This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.
By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.
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Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.
Zionism is extremist to liberal ideology; the idea that a people have a right to settle a land and create a country while dismissing the people who lived there for centuries. It is not that extremism took over Israel. The premise of Zionism is nationalism. It is the same type of nationalism that motivates an Argentine to claim the Falkland Islands. The only difference is Israeli nationalism is justified by theology. Similar to how Islam gives Muslims the right to “put civilizations to the right path”. It is a matter of supremacy. Westerners cry about racism all the time, it is always on the news, something racist happened, a person is racist, while at the same time, they seem quite tolerant of supremacy in the Greater Israel region. While activist treat Zionism as some kind of special supremacy, it is just nationalism. The State Of Israel is a primarily Jewish. That is the whole point of in the foundation of Israel. The “People Of Israel” run the state. A Christian, a Muslim, a pagan, a non-Jew, are not part of the Nation Of Israel. If Israel is thought of in this way, it makes you wonder why American politicians, who preach about democratic liberalism being the correct order for the world, using this as a justification to blow people up, supports a nationalist country that is arguably, at the very least, of committing war crimes. I don’t consider American civilian leadership particularly smart people, but most of the laymen do. American military leadership on the other hand do understand Israel is a liability, and this is from their cold military analysis.