My friend Joseph Dana, based in Jerusalem, on yet another week of IDF and settler lawlessness in the West Bank:
Saturday was a burning hot day in the West Bank. Combatants for Peace, a group made up of Israeli ex-combat soldiers and Palestinian ex-fighters, planned a protest at an illegal outpost adjacent to Shufa, a Palestinian village in the northern West Bank that is very close to the Green Line. The illegal outpost was built by settlers from the settlement of Avney Hefetz over the last three weeks. They simply took over a hilltop on Palestinian land and constructed makeshift tents that are guarded by the IDF. While the tents are not settlements, the pattern is clear. Build a tent, then build a house, then another one and you have a settlement protected by the IDF that then becomes a “consensus area” too populated to ever evacuate.