Israel’s American Settlers
In this afternoon’s email came a report of an attack by Jewish settlers in the West Bank on two members of a Christian Peacemakers Team. A press release on the CPT email listserv says this:
HEBRON, WEST BANK – Kim Lamberty (Washington DC, USA) and Christopher Brown (San Francisco, USA) were attacked and beaten by five Israeli settlers while accompanying Palestinian children walking to school this morning in the Southern Hebron District of the West Bank. The school children were able to escape uninjured. Lamberty and Brown were taken by ambulance to Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheba. … Lamberty stated in a telephone interview, “We were attacked by settler men who came from the Ma’on outpost. They were dressed in black with black scarves across their faces. They threw us down to the ground and kicked us. Chris was also beaten with chains and a bat.”….
Christian Peacemaker teams are present in the area of the attack at the request of Palestinian villagers who are suffering repeated harassment from Israeli settlers while Israeli authorities have failed to intervene.
The report is bad enough on its face and seems consistent with other confirmed incidents over the years. I have no reason to doubt it occurred, even though, in the face of more deadly violence on both sides, it probably won’t get much media attention, certainly not in the US where the preferred mainstream image of Palestians is perpetrator, not victim.
What strikes me most, though, is something omitted from the press release but noted in the email I received: “The five settlers spoke English to each other while unleashing their blows, and then ran away.”
I’m not surprised. As an American who — more than thirty years ago — went to live in Israel for what I thought would be forever, the role of American settlers is particularly obnoxious (well, yes, they could be from Australia or the UK or some other English-speaking place, but I’m betting Brooklyn). The group I was part of had easily decided not to move into Occupied Territory; even in the late 1960s, just after the Six Day War, the notion of creating a Greater Israel at the expense of Palestinian lives was something even many Zionists opposed. As I’ve written about elsewhere, when I was a teenager in New York the belligerant members of the right-wing Betar youth group (affiliated with Menachem Begin’s political party) wore comical military style uniforms, held gun practice sessions, and sported buttons showing maps of a Greater Israel that included not just Israel and the West Bank but Jordan as well. That these Betarniks and their ideological descendents now shape developments, or at least seem as determined as their Palestinian counterparts to disrupt any negotiated agreement, is dangerous and depressing.
Israel continues to try to spur Jewish immigration, partly to maintain itself as a Jewish State that’s likely to include much of the West Bank if Sharon and his ilk get their way. At the same time, Israel refuses to discuss allowing any Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they left during the 1948 war. Israel’s toleration of settler violence designed to force yet more Palestinians to head for the borders can only make matters worse.
August 17th, 2005 at 3:18 am
I have long noticed that the many of the militant settlers interviewed on TV and radio have Brooklyn accents, and speak of their recent immigration to Israel. They evidently have traveled to settle in a troubled area to add to the trouble. They are, in expansionist impulse and in aggressive innocence, quintessentially AMERICAN.
What percentage of the settlers now refusing to leave Gaza are Americans?
Do Israelis who have worked to build Israel for two generations perceive that their nation is endangered by people from outside who have there own agenda?