Written by: Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine on 10 September 2024
A message from the Foreign Affairs department at DFLP to the world’s parties about the crimes of Israeli settlers.
For these reasons... we call for the arming of the Palestinian people in the West Bank to combat Israeli settlers’ terrorism.
The terrorist acts committed by Zionist settlers in the West Bank under the protection of the occupation army cannot be seen as a reaction to the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation.
Rather, one of the reasons for this operation is the ongoing and past actions of the occupation army and settlers against the land and people of Palestine in the West Bank, including the repeated aggression against Palestinian cities and camps. In this context, numerous crimes committed before October 7 can be cited, such as the burning of the town of Huwara in Nablus Governorate in February 2023, the kidnapping and burning alive of the boy Mohammed Abu Khdeir in Shuafat, Jerusalem, in 2014 by settlers, the burning of the Dawabsha family's home in the village of Duma in Nablus, leading to the martyrdom of an 18-month-old infant, in addition to dozens of Palestinians who were martyred by settlers in their homes, fields, roads, schools, and public places.
The United Nations, the European Union, and Western countries have condemned the crimes of the settlers. Some described their criminal actions as horrific and a direct result of settlement policies and repeated instances of impunity. Others demanded the Israeli government to immediately stop these unacceptable acts, while some said that the settlers’ attacks on Palestinian civilians must stop. However, these positions and statements did not stop the crimes or curb their fascism. On the contrary, some Zionist gangs increased their defiance of Western positions by expanding the scope of their criminal acts and settlement activities. The result on the ground is that the settlers are becoming more ferocious and fascistic, and their leaders are expanding restrictions on the Palestinian landowners, whether through “laws” from Israeli bodies that have no legal authority to deal with another people and occupied Palestinian lands, or through military and administrative decisions from the army and its various apparatuses, or through field procedures that impose a new reality of occupation and settlement by legalizing land theft or expanding the granting of permits to settlers to build in the West Bank while restricting Palestinian construction and demolishing their buildings under the pretext that they are illegal.
While the occupation army continues to commit genocidal crimes against civilians in the Gaza Strip for more than ten months, political genocide continues in the West Bank by imposing the annexation and resolution plan by official bodies and settlement institutions working according to their own agenda, disregarding international condemnations. Since October 7, for example, Palestinian and international institutions have recorded more than 300 attacks against Palestinians by settlers, including shootings, vehicular assaults, house and field burnings, invasions of cities, camps, and remote communities, uprooting of trees, and road closures, in addition to the army’s operations of bombing, invasions, destruction, and arrests.
The goal of these practices is no longer a secret. Dozens of Israeli officials, including ministers and security and military officials, openly take responsibility for these crimes and their goals, which aim to expel the largest number of Palestinians. The recent plan by Smotrich to expand the scope and powers of security, military, and civil control for the army and its institutions is just one example of dozens of plans overseen by senior officials in the Israeli government and army.
Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich speaks of a clear plan to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state by increasing the number of Jewish settlements and settlers in the West Bank. Security Minister Ben-Gvir calls for unleashing more settlement outposts and launching a large-scale military operation to eliminate thousands of Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israeli government tries to portray to the world that it is enforcing the law in the West Bank, through the Prime Minister’s criticism of the crimes committed by the settlers against Palestinians.
Netanyahu’s positions do not change the fact that the fascist and racist right-wing government in Israel, with all its components, oversees the arming of settlers, whether through ministers in the government and settlement institutions or through the occupation army itself and security institutions. Ben-Gvir has admitted more than once that through his ministry, he has armed 100,000 settlers and that there are 300,000 requests on the ministry’s table, in addition to approximately 165,000 weapons that were distributed to settlers before the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation. This confirms that Israel’s crimes, by its army and settlers, are not isolated from the plan that Israel seeks to impose in the West Bank, which is the annexation plan, ignoring the condemnations, appeals, and international and UN positions rejecting Israel’s practices in the West Bank.
What the media and Western embassy reports present about the increasing severity of settler crimes only reflects a small part of the reality that all Palestinian cities, camps, and communities in the West Bank are daily subjected to settler aggression and crimes, which are accompanied by repeated aggression carried out by the occupation army in many cities and camps. This indicates that there is a real partnership and division of roles between the army and settlement organizations that are unusually active in the West Bank, heavily armed with the latest weapons and an extermination and fascist ideology that believes only in killing and terrorism as a means to achieve its plans, repeating the experience of 1948, when Zionist gangs committed dozens of massacres against Palestinian civilians, resulting in the displacement of more than three-quarters of a million Palestinians who are still refugees in neighboring Arab countries and within Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian people view the positions of some Western countries, especially the United States, which consider settler crimes against Palestinians as mere violence, as partners in the crime, practicing political hypocrisy daily, in comparison with their positions on Palestinian resistance and the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation, which came as a natural and necessary response to Israeli crimes and terrorism in various forms accumulated over the past decades. They ignore the fact that settlement and occupation are the highest forms of terrorism according to international laws, and that imposing individual sanctions on a small number of settlers is nothing but encouragement for the occupying state and the leaders, organizations, and militias of the settlers to continue committing their crimes. All forms of settlement are illegal and terrorism, as is the occupation that sponsors, encourages, and legitimizes the theft of Palestinian land.
For all these reasons, we in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine call for the arming of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the formation of defense committees for Palestinian cities, villages, and camps to confront settler gangs and the incursions of the occupation army, to be the protective shield alongside the Palestinian Authority’s security apparatuses so that they together defend the land and national dignity, raising the cost of Israeli colonial and occupation presence on Palestinian land, and sending a message to the international community that our people are tired of unanswered appeals, complaints, and positions, and will take their cause into their own hands, no matter the price and sacrifices required, to make the occupation understand clearly that our land will not be desecrated, and every inch of it will cost the occupier dearly.
The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
-Department of Foreign Afairs-
08/09/2024
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