The Occupation is the Elephant in the public demonstrations

• Grave injustice has been rife in the West Bank with many years of violence and dispossession. But in the last year there has been an accelerated annexation, a chain of riots (some of them in retribution for terrorist attacks) directed against innocent villages, especially those who have agricultural land that the settlers want to usurp, or toward encampments of impoverished Palestinian herders. Although we have documented the worsening situation for years, the truth is that a year ago we could not have imagined that the reality of the horror in the West Bank villages would materialize so quickly. We were shocked that it took so little time to shatter our hopes of curbing the expansion of the settlement and the settler's rampage in the West Bank.
• The provocations and bloodshed are initiated by the settlers, and their marching orders come from above. The outposts' settlers favorite Shabbat activity is to come from their illegal outposts and sheep farms to lands owned by the villages and to the herders' shelters. They destroy the olive trees and crops, burn fields, cars, and houses, beat, injure, and kill animals. When the Palestinians respond by throwing stones, the settlers in turn use firearms. They claim that the deaths and injuries they cause are in self-defense. All this is done under the auspices of the army, which assigns escort to the attacking hooligans.
• Now, that the West Bank settlers’ most violent wishes appear on the extreme right-wing government's urgent task list - to annex as much land as possible and reduce the population by deportation. The declared policy is to expand the settlements, and all means are kosher in the eyes of the ministers.
• And the army? Supports and protects the perpetrators and arrests the victims. So far in 2023, Israeli forces have killed 178 Palestinians in the West Bank or Israel. This already exceeds the death toll by Israeli forces in the West Bank of any whole year since 2005!  (according to OCHA as of September 4)

​Israeli citizens who shout “Shame” and “Democracy for Israel,” without regard to the rampant and expanding occupation, are complicit in these crimes. This is “knowing but not knowing,” seeing but not seeing.  This is how the tacit consent to the occupation’s existence increases in the public sphere, as it intensifies and races toward the horizon of the destruction of the democratic state of Israel.