As media focus on Gaza wanes, Israel commits largest West Bank land robbery in decades

Mourners take part in funeral prayers for four Palestinians killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Nur Shams refugee camp near Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday. AFP

In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian blood continues to flow like a river. The total death toll has topped 38,000. Among them are 16,000 children. Some 21,000 children are unaccounted for. They are believed to be buried alive under the rubble. The Nazis’ horror pales into insignificance when compared to the horror Israel is inflicting on the people of Gaza.

As Israel’s war on Gaza enters its tenth month next week, the news about Palestinian suffering has diminishing marginal utility in the Western media, most of which have long abandoned value-based journalism in pursuit of profits and their countries’ power agendas. The Western media that dominate the post-World War II information order are preoccupied with analysing the June 27 United States presidential debate, where incumbent president Joe Biden’s poor performance has raised the question about whether he should quit the presidential race. Another issue they pursue is the US Supreme Court’s controversial ruling that virtually granted immunity to Donald Trump from prosecution for the unconstitutional act of inciting supporters for an insurrection. Then there are elections in the UK and France.

After these topics, when Gaza is covered, visuals are carefully chosen and narratives skillfully crafted so as not to cause any erosion in the pro-Israeli bias they have etched in the minds of their audiences or readers.

The shift in the Western media’s focus or their lack of interest in highlighting the human suffering in Gaza has given Israel more space and freedom to commit what it has been notorious for in the past seven decades: killing Palestinians and robbing their land.

WikiLeaks, in one of its first posts after its co-founder Julian Assange was released on June 24 from the custody of the British police, highlighted last week leaked documents that confirmed Israel’s plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza and drive its population out to Egypt’s Sinai deserts. Although the Biden administration and its Western allies, such as Britain and Germany, have been complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Sinai plan did not find favour with them. But Israel pays little heed to the viewpoints of its steadfast allies because the Zionist state knows that whatever wrong it commits, its Western allies will find a way to accept it.

After all, did not the United States, under the presidency of Donald Trump, recognise Israel’s annexation of the Palestinian territory of East Jerusalem and declare that the whole of Jerusalem was the undivided capital of Israel, and also the annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights despite the illegality of the annexations? Biden made no effort to reverse this aberration.

Perhaps normalising Israel’s acts that are crimes under international law is admissible under the rules-based international order the US claims it is promoting. 

In keeping with the appalling pattern—the normalisation of Israeli crimes—that defeats efforts to bring about a global order based on peace and justice, Israel this week approved the largest seizure of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank in more than three decades—12.7 square kilometres of land in the Jordan Valley.

What better time than now for Israel to commit the preposterous act of robbing the land rightfully and historically belonging to the Palestinian people, when the Western nations and their servile media have deliberately or inadvertently pushed the Palestinian issues, including the Gaza genocide, to the back burner?

Israel’s thirst for expansionism knows no bounds. From the perspective of Jewish religious extremists, who are the driving force behind the Benjamin Netanyahu government, such expansionism will end only with the Zionist state’s global conquest, which will establish a global order where the raison d’être of the conquered—the rest of the world—is only to serve the master race, the Chosen People.

One such extremist is Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself. He says he aims to solidify Israel’s hold on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.

According to Peace Now, an Israel-based peace group committed to a two-state solution, this week’s seizure was the largest single appropriation approved since the 1993 Oslo Accords. The group says the land grab connects Israeli settlements along a key corridor bordering Jordan, a move it points out undermines the prospect of a contiguous Palestinian state.

The West’s muted condemnation of the land grab comes as no surprise. Moreover, the so-called sanctions the US, the UK, and the European Union have imposed on selected Jewish settlers for committing violence against the Palestinians have little effect. Settlers targeted by these sanctions mockingly dismiss them and continue to persecute the Palestinians in full view of the West.

At the time of the partition under the West-dominated United Nations plan in 1947, the Jews comprising 32 percent of the population—most of them European Jews with disputed Semitic origins—were given 55 percent of historic Palestine, while the 68 percent native Palestinians—both Muslims and Christians—were given 45 percent of the land. Since then, it has been the case of Israel grabbing Palestinian land and expelling the Palestinians. As of today, the Palestinians have control over less than 17 percent of the land allocated to them under the UN plan.

Across the West Bank, where since October 7 more than 500 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, more than 100 Jewish settlements have been built with over 500,000 Jewish intruders living with security and state patronage, while the Palestinians lead a life of refugees within their own country.

The Associated Press, one of the few Western media outlets that highlighted the latest land grab, says in a dispatch from Jerusalem that the newly seized land is in an area of the West Bank where, even before the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, settler violence was displacing communities of Palestinians. That violence has only surged since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack ignited the war in Gaza. Settlers have carried out more than 1,000 attacks on Palestinians since October in the West Bank, causing deaths and damaging property, according to the U.N.

“The land seizure, which was approved late last month but only publicised on Wednesday, comes after the seizure of 8 square kilometres (roughly 3 square miles) of land in the West Bank in March and 2.6 square kilometres (1 square mile) in February. That makes 2024 by far the peak year for Israeli land seizures in the West Bank, Peace Now said,” the AP report said.

All these developments make peace only a mirage in the holy land.

With Israel killing Palestinians in their thousands in Gaza and the West Bank and annexing whatever little land is left for Palestinians, the two-state solution is nothing but a charade Israel and the West dabble in to mislead some of their people, who in their credulity still believe that the liberal West and democratic Israel are incapable of committing evil.