It Could Happen Here - West Bank Takeover

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

In this episode Dana El Kurd talks about how the settlers and the Israeli state are working hand in hand to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the West Bank, and how we should understand the relationship between the two actors.      Sources: https://jewishcurrents.org/it-feels-like-a-death-sentence https://www.972mag.com/armed-settler-hikes-west-bank/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/opinion/israel-west-bank-settlers-violence.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/29/israeli-settlers-surround-palestinian-home-in-occupied-west-banks-qusra https://www.972mag.com/bilin-israeli-land-seizure-settler-road/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack.

This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on. On the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Kudhappen here.

My name is Dan Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics. And today I want to talk about the truly insidious stories coming out of the West Bank that red separately look like a spike in settler violence. But red together look like something else entirely. On August 9th, settlers surrounded. three Palestinian homes in a neighborhood called Rosadayan on the edge of a village called Kusra south of Nablis. They didn't leave. 21 days later, at least four people were still inside one of those

houses cut off from water, electricity, and basic supplies. Getting food into those people meant coordinating through the village mayor, which was a process that took three to four days. The Israeli army put up three new roadblocks, and in July, the village mosque was burned. I want you to sit with that for a minute because this is not a raid, this is not a rampage, it's a siege with a bureaucracy attached. And that bureaucracy is the story, and that's what I want to talk about today. And I'm trying to be precise about the difference because the distinction is not academic. It determines what you think the problem is and therefore what you think the solution would look like. Here's the framing you'll get from almost every Western outlet. And of course, every Israeli official.

that this is a fringe and that these settlers are a violent fringe and they embarrass the state and the state condemns this fringe. When settlers besieged Kusra, Prime Minister Netanyahu did issue a statement and here I'm quoting, condemning the quote criminal acts of violence

committed in the village of Kusra by a handful of rioters who are violating the law. And Israeli President Herzog also condemned it and the foreign ministry condemned it as extremist and criminal violence. So let's take that. framing seriously for a moment because if it's true, what we're looking at is a law enforcement failure, a state that's lost control of its most radical citizens. And if it's false, what we're

looking at is a state carrying out a policy through deniable means, and the condemnations are not a failure at all. They're a feature. They're the part of the machine that faces outward. So let's go through what actually happened in these villages, and then let's ask which of these framings fits the evidence best. So Basar al-Adra, the journalist from Masafiriata, the one who you know from no other land, the documentary that won a bunch of awards, he published a piece in Jewish currents on September 3rd about livestock theft in the South Hebron Hills. So this isn't vandalism, it's theft, it's organized removal of livestock. So shortly after midnight on August 21st, in a place called Kherberd dir Shams, a family was attacked by roughly 15 masked settlers with sticks and stones.

One of them describes it flatly. They basically opened the pen where the family kept around 70 goats, and then they opened the sheep pen where there were about 100 sheep. And as the settlers moved off with the animals, Israeli army vehicles passed nearby. And in his words, they did nothing. Nearly two weeks later, not one animal has been recovered. Back in July, in another village, a settler pepper sprayed a man, and then more settlers arrived, and then a flock of about 122 sheep were targeted and taken. Soldiers did Show up that time, according to one of the villagers, what the soldiers did was push the Palestinians away from their own animals while settlers broke the locks. And of roughly 227 animals taken that day, nine came back. Four residents of the village were arrested and then released. Betzelam, which is an Israeli human rights organization, has counted 17 livestock theft incidents in 26 alone.

And a flock of the size that we're talking about here, it's worth something on the order of tens, if not $100,000. I'm flagging this because I think it's easy to hear sheep and these kinds of things and file it maybe under like property crime or vandalism or something. But for a herding family in the South Harbourn Hills, the flock is not just an asset. It's the entire productive base of the household. It's the income. It's the reason to stay on that hillside. So if you want to expel a pastoral community, you don't just expel them.

