Israeli regime encourages settler attacks against Palestinians: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed Tome Stokes, a writer and political analyst in Dublin, to discuss the ever-growing wave of Israeli settler violence against Palestinian people.

Following is a rough transcription.

Press TV: When the UN Human Rights Committee says that the root cause of escalating violence in occupied Palestinian territories is the Israeli policy of illegal settlement expansion, are they on the mark?

Stokes: Of course! It is a classic case of colonialism at work. Many of us around the world in the Middle East, Near East, Far East, Africa and parts of Europe like Ireland, where I am, or in Latin America understand fully what the implications of colonial policy are and they are being played out in Palestine.

You mentioned the treatment of women, often in the presence of their husbands and their children, and that is not a strange phenomenon. Part of what that does, the psychological effects on men, is to give them a feeling of emasculation, for instance, that they are not able to protect their own families in their own land.

So the relentless violence, there is a figure I think for this year, an average of 12 attacks every week amounting to 370 attacks by the end of July of this year, just by the end of seven months and these are the documented ones. There is daily harassment, daily ill-treatment of men, women and children at checkpoints. The arrest and detention of underage children, 20-year sentences for adolescents who throw stones for instance; and then there was a report of course, last week, that the young Israeli man who attacked Ali Saad Dawabsha and his family who killed that unfortunate toddler and later his father, had got a  six months sentence.

Press TV: Indeed, I would like to bring that point up because it is not just Israeli forces that create the kind of situation that you have just outlined for the Palestinians but it is also the settlers who are allowed to carry on with impunity. Why isn’t there more attention being paid to this?

Stokes: Well, they are not allowed to, they are encouraged to. The language that the Israeli government, all of the cabinet ministers, Netanyahu and so on, the language they use is violent and extreme when it comes to talking about Palestinian people and so what that does is that in the minds of settlers, who are not particularly nice people from what I can see, in their minds Palestinians are turned into sub-humans. They are not allowed to be fully human and of course, they are a fully human people.

What that does then is that it leads to a permission of sorts to do whatever you like because if you are dealing with people who are not fully human, well then the same rules don’t apply.

One of the things that rarely comes up is the fact that not all of these settlers will travel to other countries but many Israelis have free pass to travel backwards and forwards to Europe and to North America and these are people who are as responsible as any of those settlers who carried out the deeds with their own hands.

That impunity has to stop. Many of these Israelis who travel internationally have been members of the Israeli defense force, or of the police, some of them have been instrumental in government and they bear full responsibility for what the settlers are doing as well and that is not to allow the settlers a free pass on this either.

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