WEBVTT - West Bank Takeover 0:00:02.490 --> 0:00:09.440 Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My 0:00:09.480 --> 0:00:11.980 name is Dana Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher of Arab and 0:00:12.000 --> 0:00:15.280 Palestinian politics. And today I want to talk about the 0:00:15.660 --> 0:00:19.200 truly insidious stories coming out of the West Bank that 0:00:19.570 --> 0:00:23.910 read separately look like a spike in settler violence, but 0:00:23.989 --> 0:00:29.069 read together look like something else entirely. On August 9th, 0:00:29.760 --> 0:00:33.199 settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in a neighborhood called Ras 0:00:33.220 --> 0:00:35.700 al-Ayn on the edge of a village called Qusra south 0:00:35.740 --> 0:00:39.700 of Nablus. They didn't leave. 21 days later, at least 0:00:39.760 --> 0:00:41.959 four people were still inside one of those houses cut 0:00:42.000 --> 0:00:46.530 off from water, electricity, and basic supplies. Getting food into 0:00:46.570 --> 0:00:49.250 those people meant coordinating through the village mayor, which was 0:00:49.290 --> 0:00:52.050 a process that took three to four days. The Israeli 0:00:52.110 --> 0:00:54.810 army put up three new roadblocks, and in July, the 0:00:54.830 --> 0:00:57.850 village mosque was burned. I want you to sit with 0:00:57.870 --> 0:01:01.320 that for a minute. Because this is not a raid. 0:01:01.340 --> 0:01:05.470 This is not a rampage. It's a siege with a 0:01:05.530 --> 0:01:09.330 bureaucracy attached. And that bureaucracy is the story. And that's 0:01:09.350 --> 0:01:11.430 what I want to talk about today. And I'm trying 0:01:11.450 --> 0:01:13.890 to be precise about the difference because the distinction is 0:01:13.950 --> 0:01:16.870 not academic. It determines what you think the problem is 0:01:17.330 --> 0:01:19.840 and therefore what you think the solution would look like. 0:01:20.819 --> 0:01:24.000 Here's the framing you'll get from almost every Western outlet. 0:01:25.000 --> 0:01:28.200 And of course, every Israeli official. That this is a fringe. 0:01:28.970 --> 0:01:32.130 and that these settlers are a violent fringe, and they 0:01:32.209 --> 0:01:36.209 embarrass the state, and the state condemns this fringe. When 0:01:36.230 --> 0:01:39.640 settlers besieged Qusra, Prime Minister Netanyahu did issue a statement, 0:01:39.860 --> 0:01:43.800 and here I'm quoting, condemning the, quote, criminal acts of 0:01:43.840 --> 0:01:46.520 violence committed in the village of Qusra by a handful 0:01:46.560 --> 0:01:50.040 of rioters who are violating the law. And Israeli President 0:01:50.080 --> 0:01:52.640 Herzog also condemned it, and the foreign ministry condemned it 0:01:52.800 --> 0:01:57.030 as extremist and criminal violence. So let's take that framing 0:01:57.080 --> 0:02:00.070 seriously for a moment because if it's true, what we're 0:02:00.090 --> 0:02:03.150 looking at is a law enforcement failure, a state that's 0:02:03.170 --> 0:02:07.530 lost control of its most radical citizens. And if it's false, 0:02:07.810 --> 0:02:09.810 what we're looking at is a state carrying out a 0:02:09.850 --> 0:02:14.030 policy through deniable means and the condemnations are not a 0:02:14.070 --> 0:02:16.919 failure at all. They're a feature. They're the part of 0:02:16.940 --> 0:02:20.400 the machine that faces outward. So let's go through what 0:02:20.460 --> 0:02:24.030 actually happened in these villages and then let's ask Which 0:02:24.070 --> 0:02:28.730 of these framings fits the evidence best? So Basil Al-Adra, 0:02:28.790 --> 0:02:30.910 the journalist from Masafi Riata, the one who you know 0:02:30.990 --> 0:02:33.730 from No Other Land, the documentary that won a bunch 0:02:33.750 --> 0:02:36.600 of awards, he published a piece in Jewish Currents on 0:02:36.639 --> 0:02:40.740 September 3rd about livestock theft in the South Hebron Hills. 