You can take its animals. and then it can expel itself. And it does so in a way that produces no photograph of a bulldozer. Another incident was on July 8th, when the head of Israel's Central Command signed a land seizure order. And that order takes dozens of dunums of land from Bilin and three neighboring villages to build a security road, six and a half kilometers long and eight meters wide,

connecting the settlement of Modain elite to an outpost called Stay Ephraim. Sorry, I don't know Hebrew, so I'm going to. going to be butchering these. But Orin Zev reported this for 972 Mac on September 2nd. So those who are familiar with Palestinian Popular Resistance in the mid to early 2000s, you've heard of Belain. Lots of documentaries about it. Lots of international tension. This village basically sustained weekly demonstrations against the separation wall for something like 15 years because this wall was being built on their land and taking huge chunks of their land.

In 2007, the Israeli High Court ordered that part of the wall removed, and the land actually came back to the village. So in the international imagination, this was the best outcome. See, the nonviolent resistance worked. And this is the nonviolent resistance that Western commentators often point to when they want to lecture Palestinians about tactics. Now, this road that they're proposing runs through the land that was returned. So Muhammad Khatib, who led some of these protests, says that.

The point is not a road. It's a settlement corridor. It's basically an eventual seizure of something like 600 Dunham's. And the attorney Michael Spard put it very bluntly. They don't think twice about co-opting the security argument for purposes that are clearly settlement oriented. And what's really ludicrous is that this road runs through a wadi, kind of a valley, which from an actual security standpoint is a bad place to put a road. So the security rationale isn't just contested. It's incoherent, which tells you that the word security here is doing legal work, not tactical work. It's this just magic phrase that converts a settlement expansion into a military necessity and then a military necessity into a signed order from a general. A third incident or set of incidents I want to talk about is these hikes.

There have been these hikes. This is a really ridiculous, insidious story. Aharon Parath and Roy Klytman published an investigation of these hikes in 972 mag in late August about these hiking groups, these organized settler hiking groups in the West Bank. They've got really cutesy names sometimes, like hiking buddies, and they publish their routes, and they go from settlement to settlement, and they cross Palestinian farmland and springs and villages. So a hike near the north of Hebron, one of these hikes, ended with a, quote, civilian security. coordinator opening fire and killing 17-year-old Palestinian Karim Shalda and seriously

wounding another one. So that's, I think, the whole episode in two words. A civilian security coordinator. This is not a hiker who lost his temper. It's a job. It's an armed, appointed part of the chain of command. The man who fired was functionally an arm of the state, but supposedly on a hike in a village that is not his. On July 24th, near the village, village of Tull west of Nablis, a hike ended with six people dead, two Israelis and four Palestinians. David Sayyad, who founded one of these hiking groups, basically says the quiet part in a single sentence. Wherever the hikers' foot treads, there the border will pass. So he's talking about how they're going to places they haven't been to in a long time or maybe ever. And on the question of

the army, he explains the relationship very precisely. We don't ask for permits, he says. We We mainly notify them so we don't put the sector on alert. And this is very clear in a lot of their quotes about this issue. They coordinate with the army. They notify, but they are not asking permission. And the army isn't policing them. It's being kept in the loop so that it can protect them. And the reporting traces this back over a decade.

It's, you know, there's a 2013 hike documented with 100 hikers and soldiers accompanying them. So supposedly this recreational activity has a stated. territorial doctrine, a published route through other people's fields, an armed participant base and a military that gets notified. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts everyone's talking about.

All in one place. And it's free. Whatever you want to hear. Listen anytime. Anywhere. Music, radio. Podcasts. Unlimited audio.

It's on the free IHurt Radio app. One app, no subscription. Always free. Grab the free app. I heart radio. Everywhere you go. Always free. Download the free IHard Radio app today.

Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest and they complained about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw.

I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 12 seats.

Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we have four things. The livestock theft with soldiers watching, a siege of villages, a seizing of land, and armed hikes with military escorts. Now let's get back to Prime Minister Netanyahu's phrase about this being a handful of riots. A riot is unplanned. A riot has no logistics. A riot does not file paperwork. What's in front of us here is very different. Because here, I think a lot of people who are critical of the state of Israel might make the argument that the settlers are the state. But I think this loses a little bit of analytical detail. So let me make this a little bit more specific, which I actually think is more damning. The Israeli state and the settler movement are not identical, but they are complementary.

because they perform different functions in the same project. And it's very clear that the division of labor is the point. Because think for a moment about what each half can do that the other can't. Settlers can do things the state can't do openly without incurring some diplomatic cost. For example, taking a flock of sheep or burning a mosque or standing outside a house for three weeks. These are acts with no legal basis. There's no order, no minister to sanction, no policy to condemn at the UN. They produce displacement without producing a decision.

