By: Jonathan Cook*

 

Three separate, deadly Palestinian attacks in Israeli cities in a week have elicited a predictable response. The Israeli army has drafted large numbers of extra soldiers into the West Bank and around Gaza, Palestinian territories already under decades of brutal military occupation.

But the fact that, unusually, two of the attacks were carried out by members of a large Palestinian minority whose rights are severely circumscribed and inferior to those of the Jewish majority has raised the stakes considerably for the Israeli right. 

A total of 11 Israelis died in the attacks a few days apart in the cities of Beersheba, Hadera and Bnei Brak, a suburb of Tel Aviv. Trigger-happy Israeli forces killed three Palestinians in separate incidents on Thursday, in the immediate wake of the attacks.

The lethal attacks were an opportunity for Naftali Bennett, the far-right leader who snatched the Israeli premiership from Benjamin Netanyahu last summer, to prove his credentials to his party’s main constituency: Jewish settlers determined to drive Palestinians off their lands and reclaim a supposed biblical birthright.

In a video statement, Bennett told “whoever has a gun license” - meaning overwhelmingly Jewish citizens - “this is the time to carry a gun”. And if that wasn’t enough, he went on to announce that the government was considering “a larger framework to involve civilian volunteers who want to help and be of assistance”.

 

Street Violence

What that means in practice is not hard to decipher. Nearly a year ago, the intensification of long-running moves to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Al-Quds became one of the triggers for the worst inter-communal violence in Israel in at least a generation. 

Palestinian citizens who staged angry demonstrations found themselves not just facing the expected crackdown from Israel’s paramilitary police, but street violence from far-right Jewish mobs that appeared to be operating in tandem with Israeli security forces.

For the first time it looked as though the Israeli leadership was moving a key feature of the occupation inside the Green Line. 

In the occupied territories, armed settlers operate effectively as militias, terrorizing nearby Palestinian communities, watched impassively, or sometimes assisted, by the Israeli army. They act as the long arm of the Israeli regime - offering plausible deniability for Israeli officials as they exploit the settlers’ violence. 

The aim of both the settlers and the Israeli state is the same: to drive Palestinians from their homes so Jewish settlers can take over the vacated land. 

Last spring, the use of that same model inside Israel became harder to disguise. The Israeli regime appeared to be contracting out parts of its domestic security to the same fanatical and violent settlers, allowing them to be bussed into Palestinian communities inside Israel unhindered. There they acted as vigilantes.

They smashed Palestinian shops, chanted “Death to the Arabs”, and beat up Palestinian citizens who crossed their path. At the same time, Israeli politicians from across the spectrum incited against the Palestinian minority. 

Now Bennett gives every appearance of hoping to exploit the three attacks to put this earlier arrangement on a more formal footing. 

Notably, a “Barel Rangers” militia has already been formed in the Negev region, in Israel’s south, where one of the attacks occurred. The founder, a former police officer, set out its purpose in a social media post: “When your life is under threat, it’s only you and the terrorist. You are the policeman, the judge and the executioner.”

Another militia has recently been established in Lod, a city near Tel Aviv, that saw the worst violence last May.

 

Playing With Fire

Bennett is rallying militias to attack supposedly own citizens, based on their ethnicity. He is playing with fire, stoking a mood of civil war in which one side, Jewish Israelis, have the weapons and regime resources, while the other - the Palestinian minority - is largely defenseless.

Notably, after the second recent attack in the Jewish city of Hadera on Tuesday - by two Palestinian citizens - a mob formed chanting “Death to the Arabs”.

Where this might lead was underscored by a retired army general, Uzi Dayan, now a member of the Israeli parliament for Netanyahu’s Likud party. He warned all of Israel’s 1.8 million Palestinian citizens to “be careful”. They faced, he said, another Nakba, or Catastrophe - the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland by Israeli militias and the army in 1948. 

 “If we reach a civil war situation, things will end in one word and a situation you know, which is Nakba,” he said. “This is what will happen in the end.” He added: “We are stronger. We are holding back on a lot of things.” The ethnic cleansing associated with the Nakba “was not completed”, he noted.

That is not a situation Palestinian citizens will be able to avoid if Israeli leaders will it. Many in the minority have been afraid to leave their homes, go to work or venture into Jewish areas for fear of reprisals. And that is precisely because Bennett and Dayan represent a vast swathe of opinion in Israel that views Palestinians - even Palestinian citizens - as the enemy.

The measures being “held back”, as Dayan phrased it, could include not only more regime-backed violence but efforts to strip the Palestinian minority of even their degraded citizenship status. 

For nearly two decades, leaders of the far-right such as Avigdor Lieberman have been calling for loyalty pledges and transfer policies to undermine the rights of Palestinian citizens. The controversial nation-state law of 2018 chipped away