0:02:41.360 --> 0:02:46.360 So this isn't vandalism, it's theft. It's organized removal of livestock. 0:02:47.300 --> 0:02:50.210 So shortly after midnight on August 21st in a place 0:02:50.250 --> 0:02:53.370 called Khirbet Dir Shams, a family was attacked by roughly 0:02:53.370 --> 0:02:56.630 15 masked settlers with sticks and stones. One of them 0:02:56.669 --> 0:02:58.870 describes it flatly. They basically opened the pen where the 0:02:58.910 --> 0:03:01.530 family kept around 70 goats, and then they opened the 0:03:01.550 --> 0:03:04.470 sheep pen where there were about 100 sheep. And as 0:03:04.510 --> 0:03:06.990 the settlers moved off of the animals, Israeli army vehicles 0:03:07.060 --> 0:03:10.480 passed nearby. And in his words, they did nothing. Nearly 0:03:10.540 --> 0:03:14.080 two weeks later, not one animal has been recovered. Back 0:03:14.120 --> 0:03:17.940 in July, in another village, a settler pepper sprayed a man, 0:03:18.440 --> 0:03:21.250 and then more settlers arrived, And then a flock of 0:03:21.290 --> 0:03:26.049 about 122 sheep were targeted and taken. Soldiers did show 0:03:26.090 --> 0:03:29.190 up that time. According to one of the villagers, what 0:03:29.210 --> 0:03:31.369 the soldiers did was push the Palestinians away from their 0:03:31.430 --> 0:03:35.410 own animals while settlers broke the locks. And of roughly 0:03:35.410 --> 0:03:38.840 227 animals taken that day, nine came back. Four residents 0:03:38.880 --> 0:03:41.900 of the village were arrested and then released. B'Tselem, which 0:03:41.940 --> 0:03:45.560 is an Israeli human rights organization, has counted 17 livestock 0:03:45.600 --> 0:03:49.100 theft incidents in 2026 alone. And a flock of the 0:03:49.140 --> 0:03:51.620 size that we're talking about here, it's worth something on 0:03:51.640 --> 0:03:56.140 the order of tens, if not $ 100, 000. I'm flagging this 0:03:56.180 --> 0:04:00.060 because I think it's easy to hear sheep and these 0:04:00.160 --> 0:04:02.960 kinds of things and file it maybe under like property 0:04:03.020 --> 0:04:06.440 crime or vandalism or something. But for a herding family 0:04:06.480 --> 0:04:09.160 in the South Hebron Hills, the flock is not just 0:04:09.200 --> 0:04:12.900 an asset. It's the entire productive base of the household. 0:04:12.960 --> 0:04:15.600 It's the income. It's the reason to stay on that hillside. 0:04:16.460 --> 0:04:19.730 So if you want to expel a pastoral community, you 0:04:19.850 --> 0:04:23.050 don't just expel them, you can take its animals, and 0:04:23.070 --> 0:04:26.290 then it can expel itself. And it does so in 0:04:26.310 --> 0:04:29.710 a way that produces no photograph of a bulldozer. Another 0:04:29.750 --> 0:04:32.560 incident was on July 8th, when the head of Israel's 0:04:32.600 --> 0:04:36.560 Central Command signed a land seizure order. And that order 0:04:37.020 --> 0:04:39.920 takes dozens of dunams of land from Bil'in and three 0:04:39.960 --> 0:04:42.720 neighboring villages to build a security road, six and a 0:04:42.760 --> 0:04:46.080 half kilometers long and eight meters wide, connecting the settlement, 0:04:46.950 --> 0:04:51.279 of Modayin elite to an outpost called Ste Efraim. Sorry, 0:04:51.360 --> 0:04:53.740 I don't know Hebrew, so I'm going to be butchering these. 