The Siege of Qusra

How the IDF, settlers, and Israeli government worked together to besiege a Palestinian village while the New York Times ran interference

Infinite Jaz exists because I believe reporting on Israel-Palestine, and the systems of power that shape it, should not be filtered through the priorities of billionaires and politically biased, risk-averse institutions.

But all of my reporting is self-funded, and it cannot continue without your support. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank.

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Quick note: I recorded what I thought was a fantastic episode of Know Your Enemy with the brilliant Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman. It’s long, but it was one of the most comprehensive conversations I’ve ever had on a podcast, covering a huge breadth of my work. Here’s the show description:

This episode begins by noting the proximity of two of the most significant events of the twentieth century, one archaeological, the other political: the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and the founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948. What do they have to do with each other? A lot, it turns out, at least when it comes to archaeology’s role in Israeli nationalism, from justifying their claim to “Judea and Samaria” to using the legal and bureaucratic aspects of protecting “heritage sites” as a way to seize territory to the draw for Christian Zionists of Israel’s supposed stewardship of “the Holy Land.” Throughout the conversation, we draw on our guest Jasper Nathaniel’s years of reporting on these matters, and especially his heroic work documenting the brutality of Israel against Palestinians.

I highly recommend listening to it in full if you want a crash course in what’s happening in the West Bank, and how we got here. Here it is on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

(Cover Image Credit: Zain JAAFAR / AFP via Getty Images)

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Last month, I wrote about my stay in the West Bank village of Qusra. I’ve added a few videos and some commentary here that weren’t included in the original post:

I traveled southeast to Qusra, where settlers had recently stolen a Palestinian home on the peak of the highest hill and were using it as a launchpad for attacks on the village. In February, they beat two Israeli activists, including an elderly woman, nearly to death, cracking their skulls with clubs.

In March, they shot a Palestinian man dead and nearly stabbed his father to death. The surviving members of that family, strawberry farmers, have imprisoned themselves inside a cage to keep the settlers out.

I stayed with the shebab in another home on the stolen hill, where they kept a 24/7 watch. The attacks were constant. They went on all night. A pickup truck full of settlers arrived and unloaded a flatbed of large stones on us. They came with clubs and knives.

Eventually, the army arrived. Soldiers chatted with the attacking settlers, smoked cigarettes with them, before coming to the home and throwing four Palestinian men against the wall.

[Side note: I got a kick out of the soldier saying, “You’re a long way from home.” Yeah… you too buddy.]

They were there to investigate the settlers’ claims that the Palestinians had thrown rocks at them. They had no answer when I asked why the settlers were allowed to live in a stolen home and attack locals from it—but the stones allegedly thrown in response were treated as a matter of grave concern.

[In case you missed it, the soldier responds to my hypothetical about stealing a Palestinian’s home by saying, “If you’re Jewish, you can go and move wherever you want.”]

Nobody was abducted, fortunately, perhaps because an American journalist was sticking a camera in their faces. But the settlers returned minutes after the soldiers left, cutting the electricity, blacking out the home—including the security camera system—and attacking again, nearly scaling the wall and making it inside. Fortunately, we had an amateur electrician inside who MacGyvered a new power source.

The next day, we watched a settler grazing sheep just outside the home. “Those are my sheep,” one of the guys told me. The settler had stolen them. “That’s my land, my crops. And he’s living in my uncle’s home.” That night, settlers broke into another home on the hill and stole the doors and windows right out of the frames.

[Apropos of nothing, I love this video, taken the morning after the attack, which shows that, even through all this, boys will be boys:]

That was in early July. On Sunday, August 9, a huge mob of settlers surrounded the hillside home I’d been staying in, along with two neighboring ones, and began setting up an outpost, trapping the Palestinians inside. This video is taken from inside the home as the settlers gathered around it:

On Monday, my friend Andrey X, a journalist and activist, tried to reach the besieged homes. He was blocked by a combination of settlers and soldiers, who also blocked an ambulance trying to reach one of the homes to take a sick child to the hospital. Rather than describe his experience, you should just watch the two videos he published about it:

As it turns out, the main besieged home—the one I stayed in—belongs to an American citizen. While his family was trapped inside, he watched live security-camera footage from Ohio, 6,000 miles away.

By Wednesday, as the story started to break through, the IDF responded directly to one of Andrey’s posts to say that it was on top of the situation:

As did Ambassador Mike Huckabee:

Before you credit Huckabee for calling the invaders “Israeli terrorists,” keep in mind that he used the exact same phrase for the settlers who murdered the American 20-year-old Sayfollah Musallet before walking it back weeks later and then never mentioning it again.

In reality, the IDF completely failed to evacuate the settlers. Perhaps because they’re on the same team?

Here’s Elisha Yered, the settler activist who can always be counted on to expose the liberal Zionist fiction that the Israeli state takes the threat of settler violence seriously—and who, on the rare occasions when soldiers fail to move in lockstep with the settlers’ territorial ambitions, is the first to throw a very public tantrum:

So who’s telling the truth? Watch these videos of the soldiers and settlers together at the outpost and decide for yourself:

Praying for a peaceful resolution, I’m sure:

As the story began making international headlines, the White House leaked that it was “fuming” and that Trump was “shocked.” (Yawn. How many times did we hear that Biden was “fuming” at Netanyahu before shipping him another cargo load of 2,000-pound bombs?)

On Thursday, the IDF launched a massive military operation in Qusra, ostensibly to evacuate the settlers. Funny enough, the operation began by evicting several Palestinian families from their homes in the village itself—not on the besieged hill—and occupying those homes:

Never miss a good opportunity to kick Palestinians out of their homes.

