Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 12.09.2026
According to the Zionist narrative Israel was formed in response to the Holocaust so such a genocide will not occur again. However, aFMfcgzQhWLRKdjqsxjnBmdwlVCvisited the West Bank in the company of multiple prominent Israelis, including former military and intelligence officials, who used World War II comparisons to describe what’s currently unfolding in the West Bank. “Eighty years after the Holocaust, ‘Mein Kampf’ in reverse,” one said; another called it “ethnic cleansing”
“Azam Ahmed replied to questions based on his experience during a one month visit to the West-Bank ground reporting on the impunity of settlers attacking Palestinians.
Q: Azam, you recently accompanied a group of retired Israeli officials and military officers to the West Bank. How did that happen? And what did you see?
A: One of these generals had known our colleague Ronen Bergman for a long time and asked whether we’d like to come along. We saw villages where settler violence has cleared entire communities. You walk around and it’s like a ghost town. There are the remnants of shepherding pens and homes. But no people.
The most striking thing to me was the language these former military officers used to describe what’s happening. They openly called it “ethnic cleansing.” They also referred to “Jewish terrorism” — the idea that in the name of Judaism settlers terrorize innocent farmers, women and children, and sometimes even kill them.
Groups of settlers have been moving into the occupied West Bank, often into containers or trailers on the hillsides. They tend to settle close to Palestinian population centers. In some cases, they attack the surrounding communities. They come in with masks, with guns, with bats. They torch homes, and steal livestock. The Palestinians know that they’re not allowed to be armed, and that if they fight back, in many cases the military will show up and defend the settlers, even when they are the aggressors.
Q: These retired generals say Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is complicit in this violence. How so?
A: When they call the government “complicit,” they mean several things. In some cases, soldiers join forces with settlers to attack a village. There was a highly publicized incident of settlers camped outside Palestinian homes in a village called Qusra, and one video shows a soldier praying with the settlers.
These officials also point out that Israeli intelligence in the West Bank is so good that it’s very hard for a Palestinian to pull off any kind of attack. So, their question is: How is it that a Palestinian can’t do anything without the Israeli military knowing about it, but settlers face no consequences for violence?
Q: Did the Israeli government offer any kind of response?
A: The prime minister’s office declined to respond when we asked them about these officials’ comments, and Netanyahu has played down the attacks. But international concern has been growing, and he did speak out about a particularly violent attack last month.
Q: The settlements aren’t new of course — hundreds of thousands of Israelis have lived among millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories since 1967. So what is new here?
A: It doesn’t come out of nowhere. You’re looking at something that has been building for decades and has now been taken to an extreme by this government. Oct. 7, 2023, was a seminal moment. But so was the formation of Netanyahu’s government in 2022, because he brought in Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and other right-wing officials who have the ambition of claiming the occupied West Bank as part of Greater Israel.
That’s what the generals, and other critics of this government, believe they’re watching. They’re saying these violent incidents aren’t just “a handful of kids,” which is how Netanyahu once tried to frame it. They see this violence as strategic: settlers taking strategic areas, creating corridors and pushing Palestinians into densely populated cities that can be ring-fenced, so the rest of the land can be claimed.”
The problem with this report is that someone can get the impression that the ethnic cleansing began with Netanyahu’s government, while it began with the establishment of Israel and even with the first waves of Zionist migration to Palestine. In 1947-8 according to the historian Benny Moris, the Zionist army committed 30-40 massacres. Prior to these waves of Zionists Jews lived in four cities and had very close and friendly relations with the native Palestinians.
“Menachem Klein’s book, Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron, is a depressing one. Originally released in English, the book — which is being published in Hebrew — paints a picture of a shared life between Palestinians and Jews at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, bringing us face to face with daily life, commerce, education, celebrations, and sadness. It shows that this kind existence, despite everything we were taught by the Israeli education system, is possible. And then Klein goes on and shows the disruptions of this delicate balance, burning everything left of it today”[ii]
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/world/israel-west-bank-canada-us-trade.html
[ii] https://www.972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/#:~:text=Before%20the%20advent%20of%20Zionism%20and%20Arab%20nationalism%2C,go%20back%20to%20that%20time.%20By%20Noam%20Rotem