As the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has stretched into its 11th month, Israel has increased its military activity against what it terms suspected terrorism in the occupied West Bank, and violent settler attacks have surged at the same time.
Far-right ministers in Mr. Netanyahu’s government — particularly Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, who are both West Bank settlers — have espoused divisive rhetoric and advanced policies to expand Israel’s hold on the territory.
The West Bank is home to about 2.7 million Palestinians and more than 500,000 settlers. Israel seized control of the territory from Jordan in 1967 during a war with three Arab states, and Israelis have since settled there with both tacit and explicit government approval. The international community largely considers settlements illegal, and many outposts also violate Israeli laws.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which tracks violent incidents in the West Bank, said in its latest update on Wednesday that Israeli settlers had carried out 25 attacks against Palestinians in the previous week. Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that set off the war in Gaza, the agency has recorded around 1,250 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property.
“There has been an uptick in vigilante attacks by a minority of settlers,” David Makovsky, director of the Koret Project on Arab-Israel relations at the Washington Institute, said in an interview. “The West Bank is a tinderbox.”
Few attacks, however, have generated the kind of immediate reprobation from Israeli officials that followed the storming of Jit.
It’s funny how obviously you can see the authors drawing on the NYTimes style guide when trying to find an acceptable way to say that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are violent ultranationalists who support the use of terrorism to ethnically cleanse and annex occupied territory.
“Expand Israel’s hold”? Come. On. They have said over and over that they already believe this territory is theirs by law of might and divine right, and have called over and over for a specific favored ethnic group to drive out the undesirable indigenous population by making them choose between surrendering their land or dying for it.
It’s just maddening to see them talk about genocide and apartheid the way a parent might spell out words when trying not to let their kid know that they ate the last slice of birthday cake.
NYT doing the work, spreading the message of the State Department.
I wonder how it must feel to work your whole life to be respected enough to work at somewhere as well known as NYT and then your job is just to make genocide more palatable to the American reader. I’m surprised journalist suicide isn’t on the rise to be honest.
Realistically, you go to work at the place that does the work you like. This person certainly wrote from this voice BEFORE they started working at the NYTimes, and was hired because of it.