Connecting the dots between Hebron and Gaza

As global attention remains focused on Gaza, although not to safeguard the Palestinians from genocide, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have been facing increasing violence from Israeli soldiers and settlers. B’Tselem’s latest report, titled Unleashed: Abuse of Palestinians by Israeli Soldiers in the Centre of Hebron, shows how colonial violence and incitement to genocide have increased since 7 October.

“Soldiers … see themselves as authorised to play the role of prosecutor, judge and executioner in any encounter with a Palestinian,” B’Tselem’s report explains. While the dehumanisation of Palestinians is not new – colonialism is inherently dehumanising – the genocide in Gaza has created unprecedented impunity and opportunity for the Israeli military to act in a similar manner as soldiers in Gaza.

The Israeli colonial narrative insists that there are no innocent Palestinians. Promoting such a narrative to justify the genocide in Gaza has, of course, spilt over into the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians have been detained at random and, based on their indigenous identity, subjected to humiliation, violence and abuse. In some cases, soldiers sought even the slightest link to Gaza – such as any photos or news-related material found on the mobile phones of Palestinians – to justify the beatings, threats of sexual violence and actual sexual violence.

Similarly to Gaza, the soldiers filmed the beatings or beat Palestinians while on video calls. “I heard the sound of laughter on a cell phone and figured they were filming me and sharing it with their friends,” one testimony narrates.

B’Tselem’s report notes: “The Palestinians abused in central Hebron, most of them young men going about their daily affairs, were easy targets. The soldiers who attacked them, like the government and many Jewish-Israelis, see them as collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas.”

Extending the genocide in Gaza to the occupied West Bank may not take the same blatant form, but the incitement and imitation of several forms of colonial violence are evident.

And with the world completely silent on a live-streamed genocide, how much more silent is the international community likely to remain when it comes to the occupied West Bank, where violence has been normalised into statistics, and the illusion of state-building takes precedence over Palestinians’ safety and rights?

Israel’s colonial violence in the occupied West Bank, B’Tselem notes, is directly related to the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians and leaves Palestinians with the options of forced displacement or living the reality of colonial violence.

The report focuses on testimonies, but what is evident is the absence of international concern over any form of Israeli violence meted out to Palestinians. For decades, the international community downplayed Israel’s colonial violence to the point of genocide, as we can now see in Gaza. But the ongoing distinction between Gaza and the occupied West Bank, which plays into the Western narrative of what qualifies the hypothetical Palestinian state, is creating a veneer behind which Israel creates more similarities than differences in its treatment of Palestinians.

Israel is connecting the dots to its benefit while Western diplomats coerce Palestinians into manageable segments for future Zionist colonial violence.

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