And then the state can do things settlers can't do on their own. It can sign a seizure order. It can declare land, state land. It can build the road that makes the outpost viable and connect it to the grid and route the bus line. And it can decline to investigate when things happen. It can arrest four Palestinians instead of the 15 masked settlers, which is exactly what happened in one of these villages. And crucially, the state can supply this ambiguity that lets the whole thing keep running. The soldiers present at these incidents are not intervening because not that they're absent.

It's in fact a specific posture of the state. It converts this crime into something sanctioned. And it tells the Palestinian family there's really no one to appeal to. And this is what political scientists who study this stuff in other contexts as outsourced or deniable repression by paramilitaries or militias or unknown gung men, quote unquote. we recognize it instantly when it's in other places, and we understand kind of the analytical move here because you don't ask whether the state ordered it, you ask whether the state built the conditions under which it happens. And by that test, this is not ambiguous at all. But for some reason, when we talk

about Israel Palestine, things get a little bit more ambiguous. I also want to point out something really crucial, which is that every one of these incidents, and they've been happening for a while, but they've ramped up in severity, but every one of them produces a permanent gain. The animals that are stolen, don't come back. The road that's built can't be unbuilt. The hiking route, you know, once walked with an escort becomes a corridor, then a security zone, then a place that Palestinians can't farm. And the siege doesn't need to end in a formal expulsion. It ends when the family decides they can't raise their children under these conditions. They can't stay under siege. And there's a phrase for what's coming when all of this happens all at once, which is annexation.

And people talk about it as if it's a future event that's awaiting some sort of vote from the Israeli Kinesit or something. But I'd suggest that framing is itself part of the problem. It invites us to wait for a declaration and treat everything before that as some sort of tension or spike. The declaration of annexation is the least important part. What's happening on the ground is a territorial reality that's being produced by signature and by theft. and then maybe later on the paperwork will ratify it, but it's not necessary. Israeli writer and analyst Mayor of Zanzin actually made a version of this argument in the New York Times on September 6th, under a headline that I think is worth reading.

The headline of the article is, it's not just the West Bank settlers, it's Israel. So hopefully this analysis doesn't seem fringe anymore. And at the end of the day, if we consider settler violence a fringe problem, then the remedy, which the Biden administration toyed with half-heartedly, is sanctions on individuals, a visa ban or an asset freeze. And we've run that experiment that didn't really work. The violence kept going up. But if it's a state policy executed through deniable proxies,

then the remedy has to address the state. And every actor with leverage over that state, which we're talking about DC here, understands this, but they've chosen the fringe framing precisely because it permits condemnation without cost. So Netanyahu condemning a handful of rioters in the same week that the Israeli Central Command signs a road through B'a'in's returned land, this is not a contradiction he failed to notice. It is the design of this policy. So I'll leave you with this detail from the reporting on Kusra that I can't get out of my head. It was that six people were attacked while

trying to install metal bars and window shields on their homes. They were attacked by both Israeli soldiers and settlers together in the same action and then the six of them were arrested. So they weren't fighting. They weren't protesting. They were fastening metal on their own house to protect themselves and they were being arrested for it by the same army standing alongside the people they were shielding themselves from. So if you wanted kind of a single image for this division of labor, I've spent this episode describing, that's it. Because the thing that's not permitted in the end is not that they're resisting, it's that they're staying. The families in the South Hebron Hills are still there, and Balin is contesting the order of the seizure of their land. Kuswazirans have installed some shields

anyway, and a number of Israeli journalists and lawyers and researchers are documenting this in Hebrew and in English, and then, of course, Palestinian journalists are putting themselves on the line to document this as well. That's not a hopeful note exactly. It's just the accurate one. Unfortunately, what's missing is apparently anyone with power are willing to act on understanding this reality. That's it for me. Thanks for listening. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia. Or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast?

Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools.

Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. and download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHart podcast. Guaranteed human.