The fanaticism and atavism of Israel’s illegal Hebron settlers knows no bounds. Although the presence of all Israeli settlers is illegal, unjust and inherently violent. Most settlers can be terms “economic settlers.” They live in, say. Ma’la Adimin not out of religious zealotry, but, rather, due to the subsidized housing made available by their government to encourage “facts on the ground.” Thus most settlers never come in contact with Palestinians. They live in secluded hilltops and in a reflection of the apartheid matrix that exists the settlers drive on Jewish-only roads. These settlers do not attack Palestinians due not only to being removed from them in isolated settlements, but most would not even care to if they could because although they may [and most probably do] hate Palestinians, it takes an incredibly vulgar kind of person to go around attack people.

But the illegal settlers in Hebron are a different bread. Hebron is a small settlement of 400 mostly Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews [by contrast, the hilltop settlement of Ariel is home to 25,000]. Hebron settlers live on the land, which they term Judea and Samaria, out of religious conviction. This conviction is based on the supremacist and racist belief that the Jews are God’s “Chosen People” and that God is in the realty business and gave the land to the Jews. They refuse to share the land with the Palestinians not only in rejecting Palestinian statehood, but rejecting just the presence of any Arabs on the West Bank. The small community of 400 led by Kahanesque Rabbis has been terrorizing 140,000 Palestinians for years. How is a community so small able to attack with impunity over a 100,000 people? Because the 400 occupiers are backed by 5,000 well-armed Israeli occupation troops.

Under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying power is supposed to protect the native people. But Israeli occupation troops not only engage in their only assaults against Palestinians, many Israeli occupation troops share the same fundamentalism of the illegal settlers, but the troops are often idle are M16-wielding illegal settlers attack, and sometimes kill, Palestinians and destroy their property.

The settlers routinely attack Palestinians with the stated goal of making life so miserable for them that they simply live. Although Palestinians have not left Hebron, the city center has been turned into a ghost town due to attacks and property-destruction of crazed illegal settlers.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has even started a project to document the attacks against Palestinians by giving them cameras to record the actions of the settlers. Documentation is quite extensive and includes an assault with sticks by several face-covered illegal settlers against a woman in her 70s.

Illegal Hebron settlers/terrorists getting ready to attack a Palestinian couple.

Their victim. To watch the video click the link right above.
Photos from B’Tselem.

Israeli troops themselves recently experience first hand the violence of the settlers. Dressed as Arabs, several Israeli troops walked into the Hebron settlement and were immediately kicked and beaten up. Of course, when the illegal settlers attack Israeli troops they are held accountable, but when the attack Arabs, even kill them, rarely if ever are illegal settlers prosecuted; and even then sentences are quite lenient.

And now B’Tselem is reporting that a 23-year old pregnant women was viciously attacked by illegal settlers. Her testimony:

Around 8:00 A.M., we arrived to land owned by farmers from Yatta. We grazed the sheep and gathered plants we use for food. We were more than five hundred meters from the Ma’on settlement. We didn’t go close to the settlement. Around 9:00 A.M., we saw four settlers coming toward us from the settlement. Two of them went down into the wadi [valley] and headed to another group of shepherds, and two of them, who were masked, approached us.

The two who came toward us appeared to be young. They were holding sticks and had pistols on their hips. Amneh was standing close to me, and Khadrah was relatively far from us. When the settlers got to about thirty meters from us, they shouted at us in Hebrew. Their appearance frightened us, and we began to run away. The settlers chased us, and continued to shout at us as we ran.

Being pregnant, I couldn’t run fast. After about one hundred meters, the settlers caught me. One of them hit me in my right arm and left leg with his stick. The other settler threw a stone at me, which hit me in the left leg. Then one of them pushed me, and I fell onto some thorns. My arm and leg hurt a lot. When I fell, the two settlers left me and ran toward the farmers and other shepherds. I remained there, crying. I was in terrible pain.

After a few minutes, Amneh and Khadrah ran over to me and helped me get up. They lifted me up with the help of the children and laid me on the donkey that we had brought with us, and returned me to the village. I was in such great pain that I thought my arm has been broken. I was still crying when we reached the village. An Israeli ambulance came and the medical team gave me first-aid. Then the Israeli police and two army jeeps of the Civil Administration arrived. I told them what happened. Around 11:00 A.M., a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance came and took me to ‘Aliyah Government Hospital, in Hebron.

At the hospital, they examined me and X-rayed me. They found that my arm was not broken. I was very lucky, and the fetus was not harmed. I remained in the hospital for two or three hours, and then went home. My arm swelled up and I am still in pain, a week after the incident.
A Palestinian policeman at the hospital took my complaint. I did not go to the Israeli police because I don’t feel well enough, and because I need somebody to accompany me to Kiryat Arba to do that.

But the sadism of the illegal settlers cannot be separated from that of Israeli occupation troops, who are even more cruel and their violence more wide-spread. Palestinians at checkpoints are routinely beaten up and made to wait for hours in an effort to humiliate them.

During Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza, which massacred over 900 Palestinians of whom over 400 were children, occupying Israeli troops left their fecal material in the floors, refrigerators and washing machines of Palestinians. They left hateful graffiti all around. These soldiers were encouraged by state-sanctioned Rabbis to show no mercy to Palestinians, because God had given the land to the Jews and the Arabs were intruders with no rights to the land of “Israel”. As the occupation continues, as does the degree of Israeli violence. Israeli soldiers are more sadistic than ever:

Israeli soldiers attacked the teachers and children returning from a school trip in the West Bank town of Beit Ummar on Thursday afternoon.

Upon returning from a trip to Ramallah and Jericho, Israeli soldiers halted the busses at the entrance to the town, ordering the children and teachers off the busses. The children were held for three hours before international human rights activists stationed in the village intervened. The presence of teachers and the children’s’ families also prevented the army from holding them longer.

Witnesses said the soldiers “abused and intimidated” their detainees.

Tell me, what is the point of doing this to children? What is the point other than getting an inhumane joy from having armed power and being able to behave like this? To treat people like animals?

The culprit in these is more than the sadistic and atavistic occupation/terrorist soldiers and the equally so illegal settlers, but an ideology - Zionism - that sanctions and blesses such inhumanity. The view that all that which needs to be done to build a Jewish state in Palestine is justified. It was the founding father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, who when asked how could a Jewish state be established when there already is an native population of Arabs replied with the French proverb, “Those who desire the ends, desire the means.”