Gaza and the West Bank, Two Fronts of Dispossession

Image by Ash Hayes.

While global attention remains fixed—yet helpless—by the horrors of the genocide in Gaza, a quieter but equally bedeviled Israeli plan is being implemented in the occupied West Bank. Under the fog of war, and aided by a willful placid Western media—Israel has intensified a second front of dispossession: bulldozing homes, and displacing families to reshape the demography in the West Bank. Armed Jewish settler mobs—Zionist Youth—have been unleashed, burning homes, olive groves, torching cars, and killing Palestinians, including American citizens.

Last February, bulldozers stormed the village of Khalet Al-Dab in Masafer Yatta, razing nine homes, leaving residents searching for their belongings amidst dust and rubble. Israel claimed those structures were supposedly built in an area designated as a closed military zone.

Palestinian-owned land is routinely seized by Israel under the pretext of being closed military zones. And, nearly every Jewish-only colony is built on these same “closed military zones,” later rezoned exclusively for Jewish civilian use. This Zio deception is not about land management; it’s about “legalizing” ethnic cleansing, cloaked in bureaucracy and executed by American-made Caterpillar bulldozers.

In the refugee camps of Tulkarm and Jenin in the northern West Bank, the campaign is more militarized but equally destructive. Since January, Israel’s so-called “Operation Iron Wall” has turned the camps into war zones. Organized demolitions have leveled entire neighborhoods forcing people from their homes. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has warned that Israeli actions are not just displacing people but attempting to permanently alter the character of the camps. As a result, 40,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced. Camps like Nur Shams near Tulkarem and the Jenin camp have been turned into ghost towns.

Much of this demolition campaign is taking place in Area A, which under the Oslo Accords, is meant to be under full civil and security control of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Yet the PA remains conspicuously impassive as Israeli bulldozers tear through homes in the refugee camps. Instead of asserting its jurisdiction, the PA appears paralyzed—or simply too reluctant, obviously fearing a confrontation with the occupation forces might jeopardize the Israeli-issued VIP passes to its leadership.

Meanwhile, the world is paralyzed by apathy. And Western media—despite having less restrictions in the West Bank—barely report critically on these immoral policies. This self-censorship is not due to lack of access, but rather a deeply embedded moral blind spot. Even when the media report, their coverage is often watered down. For instance, they use passive language, such as depicting recent lynching of Palestinian American, Sayfollah Musallet, by Israeli settlers, as merely “died.” Western media normalize the violence of the settler mobs by adopting Israeli hasbara and using oblique lingo—portraying these attacks as “clashes.” This insidious framing creates a false equivalence between the armed Jewish settlers and unarmed Palestinian farmers and villagers.

We witnessed the same indifference in the lead-up to October 7. Israel had imposed decades of a crippling siege on Gaza where its population was subjected to a starvation diet—euphemistically and cynically referred to by Israeli officials as a “calorie diet.” In the West Bank, Palestinians have been treated like slaves, prevented from reaching their farms, murdered, and arrested.

The global outrage comes to life only after Israeli blood is spilled. And then, suddenly, the timeline begins. The Zio managed western media wants us to believe that history began on October 7, and Palestinian suffering before that date—and to that matter, even after—was either irrelevant or unworthy.

The Western media’s blind eye to Israel’s underlying crimes reveals a deeper, more disturbing dynamic: a duality of both subconscious and conscious racism. Reporting is filtered through a biased lens, where Israel-first ideologically driven, American and European journalists, and editors, selectively choose moderated language, controlling what unsuspected Western readers can and can’t read. Murdered Palestinians, when mentioned, are reduced to statistics—rarely named, rarely shown—often undeserving of attention or acknowledgment, while Jewish Israeli lives trigger outrage and front-page headlines.

This moral asymmetry is not by accident; it is the product of a bias Western culture that has treated Israel not only as a state, but as a European redemptive project—a “Jewish state” implanted in the heart of the Arab world to atone for Europe’s crimes in WWII. In this construct, Germans murdered Jews—and Palestinians paid for it. Palestinians, and their right to live in dignity in a state of their own have been sacrificed on the altar of someone else’s historical reckoning.

The Israeli malign destruction of Palestinian communities and land confiscation in the West Bank are not separate from the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza; they are part of the same Israeli strategy reengineering the demographic and geographic facts on both sides of the Green Line. It is a blueprint of Israeli Jewish apartheid designed to erase the non-Jewish, Muslim and Christian, presence and history: one home, one mosque, one church, and one olive grove at a time, quietly redrawing the map of Palestine.

In a perfect display of this blueprint, the Israeli government is flattening Palestinian neighborhoods while simultaneously legalizing Jewish-only colonies. Whereas a people is erased, while another is rewarded with the stolen land. This is not double standards, this is what a Jewish supremacist state would look like.

The question before us isn’t if the ethnic cleansing and Israeli policies are legal or not. The challenge is whether the world—and the PA leadership—will ever find the resolve to take action against an apartheid state that uses war crimes as a mental fog for the slow-motion dispossession of an entire nation.

The post Gaza and the West Bank, Two Fronts of Dispossession appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.