Israeli settlers stormed the Palestinian village of Qusra in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, attacking residents and seizing a home while its owner was still inside. When Israeli soldiers arrived, they turned their weapons against the Palestinians under attack.
As usual, the settlers and the occupation forces played different parts in the same process: removing Palestinians from their land and transferring it into Israeli hands.
The attack began early on Saturday afternoon when settlers entered Qusra and threw stones at the home of Louay Adli. As Adli called the Israeli police, the crowd grew to an estimated 60 or 70 settlers.
“They surrounded us from all sides and threw stones at all of us,” Adli said. “This went on for a whole hour until the army came from in front of the house, while the settlers were from behind.”
Adli said the soldiers “watched and did nothing” before firing tear gas at his home. Video from the scene appears to show settlers attacking one side of the building while Israeli soldiers operated on the other. The Palestinians were trapped between the settler mob and the army supposedly sent to restore order.
Adli and six other people fled to the roof as the tear gas filled the house.
“Because we could not breathe inside. We were suffocating and the army had us trapped with the settlers,” he said.
Israeli forces then arrested Adli, blindfolded him and warned him not to return to his own home. The settlers, meanwhile, were allowed to leave. As of Sunday afternoon, no arrests had been announced.
The military later claimed it had used “proportionate force” against a Palestinian accused of resisting and throwing stones. Its joint statement with the border police admitted that “dozens of rioters” had entered a Palestinian home while its residents were still inside, but offered no explanation for why none of them were arrested.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that three cars used in the raid had been seized. Police said an investigation remained underway. But the immediate result is already clear: the Palestinian homeowner was arrested and driven out, while those who attacked and occupied his home walked free.
This is how the Israeli state’s relationship with the settler movement works in practice. Settlers carry out attacks, destroy property and terrorise families into leaving. The army provides the armed force needed to suppress Palestinian resistance and consolidate the resulting seizure of land. Police investigations then give the whole process a thin appearance of legality.
The capitalist state isn’t a neutral referee standing above society. It protects a particular system of power and property. In the occupied West Bank, the Israeli state protects a colonial system in which Palestinian homes and land are treated as resources to be seized for Israeli settlement. What’s called “settler violence” is one method through which that system advances.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog described the attack as a “direct and flagrant defiance of the laws and values of the State of Israel. It is another incident in a disturbing sequence of events that casts a stain on Israel’s image and demands firm and decisive action.”
Israel is already carrying out an ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza while intensifying the ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank. To present the seizure of a Palestinian home as an embarrassing departure from Israeli “laws and values” is to tear it from that wider context. Herzog’s language reduces part of a colonial process to a public-relations problem, as though Israel still had an innocent image to protect. The army’s actions in Qusra — attacking the victims, removing the homeowner and letting the settlers escape — are entirely consistent with the conduct of a state destroying Palestinian life in Gaza and driving Palestinians from their land across the West Bank.
Qusra has repeatedly been besieged by settlers attempting to force Palestinian families from the area, including families with American citizenship. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee called the violence a “horrific act of terror meant to intimidate and harass.”
That description is accurate, but Washington doesn’t stand outside the system producing this terror. The US arms Israel, finances it and shields it diplomatically. Palestinians holding American passports remain disposable when their homes stand in the way of the colonial project supported by US imperialism.
More than 700,000 Israeli settlers now live in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The settlements violate international law, but Israel’s current government has made their expansion a central priority, advancing thousands of new settler homes and approving scores of additional settlements.
The settlement project didn’t begin with Netanyahu’s present government, nor is it driven by isolated mobs acting against the wishes of the state. Its purpose is to establish permanent Israeli control by removing Palestinians, breaking up their communities and making ordinary life impossible.
What happened in Qusra wasn’t a breakdown of the occupation’s normal order. It was that order in action: settlers attacked a Palestinian family, the army punished the victims, the police promised an investigation and Israeli officials worried about the damage to the state’s image. By the end of it, the settlers remained free and a Palestinian man had been warned not to return to his own home.
