Dear Member of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Foreign Affairs Minister, by: Khaled Mouammar

Dear Member of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Foreign Affairs Minister

 

A message from: Khaled Mouammar

Jun 28, 2023

 

The Israeli military has an entire territorial division with six brigades on the ground in the occupied West Bank to protect illegal settlers whose mere presence is a war crime according to Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the ICC.

It doesn’t make any sense that an army that can pinpoint suspected Palestinian activists in Nablus, a city of 170,000 people, cannot keep tabs on gangs of settlers operating in an area where the army has full control.

From June 20 to June 24, armed gangs of settlers committed 35 pogroms in the Palestinian villages of Turmus Ayya, Luban al-Gharbiyeh, Burqa, Kufr al-Dik, Birin, Kisan, Husan, Yasuf, Urif, Susya and Umm Safa as well as on the road between Nahalin and Jaba in the occupied West Bank. In many cases, Israeli soldiers accompanied settlers in their rampage and did little to restrain them and in some instances assisted the settlers.

 

Israeli officials pay lip service against settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank while in reality the settlers have always been able to commit these crimes because they have always been backed and protected by Israel’s occupation forces.

Four months after settlers committed a pogrom in the town of Hawara on February 26 torching homes, cars and shops and killing one Palestinian, Israel still has not prosecuted anyone suspected of taking part in the rampage although 17 settlers were suspected of involvement in the pogrom.

 

Military Intelligence can promptly track suspected Palestinian activists in the occupied West Bank and arrest or kill them but they will not arrest or prosecute gangs of settlers going on rampage.

Moreover, settlers are backed and protected by three top government officials who live in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich  who is also Minister responsible for Civil Administration in the West Bank lives in the settlement of Kedumim, Minister of National Missions Orit Strock  and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir live in a settlement in Hebron. All three have expressed support for settlers going on rampage.  So the only difference between this government and past ones is that it is out in the open.

Israel did not hesitate to commit a war crime by moving settlers into the occupied West Bank, to enable it to ultimately annex the West Bank, and its occupation forces are stationed there to protect those settlers. These occupation forces will not raise a hand when settlers attack Palestinians but they are quick to fire at Palestinians who defend themselves from settler attacks.

The temporary status of “occupation” of the Palestinian territories is now a permanent condition in which one state ruled by one group of people rules over another group of people

All the territory west of the Jordan River has constituted since 1967 a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.

As a result, it is no longer possible to avoid confronting a one-state apartheid reality. Canadian policymakers and analysts who ignore this one-state apartheid reality will be condemned to failure and irrelevance, doing little beyond providing a smokescreen for the entrenchment of the status quo that inflicts racism and pogroms on indigenous Palestinian Semites.