It Could Happen Here Weekly 251

Robert Evans (0:03)

Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here, and one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Dana Al-Kurd (0:29)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics.

Today, I want to talk about the truly insidious stories coming out of the West Bank that read separately look like a spike in settler violence, but read together look like something else entirely. On August 9th, settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in a neighborhood called Ras Udayan on the edge of a village called Qusra south of Nablus. They didn't leave. 21 days later, at least four people were still inside one of those houses cut off from water, electricity and basic supplies. Getting food into those people meant coordinating through the village mayor, which was a process that took three to four days. The Israeli army put up three new roadblocks, and in July, the village mosque was burned. I want you to sit with that for a minute, because this is not a raid, this is not a rampage, it's a siege with a bureaucracy attached. That bureaucracy is the story, and that's what I want to talk about today. I'm trying to be precise about the difference because the distinction is not academic. It determines what you think the problem is, and therefore what you think the solution would look like. Here's the framing you'll get from almost every Western outlet, and of course, every Israeli official, that this is a fringe, and that these settlers are a violent fringe, and they embarrass the state, and the state condemns this fringe. When settlers besieged Qusra, Prime Minister Netanyahu did issue a statement, and here I'm quoting, condemning the, quote, criminal acts of violence committed in the village of Qusra by a handful of rioters who are violating the law. And Israeli President Herzog also condemned it, and the foreign ministry condemned it as extremist and criminal violence.

So, let's take that framing seriously for a moment, because if it's true, what we're looking at is a law enforcement failure, a state that's lost control of its most radical citizens.

And if it's false, what we're looking at is a state carrying out a policy through deniable means, and the condemnations are not a failure at all. They're a feature. They're the part of the machine that faces outward. So let's go through what actually happened in these villages, and then let's ask, which of these framings fits the evidence best?

So Basel Al-Adra, the journalist from Masafir Yatta, the one who you know from No Other Land, the documentary that won a bunch of awards. He published a piece in Jewish Currents on September 3rd about livestock theft in the South Hebron Hills. So this isn't vandalism, it's theft, it's organized removal of livestock. So shortly after midnight on August 21st, in a place called Kherber Dershams, a family was attacked by roughly 15 masked settlers with sticks and stones. One of them describes it flatly. They basically opened the pen where the family kept around 70 goats, and then they opened the sheep pen where there were about 100 sheep. And as the settlers moved off of the animals, Israeli army vehicles passed nearby. And in his words, they did nothing. Nearly two weeks later, not one animal has been recovered. Back in July, in another village, a settler pepper sprayed a man, and then more settlers arrived, and then a flock of about 122 sheep were targeted and taken. Soldiers did show up that time. According to one of the villagers, what the soldiers did was push the Palestinians away from their own animals while settlers broke the locks. And of roughly 227 animals taken that day, nine came back. Four residents of the village were arrested and then released. B'Tselem, which is an Israeli human rights organization, has counted 17 livestock theft incidents in 2026 alone. And a flock of the size that we're talking about here, it's worth something on the order of tens, if not $100,000.

I'm flagging this because I think it's easy to hear sheep and these kinds of things and file it maybe under property crime or vandalism or something. But for a herding family in the South Hebron Hills, the flock is not just an asset, it's the entire productive base of the household. It's the income, it's the reason to stay on that hillside. So if you want to expel a pastoral community, you don't just expel them, you can take its animals and then it can expel itself. It does so in a way that produces no photograph of a bulldozer. Another incident was on July 8th, when the head of Israel's Central Command signed a land seizure order. That order takes dozens of dunams of land from Bil'in and three neighboring villages to build a security road six and a half kilometers long and eight meters wide, connecting the settlement of Modain elite to an outpost called Stay Ephraim. Sorry, I don't know Hebrew, so I'm going to be butchering these. But Oran Zev reported this for 972 Mag on September 2nd.