From there, soldiers evicted Palestinians from two of the three hillside homes—including the one I stayed in—and occupied those as well.

You might be thinking: ‘Great! The IDF has turned the village of Qusra into a base for its mission of evacuating the invading settlers. If this military excels at anything, it’s targeting civilians and forcing people from their homes. This shouldn’t take long at all.’

And yet. Here are settlers playing soccer outside one of the stolen homes while the IDF soldiers carry out their urgent mission to evacuate them by standing around and doing nothing:

By the way, if you need any more evidence that the IDF was acting—and emphasis on the word choice, acting—only because of the international media attention, look no further than Jalud, three kilometers south of Qusra. There, last month, settlers surrounded and laid siege to a Palestinian home just as they had in Qusra. This time, without the international media watching, the IDF and the settlers worked together to successfully expel the Palestinians from their home.

Anyway, with the IDF clearly having the Qusra situation under control, Ambassador Mike Huckabee returned to his primary job of running PR for Israel and its settler movement:

Here’s what Yisrael Ganz, the real settler invoked by Huckabee, had to say about the situation in Qusra:

“There is no place for individuals to take matters into their own hands and establish an outpost in someone’s backyard, even when dealing with an illegal home or an attempt to seize control of the land… We are leading, and will continue to lead, the Jewish communities… throughout Judea and Samaria with determination and responsibility, through an orderly and proper process. At the same time, I call on the Israeli government to cancel the Oslo Accords.”

So what exactly is “illegal” about the stolen Palestinian homes in Qusra? According to Ganz—who, during a December trip to D.C., said that “Israel has all the rights to do whatever we want to do in Judea and Samaria”—it seems to be the very fact that a Palestinian is living in the West Bank at all. But still, the “attempt to seize control of the land,” he says, should be carried out through an “orderly and proper process.”

You couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the Good Settler, Bad Settler dynamic: the feral, violent settlers attacking Palestinian communities and the settlers in suits lobbying in the Knesset all working toward the same end. Ganz would never get his hands dirty, but you can be sure that if the settlers remain on the hill in Qusra after the media attention fades, he’ll be leading the charge to authorize the outpost as a formal settlement. The violent settlers are, after all, the tip of the spear of the state-backed annexation process—emptying the land of Palestinians before the state comes in to absorb it.

Okay, forget Huckabee and the settlers for a moment. What are the actually reasonable leaders in Israel saying? Gadi Eisenkot, the nation’s great liberal hope for wresting the government back from the far-right extremists, made sure to identify the true victim: the IDF.

In particular, Eisenkot is referring to Avi Bluth, the head of Central Command who oversees the IDF in the West Bank. The poor commander has been “abandoned” by the government “to fight the battle alone.” For some strange reason, though, Eisenkot forgot to mention that Bluth is himself a settler, and has explicitly embraced some of the most violent settlers in the West Bank. In fact, he loves them:

But, of course, Eisenkot knows this. He, like Bluth, is aligned with the violent settlers. As I wrote in my last post, in April, he visited an infamously violent settler outpost—a clear gesture to its lawless leaders that, if the government changes hands and he takes power, they’ll still have his support.

And then there is Bluth’s boss, Defense Minister Israel Katz, who was busy last week lobbying to free Tal Yinon Dardik—the settler who allegedly attacked a Palestinian village, stripped a man naked, zip-tied his penis, and paraded him around in front of his family—after 38 whole days in custody.

Katz’s contribution to the Qusra affair has been to try to wash his hands of it by preparing to transfer civilian law-enforcement duties in the West Bank from the military to the Israeli police. Never mind that this would further erode the distinction between Israel and the occupied territories, pushing Israel another step toward dismantling the legal framework of the occupation. Or that it conveniently avoids the awkwardness of soldiers being asked to confront members of their own settler-military alliance.

There is also the small matter of who runs the police: National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, perhaps the most openly sadistic settler in the Israeli government. Brilliant.

In other words, the violent settlers who have occupied the Qusra hilltop—and much of the West Bank—have the explicit or tacit support of the IDF brass and political leaders across the Israeli spectrum. Surely the paper of record would cover this indisputable fact. Alas.

Reading this article, you’d have no idea that the “chaos” is actually carefully organized state violence with the express purpose of clearing Palestinians from the land—or that the army isn’t merely “struggling to curtail settler violence,” but is directly complicit in it at the highest levels.

The article provides a perfect illustration of my problem with the New York Times’s West Bank coverage: It does an adequate enough job of reporting the basic events of the incident, but its framing is as good as disinformation. “General [Avi] Bluth’s visit to Qusra on Wednesday appeared to signal a new resolve to address the situation,” it says. Framing Bluth as a potential savior while failing to mention that, less than a month earlier, he was praising outposts just like the one in Qusra—even calling them part of the IDF’s “security doctrine”—is straightforward journalistic malpractice. It’s a shame Times readers will never know that the IDF’s “struggle to curtail the violence” may have something to do with the fact that its supposedly benevolent commander in the West Bank is himself deeply compromised.

To be blunt, this article functions as propaganda for the Israeli state, which relies on good liberals around the world believing that it takes settler violence seriously. The Times—like Yisrael Ganz and Mike Huckabee, who occasionally condemn settler violence to release pressure from the system—is running interference for Israel’s state project of ethnically cleansing the West Bank.

The truth about the West Bank, as that soldier told me in Qusra, is that “If you’re Jewish, you can go and move wherever you want.” What happens to the Palestinians already living there is simply beside the point.

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