Why the Huwwara pogrom was inevitable
Posted by: John Phoenix
Maureen Clare Murphy Rights and Accountability
In early January, as Israel was forming its most openly extreme right-wing government yet, Nadav Tamir, a former Israeli diplomat and current lobby group director, gave a prescient warning.
Tamir said that Zvika Fogel, a previously little-known figure who now chairs the Israeli parliament’s National Security Committee, openly “articulates the venomous truth” of Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party, a key player in Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.
Where Ben-Gvir might wish to mask his extremist aims in the language of moderation, Fogel “has been proudly saying the quiet part out loud, and he is worth listening to,” Tamir said.
Fogel played that role on Monday, praising the “deterrent” effect after hundreds of settlers attacked Palestinian communities in the northern West Bank, setting fire to Palestinian homes and vehicles.
A 37-year-old Palestinian was killed during the hours-long rampage, organized by settlers after two Israeli brothers were shot dead in Huwwara, the epicenter of the vigilante mob’s violent rage.
While Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir made a show of calling on Israelis to refrain from taking the law into their own hands, Fogel embarked on a media campaign articulating his approval of the rampage.
“A closed, burnt Huwwara – that’s what I want to see,” Fogel said.
“That’s the only way to achieve deterrence. After a murder like yesterday’s, we need burning villages when the [Israeli military] doesn’t act,” he elaborated.
Fogel later walked back his comments and contradicted himself by saying, “I said the state is the one that should act to deter the terrorists, definitely not civilians.”
But by then, his party’s followers and the adherents of the supremacist ideology that it represents had already received the message, loud and clear.
“State-sanctioned violence”
Even if asking vigilantes “not to take the law into their hands” was the Netanyahu government’s line on Monday, it is belied by everything the ruling coalition has said and done until now.
Breaking the Silence, a group of whistle-blowing Israeli veterans, said on Monday that “the Huwwara Pogrom was state-sanctioned violence.”
Represented at the highest levels of the government, “settlers rampaged with impunity because they know they have the state on their side,” Breaking the Silence added.
Only yesterday, MK Smotrich was given enormous governing power over the West Bank — the same day he liked a tweet by the deputy head of a regional council which called to “erase” Hawara from the map.
The IDF and police could’ve stopped the violent rampage from happening. The army knew it was coming: settlers distributed posters in advance calling for a revenge march but the IDF took no preparatory measures. Hundreds were there, yet only two settlers were arrested.
If today’s events in Hawara are ever investigated, the first who will have to supply some answers are the local IDF commanders. This flyer “demanding revenge” and calling the settlers to march on Hawara at 18:00 was widely circulating early afternoon. The IDF just stood by.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, pointed to the “synergy” of cooperation: “the settlers carry out the attack, the military secures it, the politicians back it.”
A Member of Knesset at the scene of the settler pogrom against Palestinians in Hawara: “here to support the justified cry of hundreds of Shomron residents”
לימור סון הר מלך
@limor_sonhrmelh
הגעתי הערב למקום הפיגוע הקשה בחווארה כדי לתמוך בזעקתם הצודקת של מאות תושבי השומרון שיצאו למחות ולדרוש ביטחון, אחרי חודשים ארוכים שהופקרו הכתובת הייתה על הקיר ובחודשים האחרונים התרעתי מפניה יחד עם תושבי הישובים כאן מעל כל במה אפשרית – בתוך הממשלה ומחוצה לה.
The bus nearby is owned by the Central Samaria Development Corporation, which is owned by the regional settlements. Clearly the settlers were bussed in officially, through the checkpoints set up by the army to stop Palestinians from entering Huwarah. #IsraeliApartheid
Jalal
@JalalAK_jojo
After commiting a pogrom in Huwara, the settler criminals walk free. They go “pray” at the site of the pogrom under military protection, in an isolated town reeling from a night of vicious terror. Huwara is a ghostown tdy, exactly how the Zionists want it.
Rejecting talking points suggesting that the Israeli government had lost control, B’Tselem said that “this is exactly what Israeli control looks like,” adding that “the Huwwara Pogrom was an extreme manifestation of a longstanding Israeli policy.”
Hebron precedent
For another bleak example of this policy, look to the West Bank city of Hebron.
One day and 29 years before the settler pogrom in Huwwara, Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler from the US, opened fire in the Ibrahimi mosque, massacring 29 Palestinian men and boys.
Goldstein was a follower of the genocidal rabbi Meir Kahane. Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, is a “self-described disciple” of Kahane, as The Times of Israel put it, and looks up to Goldstein as a hero.
In the wake of Goldstein’s massacre, Israel escalated its repressive measures against Palestinians and partitioned the Ibrahimi mosque in favor of the settlers – a precedent that Israel may try to repeat at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque.
