Israel is a colony controlled by settler organisations, claims Middle East analyst

Israel is a “colony” controlled by the “settler power’s representatives” who disregard the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and those in the occupied territories, a leading Middle East analyst wrote in Haaretz yesterday.

Zvi Bar’el said that when Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar respond to the murder of more than 100 Arabs in Israel this year in gang-related violence by saying “We’re losing the state!” and “We’re at war!” respectively, “one can only guffaw”.

Any Israeli outrage about internal security agency Shin Bet involvement in fighting crime among Israel’s Arab citizens is due to “fear that this decision might harm Jewish citizens of Israel as well.”

Every day, Bar’el pointed out, “The Jewish state breathes the murder of Arabs, the criminal disregard of their property rights, the systematic land theft, human rights violations, independent armed militias running the countryside by brute force, all with the backing and under the auspices of the state.”

The “Jewish militias” in question are the gangs of settlers whose representatives “have settled into the government, the Knesset and the Supreme Court.” As a result, Bennett and Sa’ar bemoan Arab murders knowing full well that they have a “blind spot” about the violence committed against Arabs in the occupied territories by “hilltop thugs” who, said Bar’el, “should have made common cause” with the “Israeli Arab murderers” in the gang scene in the self-declared Jewish state.

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“Nobody has declared war on those militias, no police can enter their homes unannounced, they do not need to acquire their arms by clandestine means or smuggle them off IDF bases. It’s all done with permission and authority.”

As such, concludes Bar’el, “if anyone in the police or Shin Bet makes the error of assuming that now a more effective hand can be taken against those who shoot at Palestinians, uproot their olive groves and beat their children” in the occupied territories, “these militias will know how to make it clear where the border between the State of Israel and the state of the Jews runs. As the cliché goes, what happens in Israel stays in Israel.”