0:04:54.640 --> 0:04:58.160 But Oren Zev reported this for 972 Mag on September 2nd. 0:04:59.420 --> 0:05:02.909 So those who are familiar with Palestinian popular resistance in 0:05:02.970 --> 0:05:07.510 the mid to early 2000s, you've heard of Bil'in. Lots 0:05:07.529 --> 0:05:12.229 of documentaries about it, lots of international attention. This village 0:05:12.270 --> 0:05:17.029 basically sustained weekly demonstrations against the separation wall, for something 0:05:17.070 --> 0:05:19.210 like 15 years because this wall was being built on 0:05:19.250 --> 0:05:22.870 their land and taking huge chunks of their land. In 2007, 0:05:22.870 --> 0:05:25.970 the Israeli High Court ordered that part of the wall 0:05:26.370 --> 0:05:28.969 removed and the land actually came back to the village. 0:05:29.810 --> 0:05:33.450 So in the international imagination, this was the best outcome. See, 0:05:33.470 --> 0:05:38.270 the nonviolent resistance worked. And this is the nonviolent resistance 0:05:38.310 --> 0:05:40.910 that Western commentators often point to when they want to 0:05:40.930 --> 0:05:45.480 lecture Palestinians about tactics. Now this road that they're proposing 0:05:45.620 --> 0:05:49.860 runs through the land that was returned. So Mohamed Khatib, 0:05:49.920 --> 0:05:53.650 who led some of these protests, says the point is 0:05:53.690 --> 0:05:56.550 not a road, it's a settlement corridor. It's basically an 0:05:56.589 --> 0:06:00.650 eventual seizure of something like 600 dunams. And the attorney, 0:06:00.690 --> 0:06:03.710 Michael Svard, put it very bluntly. They don't think twice 0:06:04.140 --> 0:06:08.860 about co-opting the security argument for purposes that are clearly settlement-oriented. 0:06:09.380 --> 0:06:12.900 And what's really ludicrous is that this road runs through 0:06:13.540 --> 0:06:16.659 a wadi, kind of a valley, which from an actual 0:06:16.779 --> 0:06:18.700 security standpoint is a bad place to put a road. 0:06:19.839 --> 0:06:23.940 So the security rationale isn't just contested, it's incoherent, which 0:06:24.000 --> 0:06:26.800 tells you that the word security here is doing legal work, 0:06:26.860 --> 0:06:30.420 not tactical work. It's this just magic phrase that converts 0:06:30.779 --> 0:06:34.210 a settlement expansion into a military necessity, and then a 0:06:34.230 --> 0:06:37.610 military necessity into a signed order from a general. A 0:06:37.670 --> 0:06:39.710 third incident or set of incidents I want to talk 0:06:39.730 --> 0:06:43.690 about is these hikes. There have been these hikes. This 0:06:43.750 --> 0:06:48.850 is a really ridiculous, insidious story. Aharon Parath and Roy 0:06:48.930 --> 0:06:52.190 Kleitman published an investigation of these hikes in 972 Mag 0:06:52.390 --> 0:06:57.330 in late August about these hiking groups, these organized settler 0:06:57.350 --> 0:07:00.529 hiking groups in the West Bank. They've got really cutesy 0:07:00.570 --> 0:07:03.910 names sometimes, like hiking buddies. And they published their routes. 0:07:04.580 --> 0:07:06.760 And they go from settlement to settlement and they cross 0:07:06.820 --> 0:07:11.060 Palestinian farmland and springs and villages. So a hike near 0:07:11.080 --> 0:07:15.500 the north of Hebron, one of these hikes, ended with a, quote, 0:07:15.540 --> 0:07:21.500 civilian security coordinator opening fire and killing 17-year-old Palestinian Karim 0:07:21.560 --> 0:07:26.880 Shalalde and seriously wounding another one. So that's, I think, 0:07:26.900 --> 0:07:29.530 the whole episode in two words. A civilian security coordinator. 