Settlers have since seized Palestinian properties in Hebron’s Old City, leaving its former commercial heart a shuttered ghost town.
On Monday, the parallel with Hebron was not lost on observers after the Israeli military shut down Palestinian shops in Huwwara.
Rania Zabaneh
@RZabaneh
Huwwara, a town of over 7K Palestinians south of Nablus… and a main road that stretches a few kms connecting the north of the occupied WestBank to its center is more of a ghosts town – Israeli military and settlers are only allowed on the road.
Settler violence, including the massacres around the time of Israel’s founding in 1948, has been essential to the formation and maintenance of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Far from Israel disliking settler violence, it is a necessary means for achieving the state’s aim of emptying Palestine of its indigenous population so they may be replaced by foreign settlers.
Settler violence, including the massacres around the time of Israel’s founding in 1948, has been essential to the formation and maintenance of a Jewish state in Palestine.
This has been the story of Israel from day one. It was brutally obvious to Palestinians but liberal Zionists chose to believe some other fairy tale. This is the legacy of Zionism.
Joe Roberts
@Joe_Roberts01
The thirst for power at any cost and capitulation to extremists led to this pogrom. Like it or not, this is Netanyahu’s legacy.
several people i spoke to nazareth since the attack on huwwara recalled when the colonists in “upper nazareth” protected by zionist forces descended upon the city in 2000, attacking people & killing one
this kind of violence isn’t by any means new … this is zionism, it is how the zionist entity was established in palestine against the wishes of its people & it is how it sustained
This is the logical endpoint of Zionism and the exact reason that Jewish communities around the world need to unequivocally reject this ethnonationalist and genocidal ideology.
Benzion Sanders
@BenzionSanders
Settlers taking a break from carrying out a pogrom in Huwara to daven maariv (evening prayer).
Who is the apartheid president kidding? Does he think that the Zionist “heroes” who slaughtered and expelled Palestinians in Deir Yassin, Tantura, Lydda, Ramle and West Jerusalem in 1948 are any different from the settlers in Huwwara? There is only one Zionism and this is it.
Ben-Gvir’s “war”
On Monday, Ben-Gvir nodded toward this continuity of violence, which he described as an existential necessity for the Zionist project in Palestine: “This is not a war that began yesterday, not a war that’s going to end in one day, but it’s a war for our home, for our lives.”
Ben-Gvir was speaking to settlers at Evyatar, an outpost not sanctioned by the Israeli government.
Settlers established Evyatar on land belonging to the Palestinian communities of Beita, Qabalan and Yatma on Jabal Subeih near the northern West Bank city of Nablus in May 2021. Since then, several Palestinians have been killed during or in close proximity to protests against the settlement.
Netanyahu’s government plans to legalize Evyatar, which was co-founded by Zvi Sukkot, a far-right extremist from the notorious Yitzhar settlement who is also a lawmaker in Israel’s current government, taking Smotrich’s vacated seat.
Settlers from Yitzhar, which is located next to Huwwara and built partially on the village’s land, are notorious for attacking nearby Palestinian communities, with guards from Yitzhar even giving orders to Israeli soldiers during those attacks.
Opposition leader Benny Gantz said on Monday that he stood by the compromise that his government made to “legalize” Evyatar.
Gantz and fellow opposition leader Yair Lapid have been highly critical of the far-right government, saying that it has “lost control” and is leading Israel into a “security disaster.”
But criticism aside, Gantz and Lapid share the same vision of a Jewish supremacist state in Palestine, albeit one with a veneer of liberal democracy rather than the theocratic flair of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
No mistake: Ben Gvir and Smotrich are 100% OK paying the price of two murdered brothers and more Israeli victims yet to come. They know this will continue in the cruel cycle of violence. They have no desire to stop it. Their govt hates the very ppl it represents.
Sally Abed סאלי עבד سالي عبد
@sally_abed
לא לטעות: בן גביר וסמוטריץ בסדר גמור עם לשלם את המחיר של שני אחים חפים מפשע ועוד הקורבנות הישראלים שיבואו בהמשך. הרי הם יודעים שזה ימשיך לקרות, במעגל אלימות מטורלל ואכזרי, ואין להם שום רצון, ושום יכולת לעצור אותו עם הממשלה שתכלס … שונאת את האנשים שהיא מייצגת.
The state is today led by Zionism’s most extreme adherents, who, in the words of Palestinian commentator Muhammad Shehada, “won’t rest until all of the land is in flames.”
The flames that engulfed Huwwara on Sunday are the logical conclusion of Israel’s supremacist ideology.
