Over the past two weeks, Israeli settlers have forced 119 Palestinians to flee their homes, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has reported. These attacks forced nearly every family in these communities to evacuate as settlers erected illegal outposts and blocked access to water.
This displacement wave comes just a month after the ICJ ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestine and settlements are illegal and that Israel must end them “as rapidly as possible.” A mob of Israeli settlers also recently carried out a violent raid on the Palestinian West Bank town of Jit, setting houses and cars on fire and shooting at Palestinians while Israeli soldiers looked on.
“These latest acts of ethnic cleansing are happening because the Israeli government does not expect to face any accountability or real consequences from President [Joe] Biden,” said CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell, in a statement responding to NRC’s report. “The Biden administration must, at long last, use American financial leverage to force the Israeli government to end the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank and stop the genocide in Gaza.”
“Settlers” is such mild terminology. We should be calling them “colonizers”. Tbf though, the Pilgrims and other early American settlers were no pacifists. That’s just the image public education and the media has painted for us.
Israeli colonization, like that of America or Australia, is based on the violent displacement of indigenous peoples. We said that America was “settled” too. The language masks the same violence.