0:07:29.570 --> 0:07:32.470 This is not a hiker who lost his temper. It's 0:07:32.650 --> 0:07:37.240 a job. It's an armed, appointed part of the chain 0:07:37.260 --> 0:07:39.810 of command. The man who fired was functionally an arm 0:07:39.820 --> 0:07:42.810 of the state, but supposedly on a hike in a 0:07:42.830 --> 0:07:46.290 village that is not his. On July 24th, near the 0:07:46.330 --> 0:07:48.790 village of Tal, west of Nablus, a hike ended with 0:07:48.830 --> 0:07:52.790 six people dead, two Israelis and four Palestinians. David Syed, 0:07:52.830 --> 0:07:55.570 who founded one of these hiking groups, basically says the 0:07:55.610 --> 0:07:59.350 quiet part in a single sentence. Wherever the hiker's foot treads, 0:07:59.830 --> 0:08:02.750 there the border will pass. So he's talking about how 0:08:03.160 --> 0:08:05.180 They're going to places they haven't been to in a 0:08:05.200 --> 0:08:08.190 long time or maybe ever. And on the question of 0:08:08.230 --> 0:08:11.530 the army, he explains the relationship very precisely. We don't 0:08:11.590 --> 0:08:14.550 ask for permits, he says. We mainly notify them so 0:08:14.590 --> 0:08:17.810 we don't put the sector on alert. And this is 0:08:17.830 --> 0:08:21.510 very clear in a lot of their quotes about this issue. 0:08:21.710 --> 0:08:24.940 They coordinate with the army. They notify, but they are 0:08:24.950 --> 0:08:28.820 not asking permission. And the army isn't policing them. It's 0:08:28.860 --> 0:08:31.220 being kept in the loop so that it can protect them. 0:08:32.030 --> 0:08:34.790 And the reporting traces this back over a decade. There's 0:08:34.809 --> 0:08:39.530 a 2013 hike documented with 100 hikers and soldiers accompanying them. 0:08:40.350 --> 0:08:44.550 So supposedly this recreational activity has a stated territorial doctrine, 0:08:45.070 --> 0:08:49.770 a published route through other people's fields, an armed participant base, 0:08:50.010 --> 0:09:03.910 and a military that gets notified. All right, so we 0:09:03.950 --> 0:09:07.589 have four things. The livestock theft with soldiers watching, a 0:09:08.520 --> 0:09:12.940 siege of villages, seizing of land, and armed hikes with 0:09:13.240 --> 0:09:17.099 military escorts. Now let's get back to Prime Minister Netanyahu's 0:09:17.140 --> 0:09:20.780 phrase about this being a handful of riots. A riot 0:09:21.250 --> 0:09:24.630 is unplanned. A riot has no logistics. A riot does 0:09:24.670 --> 0:09:27.130 not file paperwork. What's in front of us here is 0:09:27.170 --> 0:09:31.390 very different. Because Here, I think a lot of people 0:09:31.530 --> 0:09:33.890 who are critical of the state of Israel might make 0:09:33.910 --> 0:09:36.630 the argument that the settlers are the state. But I 0:09:36.650 --> 0:09:39.590 think this loses a little bit of analytical detail. So 0:09:39.630 --> 0:09:42.050 let me make this a little bit more specific, which 0:09:42.410 --> 0:09:46.270 I actually think is more damning. The Israeli state and 0:09:46.290 --> 0:09:49.290 the settler movement are not identical, but they are complementary 0:09:49.590 --> 0:09:53.210 because they perform different functions in the same project. And 0:09:53.770 --> 0:09:55.830 it's very clear that the division of labor is the point. 0:09:56.750 --> 0:09:59.010 Because think for a moment about what each half can 0:09:59.050 --> 0:10:02.260 do that the other can't. Settlers can do things the 0:10:02.300 --> 0:10:06.880 state can't do openly without incurring some diplomatic cost. For example, 0:10:06.920 --> 0:10:09.179 taking a flock of sheep or burning a mosque or 0:10:09.220 --> 0:10:11.760 standing outside a house for three weeks. These are acts 0:10:11.840 --> 0:10:16.640 with no legal basis. There's no order, no minister to sanction, 0:10:16.660 --> 0:10:20.610 no policy to condemn at the UN. They produce displacement 0:10:20.850 --> 0:10:23.730 without producing a decision. And then the state can do 0:10:23.770 --> 0:10:25.970 things settlers can't do on their own. It can sign 0:10:25.990 --> 0:10:30.849 a seizure order. It can declare land state land. It 0:10:30.890 --> 0:10:33.030 can build the road that makes the outpost viable and 0:10:33.070 --> 0:10:34.880 connect it to the grid and route the bus line. 0:10:35.770 --> 0:10:38.170 And it can decline to investigate when things happen. It 0:10:38.220 --> 0:10:41.260 can arrest four Palestinians instead of the 15 masked settlers, 0:10:41.900 --> 0:10:43.920 which is exactly what happened in one of these villages. 