Afrasianet - The siege of several Palestinian homes on the outskirts of the town of Qusra in the occupied West Bank may seem like just a small incident on the map of Palestine cut off by checkpoints, settlements and armed outposts, but the coincidence of this incident coinciding with the announcement by Minister of War Yisrael Katz of his intention to transfer law enforcement powers related to settlers from the army to the police, expands the scene and puts it in its real context, as the expansion of the occupation's borders is accompanied by the structural measures necessary to implement this expansion.
The town is preventing its residents from moving and accessing water, food, and medical care. After discovering a link to a Palestinian-American family, the US administration called on Benjamin Netanyahu to publicly condemn the siege, while the army's intervention reflected the state of Israel's predominantly normal, as after deploying its forces in the area, it restricted the access of solidarity activists and journalists, while the settlers, who were photographed by news agencies, remained hovering like hungry wolves in the vicinity of the besieged houses.
The settlers establish a small, armed outpost to start by putting pressure on farmers, herders and residents, and then restricting access to their land, roads and water, with the aim of making the daily life of the Palestinians hard and difficult.
The rapid settlement expansion adopted by the Netanyahu government shows the difficulty of separating settler violence from official policy, while the statements of senior officials in that government compete in their extremism and infiltration of the settlers' actions in a way that makes what they are doing is closer to a commitment to government policies than to the actions of the settler gangs that are out of any head.
Exclamation. Huckabee sparked controversy in February after he said it was acceptable for Israel to control territory from the Nile to the Euphrates, proposing to neighboring Arab and Muslim states cede some of their vast territory to Israel. After calling the settlers "Israeli terrorists," Huckabee says he asked the Israeli army and police to intervene to save "this family."
This is about a Palestinian family with American citizenship, and it is not about the town itself or the criminal settlement policies as a whole. Katz's move, then, comes within the synonymous context of employing settler criminality to achieve the government's goals. Katz did not transfer powers from the military to the police, but rather ordered the preparation of a plan to transfer law enforcement regarding settlers to the police. This is not a technical issue but rather annexation legislation.
The West Bank, as occupied territory, is subject to a military regime, and when the management of the affairs of the Israelis residing there is transferred from the occupation military institutions to the ministries and civilian agencies, the distance between the settlement and the borders that distinguish the occupation territories from the lands of the "State of Israel" is practically reduced.
In this context, the Palestinian and the settler are not subject to an equal political and legal system, as the Palestinian resides under a network of military orders and territorial restrictions, the settler's connection to Israeli civil institutions deepens.
In this context, the question is not who sends a police patrol when an attack occurs, but rather a political and legal system that regulates the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
These developments pose serious issues for the Palestinians, the Arab states, and the international system with which the defense of the two-state solution is no longer sufficient, at a time when Israel is cutting the territory of the supposed Palestinian state into islands, and the Palestinians are under the weight of the violence that is being exchanged between the army, the police, and the settlers, all of which serve as tools for change Palestinian geography, history, and identity.
In this sense, it is an early warning of the future, where annexation takes place without an official ceremony or the announcement of new maps, but is achieved step by step.
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