Settler violence is erasing Palestinian communities in the West Bank
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/09/west-bank-israel-settlers-violence/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNjk5NTA2MDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzAwODg4Mzk5LCJpYXQiOjE2OTk1MDYwMDAsImp0aSI6ImZkNTY5OWU2LTA3OGQtNDJmNS05YTg4LWY3ZWNhMDVkNzY5NSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS93b3JsZC8yMDIzLzExLzA5L3dlc3QtYmFuay1pc3JhZWwtc2V0dGxlcnMtdmlvbGVuY2UvIn0.6NmvMS3JT-XvC-5xs9V5P2IotbCU1OvpW6dVj2EY1i4In nearby Susiya, five men in similar dress beat Ahmed Nawaja, 38, underneath his olive tree. His daughters cried, he said, as the attackers slammed their rifle butts down on his body.
Violence by Israeli settlers, long aimed at depopulating rural Palestinian parts of the occupied West Bank, had grown common in the months since Prime Minister President Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in late December — at the head of a coalition that included far-right settler activists who have been convicted of anti-Arab incitement and have advocated for the annexation of the West Bank.
Since Hamas militants killed more than 1,400 people and plunged Israel into war on Oct. 7, the pace of the assaults has more than doubled, as the radical settler movement exploits the crisis to hasten demographic change across the territory. At least 11 Palestinian communities have been completely abandoned since the beginning of the year, including six since Oct. 7, according to the West Bank Protection Consortium, a group of nongovernmental organizations funded by the European Union.
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being majority composed of radical expansionists, including a lot of racist, tribalist supremacists, many of whom revere mass murderers like Baruch Goldstein .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Goldstein
Baruch Kopel Goldstein (Hebrew: ברוך קופל גולדשטיין; born Benjamin Carl Goldstein; December 9, 1956 – February 25, 1994) was an Israeli-American mass murderer, religious extremist, and physician who perpetrated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, an incident of Jewish terrorism. Goldstein was a supporter of the Kach, a religious Zionist party that the United States, the European Union and other countries designate as a terrorist organization. On February 25, 1994, Goldstein, a resident of the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba near Hebron, entered a room in the Cave of the Patriarchs that was serving as a mosque. Dressed in Israeli military uniform, he opened fire on the 800 Palestinian Muslim worshippers praying during the month of Ramadan, killing 29 and wounding 125 worshippers, until he was beaten to death by survivors.
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Veneration by extremists
While mainstream Jewish religious leaders, including the chief rabbis of Israel, rejected the suggestion that killing Palestinians was authorized by the Torah, some extremist religious Jews have defended Goldstein's actions. At Goldstein's funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin claimed that even one million Arabs are "not worth a Jewish fingernail". Samuel Hacohen, a teacher at a Jerusalem college, declared Goldstein the "greatest Jew alive, not in one way, but in every way", and said that he was "the only one who could do it, the only one who was 100 percent perfect". Rabbi Dov Lior of Kiryat Arba declared that Goldstein was "holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust".
In the weeks following the massacre, hundreds of Israelis traveled to Goldstein's grave to celebrate Goldstein's actions. Some Hasidim danced and sang around his grave. According to one visitor to the gravesite in the wake of the attacks, "If [Goldstein] stopped these so-called peace talks, then he is truly holy because this is not real peace." Some visitors declared Goldstein a "saint" and "hero of Israel". The phenomenon of the veneration of Goldstein's tomb persisted for years. Even after the dismantling of Goldstein's shrine in 1999, radical Jewish settlers continued to celebrate the anniversary of the massacre in the West Bank, sometimes even dressing up themselves or their children to look like Goldstein.
In 2010, Jewish settlers sang songs in praise of Baruch Goldstein's massacre demonstratively in front of their Arab neighbours, during celebrations of Purim. A phrase from one song reads, "Dr. Goldstein, there is none other like you in the world. Dr. Goldstein, we all love you ... He aimed at terrorists' heads, squeezed the trigger hard, and shot bullets, and shot, and shot." Prior to entering the Knesset, Otzma Yehudit party leader and current Israeli Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir displayed a portrait of Goldstein in his living room. It was removed when Ben-Gvir entered politics.
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