0:10:45.120 --> 0:10:48.020 And crucially, the state can supply this ambiguity that lets 0:10:48.040 --> 0:10:51.230 the whole thing keep running. the soldiers present at these 0:10:51.270 --> 0:10:56.110 incidents are not intervening because not that they're absent. It's 0:10:56.150 --> 0:10:59.510 in fact a specific posture of the state. It converts 0:10:59.620 --> 0:11:04.160 this crime into something sanctioned. And it tells the Palestinian 0:11:04.200 --> 0:11:07.319 family there's really no one to appeal to. And this 0:11:07.400 --> 0:11:10.140 is what political scientists who study this stuff in other 0:11:10.179 --> 0:11:15.550 contexts as outsourced or deniable repression by paramilitaries or militias 0:11:15.630 --> 0:11:19.709 or unknown gunmen, quote unquote, We recognize it instantly when 0:11:19.770 --> 0:11:22.890 it's in other places, and we understand kind of the 0:11:22.929 --> 0:11:25.470 analytical move here because you don't ask whether the state 0:11:25.550 --> 0:11:27.590 ordered it, you ask whether the state built the conditions 0:11:27.630 --> 0:11:30.550 under which it happens. And by that test, this is 0:11:30.590 --> 0:11:32.890 not ambiguous at all. But for some reason, when we 0:11:32.910 --> 0:11:35.470 talk about Israel-Palestine, things get a little bit more ambiguous. 0:11:36.809 --> 0:11:39.610 I also want to point out something really crucial, which 0:11:39.670 --> 0:11:41.610 is that every one of these incidents, and they've been 0:11:41.630 --> 0:11:44.190 happening for a while, but they've ramped up in severity, 0:11:44.929 --> 0:11:47.400 but every one of them produces a permanent gain. The 0:11:47.460 --> 0:11:49.900 animals that are stolen don't come back. The road that's 0:11:49.940 --> 0:11:53.260 built can't be unbuilt. The hiking route, you know, once 0:11:53.320 --> 0:11:56.080 walked with an escort becomes a corridor, then a security zone, 0:11:56.220 --> 0:11:59.040 then a place that Palestinians can't farm. And the siege 0:11:59.100 --> 0:12:02.250 doesn't need to end in a formal expulsion. It ends 0:12:02.309 --> 0:12:04.709 when the family decides they can't raise their children under 0:12:04.750 --> 0:12:07.790 these conditions. They can't stay under siege. And there's a 0:12:07.929 --> 0:12:12.190 phrase for what's coming when all of this happens all 0:12:12.210 --> 0:12:16.059 at once, which is annexation. And People talk about it 0:12:16.140 --> 0:12:18.839 as if it's a future event that's awaiting some sort 0:12:18.860 --> 0:12:22.190 of vote from the Israeli Knesset or something. But I'd 0:12:22.230 --> 0:12:25.510 suggest that framing is itself part of the problem. It 0:12:25.550 --> 0:12:29.070 invites us to wait for a declaration and treat everything 0:12:29.110 --> 0:12:33.510 before that as some sort of tension or spike. The 0:12:33.550 --> 0:12:36.449 declaration of annexation is the least important part. What's happening 0:12:36.710 --> 0:12:40.380 on the ground is a territorial reality that's being produced 0:12:40.980 --> 0:12:44.080 by signature and by theft. And then maybe later on 0:12:44.120 --> 0:12:47.770 the paperwork will ratify it, but it's not necessary. Israeli 0:12:47.809 --> 0:12:50.170 writer and analyst Marev Zonzin actually made a version of 0:12:50.190 --> 0:12:52.750 this argument in the New York Times on September 6th 0:12:53.390 --> 0:12:56.870 under a headline that I think is worth reading. The 0:12:56.890 --> 0:12:59.050 headline of the article is, it's not just the West 0:12:59.100 --> 0:13:04.280 Bank settlers, it's