Systemic settler colonial violence in West Bank: How institutionalised apartheid enables cyclical mob attacks on Palestinian families
Original framing: “‘Terrorist attack’ by Israeli settlers on Palestinian family in West Bank condemned” — The Guardian - World
The attack in Jalud echoes the *Jabalia Massacre* (1937) and the *Deir Yassin Massacre* (1948), where settler violence was used to terrorise Palestinians into fleeing. The 1982 *First Intifada* saw settler mobs attack Palestinian villages in Hebron, leading to the Israeli military’s *Operation Peace for Galilee* in Lebanon—a pattern of state-sanctioned violence. The *Oslo Accords* (1993) further institutionalised settler expansion by carving out areas (like Area C) where Palestinians face systematic displacement. Without this historical context, the current violence appears as a moral failing rather than a predictable escalation of a long-term project.
The attack in Jalud is not an isolated act of ‘terrorism’ but a predictable escalation of Israel’s settler-colonial project, where legal protections for settlers coexist with military impunity to displace Palestinians.
Historical patterns—from the *Deir Yassin Massacre* to the *Oslo Accords’* institutionalisation of settler expansion—reveal how settler violence is a deliberate tool of ethnic cleansing, enabled by international complicity in framing it as ‘extremism’ rather than state policy. Marginalised voices, like Palestinian women land defenders and Bedouin communities, expose how this violence is gendered and economically rationalised, yet their stories are erased by mainstream narratives that prioritise ‘humanitarian’ condemnation over structural accountability. Cross-culturally, this mirrors global settler colonialism (e.g., South Africa, Myanmar), where religious nationalism justifies dispossession, and Indigenous resistance offers models for disruption. The solution lies not in incremental reforms but in dismantling the legal and economic structures that sustain settler violence—through international legal action, Palestinian self-determination, economic sanctions, and global solidarity with marginalised resistance. The *Trickster* here is the Israeli state itself, which uses ‘humanitarian’ rhetoric to obscure its role in enabling violence, while the *Guardian*’s framing plays into this by deflecting attention from the systemic mechanisms that make such attacks inevitable.