among Palestinian civilians of over 150.
This doesn’t merely have direct consequences for Palestinians being killed, injured and driven from their homes, but for Israel. One of the problems for the IDF and Israeli intelligence services before October 7 was the need to devote extra resources to the West Bank in order to deal with unrest provoked by terrorist attacks by Israeli colonists (with the encouragement of Netanyahu’s ministers), who have since warned that continuing attacks will provoke another Palestinian uprising.
But for Australia’s commercial media, the upsurge in efforts at ethnic cleansing on the West Bank since the Hamas atrocities simply don’t exist. You will find not a single mention of them in any media coverage in the month since the war began. Only the ABC has reported repeatedly on violence directed at Palestinians, before and after October 7 and more recently, while SBS has also covered the violence.
The only commercial media outlet that seems to have mentioned it was The Australian, which on the weekend ran a Wall Street Journal piece on Israel stepping up arrests (of Palestinians, not colonists) in the West Bank. The WSJ itself has been far more interested in covering the violence, including reporting on it in-depth a week ago.
Australian media ignoring a campaign to drive Palestinians out of the West Bank, which for most of the year has had de facto endorsement from the Netanyahu government, isn’t just an example of how Palestinians are erased, othered and reduced to nothing more than an impediment to Israeli security. It also reflects a complete lack of insight both into the dynamic created by Netanyahu’s efforts to permanently sabotage a Palestinian state and the lessons of the failed war on terror — that extremists on both sides have an alliance of interests in violence engendering violence for the sake of perpetuating division and control.