Israel. So hopefully this analysis doesn't seem 0:13:04.420 --> 0:13:07.100 fringe anymore. At the end of the day, if we 0:13:07.140 --> 0:13:12.040 consider settler violence a fringe problem, then the remedy... which 0:13:12.110 --> 0:13:18.090 the Biden administration toyed with half-heartedly, is sanctions on individuals, 0:13:18.850 --> 0:13:21.870 a visa ban or an asset freeze. And we've run 0:13:21.890 --> 0:13:25.630 that experiment. That didn't really work. The violence kept going up. 0:13:26.590 --> 0:13:32.010 But if it's a state policy executed through deniable proxies, 0:13:32.650 --> 0:13:35.450 then the remedy has to address the state. And every 0:13:35.530 --> 0:13:38.590 actor with leverage over that state, which, you know, we're 0:13:38.610 --> 0:13:43.150 talking about D.C. here, understands this, but they've chosen the 0:13:43.190 --> 0:13:48.520 fringe framing precisely because it permits condemnation without cost. So 0:13:48.880 --> 0:13:51.840 Netanyahu condemning a handful of rioters in the same week 0:13:51.940 --> 0:13:55.100 that the Israeli Central Command signs a road through Bil'in's 0:13:55.140 --> 0:13:58.349 returned land, this is not a contradiction he failed to notice, 0:13:58.550 --> 0:14:01.750 it is the design of this policy. So I'll leave 0:14:01.770 --> 0:14:04.990 you with this detail from the reporting on Qusra that 0:14:05.010 --> 0:14:07.830 I can't get out of my head. It was that 0:14:08.250 --> 0:14:11.929 six people were attacked on while trying to install metal 0:14:12.000 --> 0:14:14.760 bars and window shields on their homes. They were attacked 0:14:14.800 --> 0:14:17.819 by both Israeli soldiers and settlers together in the same action. 0:14:18.000 --> 0:14:20.660 And then the six of them were arrested. So they 0:14:20.700 --> 0:14:25.840 weren't fighting. They weren't protesting. They were fastening metal on 0:14:25.860 --> 0:14:28.700 their own house to protect themselves. And they were being 0:14:28.760 --> 0:14:31.590 arrested for it by the same army standing alongside the 0:14:31.620 --> 0:14:34.390 people they were shielding themselves from. So if you wanted 0:14:34.490 --> 0:14:36.850 kind of a single image for this division of labor, 0:14:36.910 --> 0:14:41.540 I've spent this episode describing, that's it. Because the thing 0:14:41.580 --> 0:14:45.460 that's not permitted in the end is not that they're resisting. 0:14:45.940 --> 0:14:48.979 It's that they're staying. The families in the South Hebron 0:14:49.020 --> 0:14:52.450 Hills are still there. And Bil'in is contesting the order 0:14:52.880 --> 0:14:56.170 of the seizure of their land. Qusra's residents have installed 0:14:56.570 --> 0:14:59.530 some shields anyway. And a number of Israeli journalists and 0:14:59.550 --> 0:15:03.430 lawyers and researchers are documenting this in Hebrew and in English. 0:15:03.470 --> 0:15:06.110 And then, of course, Palestinian journalists are putting themselves on 0:15:06.130 --> 0:15:08.760 the line to document this as well. That's not a 0:15:08.800 --> 0:15:12.520 hopeful note exactly. It's just the accurate one. Unfortunately, what's 0:15:12.570 --> 0:15:16.750 missing is apparently anyone with power willing to act on 0:15:17.150 --> 0:15:21.410 understanding this reality. That's it for me. Thanks for listening. 0:15:24.150 --> 0:15:26.590 It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. 0:15:26.810 --> 0:15:31.150 For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, 0:15:31.610 --> 0:15:34.430 or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 0:15:34.770 --> 0:15:37.570 or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find 0:15:37.630 --> 0:15:40.590 sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. 0:15:41.090 --> 0:15:41.770 Thanks for listening.