Is Ethnic Cleansing Coming To The West Bank?
A political refusal to confront the illegal settlers over the past decade brings back memories of Kosovo.
For those of us who were teenagers or older in the 1990s, the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the violent civil wars that followed were a constant buzz in the background of our comfortable American lives. While we mainly tend to remember the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre in Srebrenica, in short, the Bosnian part of the conflict, the smaller yet equally significant defense of Kosovo by NATO air wings in 1999 was the last note in that nearly ten-year war.
I bring up Kosovo because, unlike Bosnia, which had been a distinct nation and/or province throughout the centuries, Kosovo had been conquered and occupied since the 14th century by one group or another. In 1912 they rose up and defeated the Ottoman Empire, but instead of gaining autonomy, the neighboring Serbs took the opportunity to seize it for themselves in the Balkan War preceding World War I. From 1913 on, Serbians poured into Kosovo in an effort to drive out the native Albanians and make it their own (sound familiar?). To try and keep simmering tensions down, Marshal Tito, the leader of Communist Yugoslavia after World War II, divided Kosovo between three regions. Despite that, Serbs continued to pour in for the next two decades, forcing many Albanians to flee to Albania or America. The Albanians that remained, though, had higher birthrates than the Serbs, and began reclaiming majority ethnic status in Kosovo. Tito’s government responded with repression of Albanian civil rights, from education to language to religion. The moderate face he showed the world to gain Western support was not reflected in his repression of the Albanians. Despite all of that, the Serbian Orthodox Church would claim after Tito’s death that the Albanians had ethnically cleansed Serbs from Kosovo despite zero evidence to support their claim.
When Slobodan Milosevic came to power in Belgrade in 1989, he first targeted Bosnia, and when NATO finally united in 1995 to force him to the bargaining table to accept Bosnia’s autonomy, the Albanians in Kosovo were not addressed. Kosovo had declared independence in 1990, but nobody recognized them as a nation, and angry about their lack of inclusion in the Dayton Accords of 1996, guerrilla forces began attacking the Serbs. This was a gross miscalculation, much in the same way that the barbaric attack of Hamas one month ago against southern Israeli communities was an incredibly stupid decision. The Serbs began using their much superior firepower against the enclave, and at the beginning of 1999, committed a war crime against an entire Albanian village in Kosovo, known as the Račak Massacre. This is when the U.S. rallied support from NATO and launched an air war against the Serbs for over two months, forcing their surrender. Despite those efforts, over one million Albanians had been forced from Kosovo, with an estimated 11,000 deaths. Some 2,500 Albanian residents of Kosovo have never been found.
I am going through that history because while Israel is in Gaza, fighting an ostensibly “just” battle against Hamas, the settlers who’ve repeatedly stolen land from Palestinians are using this opportunity to try for a full-scale ethnic cleansing, to drive Palestinians out of the West Bank the way that Serbs drove Albanians out of Kosovo twenty-five years ago. Already over the past several years, the far-right settlers have literally invaded the homes of Palestinians, forced them out at gunpoint, and then bulldozed the homes, while IDF soldiers stood by and watched. Maps, “history’ lessons, and “ethnic explanations” are being shared from right-wingers in Israel and spreading around the world. I saw these because a Jewish co-worker shared them, and while she is a MAGA person, I guess I didn’t expect to see this (the name on these posts is the original Israeli poster, not my coworker).
Saturday, a Palestinian man went to pick olives in the West Bank from the olive grove his family has owned for centuries. Four armed settlers came into the grove, and the others began to run. The man went back for his phone and was murdered in front of his children. In the same article, it notes that 120 Palestinian civilians have been killed in the West Bank since 10/7, with over 800 people driven off their own land. An Israeli general is quoted saying that the IDF is largely closing its eyes and letting settlers do what they want.
The West Bank was the largest component for the provisional Palestinian state. Israel took it in 1967 during the Six-Day War, even attacking an American surveillance ship, the USS Liberty, to ensure nobody would interfere. For decades, settlements would crop up here and there in the West Bank, until 1991-92, when U.S. Secretary of State James Baker put his foot down hard and said no more aid would go to Israel until they removed the settlements and negotiated to give the West Bank back to the Palestinians. For a time, it appeared it would actually happen after the Oslo Accords were signed. Unfortunately, starting around 2001, when Ariel Sharon became Israel’s prime minister, the pace of settlements picked back up again. Some legally, many others illegally, and neither Sharon, Ehud Olmert, or Netanyahu had the desire to confront and stop the settlers. The West Bank is being sliced to ribbons. The IDF blocks roads from Palestinian usage, no matter how it cuts up their cities and towns. The settlers, as mentioned above, use weapons and violence to take property they have no rights to, and the IDF allows it, or even helps in cases. The government began arming settlers years ago when Palestinians fought back, and the Palestinians have no right to weapons or self-defense. They can be driven out of their homes at any time, off land they held for generations, and nobody does anything. They are second-class people in their own land. This is what an apartheid state is.
Now it appears that the settlers are using this opportunity to finish the job, to continue driving out Palestinians from their cities, homes, or farms. It’s brute force, it’s grotesque, and it’s wrong. It’s as wrong as any anti-Semitism around the world, it’s as wrong as any pogrom committed against Jews, it’s as wrong as any chanted desire to kill or gas Jews. Quite frankly, the reason I’ve been so strident in advocating for the Palestinians is because they do not have any power or autonomy, and it sickens me to my core to see a people with a history of being persecuted—who not only have their own nation, but nuclear weapons to defend it—use their nation-state power to persecute Palestinians because they were inconveniently present when Israel seized the West Bank in 1967. Their policies of treating Palestinians as lesser humans, or even subhuman, of using history from three thousand years ago as justification, and demanding the rest of us shut up and accept it. If we don’t, we must hate Jews. We must be pro-Hamas.
I have so very many Jewish friends. I’ve written about this. It is a rich culture and a people that have contributed immensely to our world. If America ever turned on the Jewish people here, I’d take up arms in their defense. They have been persecuted. They were systematically hunted by the Nazis and murdered in numbers I cannot fathom. All of that is true, and none of it excuses the employment of similar tactics and strategies by Israel’s government. It doesn’t excuse carpet bombing, the “mowing the grass” attitude towards Gaza, the indifference to Palestinian suffering, the conflation of Hamas terrorists with Palestinian civilians, and the weaponization of anti-Semitism so that the public perception is that any criticism of Israel, the nation-state, cannot be separated from Jews, the people.
The warning signs are there. They’ve been documented for years by the United Nations, and because the UN regularly documents Israeli actions that are unjustifiable, Israel claims they are anti-Semitic. Their ambassador went into the UN Security Council days ago wearing a yellow star of David, implying the UN were Nazis, a move so reprehensible that even the Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem voiced disgust. So, yes, I trust the UN and its collected evidence of the slow-motion ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. I fear its massive acceleration and the end of any two-state solution. Israel’s legitimate grievance against Hamas cannot be allowed to extend to whitewashing their illegal and unjust actions elsewhere. We can hold two thoughts simultaneously and have them both be true. We can criticize Israel’s actions while loving our Jewish friends, family, and coworkers. We can stand up against anti-Semitism and denounce the silencing of Palestinian supporters. We can support a targeted effort to eradicate Hamas and every barbarian that thinks it’s okay to murder children, rape women, and kidnap grandmothers, and we can do that while also saying we do not support lobbing missiles into crowded neighborhoods. We can defend Israel’s right to exist and repudiate the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. This is not a zero-sum issue. Wrong is wrong, no matter who is committing the deed.