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While the world’s focus has shifted to the war in Iran, Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has continued, and Israeli settlers are rapidly and violently expanding illegal land seizures across the occupied West Bank, with the full backing of the Israeli government, military, and police. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with award-winning Israeli journalist, political commentator, and photographer Oren Ziv about how settler violence, land seizures, and the dismantling of the Oslo Accords-era boundaries are accelerating Israel’s efforts to permanently confine Palestinians and erase the possibility of a Palestinian state.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on the real news. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us as usual. And my guest today, Oren Ziv, has written an incredibly powerful piece called “Erasing the Lines: How Settlers are Seizing New Regions of the West Bank” and it is published in the Nation Magazine and in +972. Oren is a reporter photographer, co-founder of The Activestills Collective and since 2005, has documented social and political issues in Israel-Palestine and has joined us numerous times before and joins us once again with his new work. And Oren, welcome. Good to have you with us.
So just to begin as we talk, before we start our conversation formally here, just to describe as an Israeli, as somebody living in the midst of all this madness taking place, what it’s like and what changes have taken place since the news even that you were just describing a moment ago to me.
Yeah. So even since we published this article over a month ago about how Israeli settlers are taking over Area A and B areas that according to the Oslo Accords in the mid ’90s and even since we published the article, the Israel government had approved 34 new settlements, many of them based on those kind of outpost or outposts that are officially even illegal by the Israeli law, although they get all the support from the Army police. And the government, of course, settlers have continued their attacks since the beginning of March. 13 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank doing settlers raid on Palestinian villages, some of them by civilians, some of them by settlers who serve in the army. And even while we’re speaking during the last 24 hours while Israel is marking its Independence Day, free Palestinians have been killed by settlers in two different incidents.
So what we can see is that the situation is escalating. All the activities on the ground, doesn’t matter if it’s civilian settlers, if it’s settlers who were recruited to the Israeli Army to reserve duty. All this is A, very coordinated and working according to a plan of the Israeli government. They don’t hide it, they say it openly. And B is supported by all the different authorities from the simple soldier on the ground. And in our investigation, we also spoke to soldiers who served in the West Bank in the last two and a half years too high up to the government who give those settlers the tools to carry on these attacks from the weapons to the ATVs they drive into Palestinian villages and of course the facilities, the outposts they establish.
A couple of things here. Even though it’s not directly in the article, which is really a very thorough and interesting piece, what is the connection between Israel attacking the West Bank at this moment and trying to seize territory and close things down and what happened with Iran? What’s the connection?
So I think as we saw after October 7th, the Israeli settlers and of course also the government are taking advantage that the international attention, also the Israeli attention, everybody’s attention is to something else and they really know how to identify those moments and really escalate the situation and create facts on the ground. So for example, after October 7th, really in the first days after it, before the genocide escalated in the way we’ve seen it afterwards, settlers have been pushing Palestinian communities out. So they started with Area Sea that is under fullysraeli control in the West Bank, pushing herding communities, farmer communities on the open areas between Ramallah and the Jordan Valley in other areas. They managed to force out around 60 or 70 communities. And what we’ve seen now during the war against Iran is the same policy of escalating in this situation when nobody’s looking to the West Bank erecting new outpost, raiding Palestinian villages, killing it always come those outposts.
It’s the same method. Sometimes it happens in the course of a few months. Sometimes it’s very fast and it happens in a few days, but they establish a new outpost. They prevent Palestinian from going out and grazing
