The Zionists think they are winning. They are not. They continue to push their violence in Palestine too far. They are despised worldwide. It’s one thing to be an idiot, but quite another to be a violent idiot. I remember a morning well years ago.

I was headed to Tubas in the West Bank where I managed to stay a couple months, helping at a school funded by a rich American Palestinian entrepreneur and scientist who lived in North Carolina and who had set up a school in Tubas, his birthplace, for children. Getting there was a bit of a bitch. There was an IDF “checkpoint” just to the west of the Jordan Valley. A Palestinian cabbie from Ben Gurion took me that far one winter morning in 2006. The IDF held me there for a couple hours, wondering who I was and what doing. My ride the 15 or so more miles to Tubas was waiting up the road. He was the headmaster at the school, which by the way survived only 18 months.

Soldiers stood and ambled about. Some Palestinian laborers had been detained by the roadside where they were forced to squat in the dirt. I went up to one soldier and I asked him, having a hunch: “Where are you from?” His English was good. He answered: “Israel”, as if I were stupid. “No,” I pressed the guy, a corpulent Jew. “Where are you REALLY from?” He hesitated a bit and finally said: “Brooklyn.” I simply told him I had lived and worked in New York, not wanting to stir up more trouble. I was interrogated about what I was doing and where wanting to go. I told the truth. I also told him my ride to Tubas was a hundred meters away and pointed him out.

I was delayed and searched for another hour or so, but finally the soldiers let me go to meet the school headmaster, a very kind elderly gentleman in a ragged overcoat with an ancient little car. I scanned the checkpoint scene more and then noticed the most important thing to see there at Hamra Checkpoint that winter morning. Up on a hill off the road stood a man dressed in civilian clothes, carrying a rifle and a handgun. He was observing the entire scene like a vulture. It at least felt like he was in charge, even of the soldiers, some 20 of them at Hamra Checkpoint. Like the soldiers would defer primarily to this man in civilian clothes with the weapons if it were demanded.

The IDF finally let me go to Tubas. The headmaster drove slowly away and soon we were climbing up out of the Jordan Valley and soon arrived at his home in Tubas where his wife fed me and let me sleep on a couch on his porch there. 

But I learned something interesting that morning. The man on the hill beside the road was a Jewish “settler” in the West Bank from some foreign place, probably the U.S. I imagined. And a couple hours later I heard that the IDF had sent out a patrol to bring me back to Hamra Checkpoint and disallow my visit to Tubas. But by that time I was inside Tubas town and they could not find me. And for two months I was “safe” in and around Tubas and even managed three weeks later to visit the famous refugee camp in Jenin, courtesy of the Palestinian Red Crescent, where scores of fairly fresh graves had been dug, the result of a horrendous, infamous raid on the refugee camp by the IDF.

But I never forgot the civilian with the weapons on the hill, the apparent “settler”, and it was not difficult to realize that the “settlers” generally constituted the absolute core of Israeli designs on the West Bank: to force Palestinians out by making their lives so miserable that maybe they would just leave their country and become refugees once again.

The settlers have been wilding this year like never before. Killing Palestinians and destroying their property and with absolute impunity and hand in hand with their IDF protection in the background. The best (or worst) recent example of this was a literal pogrom in Huwara, a village near Nablus in the West Bank. Scores were injured and some killed, scores of Palestinian cars set on fire and at least a dozen Palestinian homes set on fire, too.

What makes the Jewish settlers in the West Bank from afar any better than the now diminished but still extant “Islamic State” terrorists in Syria and Iraq? Nothing. They are worse in many respects. (And Islamic State was, much against the Western and U.S. propaganda, often supported by the U.S. and may still be.

The worst tale I ever heard of the IS rabble involved attacks on the Yazidi communities in Iraq. A mother had become a prospective “sex slave” to IS goons. She refused the role. IS thus starved her for three days and then fed her a good meal. She ate her meal with gusto. But after she had finished she was told she had just eaten her baby, or parts of her child. One can hardly imagine anything so cruel.

So this degree of cruelty, whether fomented by IS or the settlers in the West Bank or the IDF or gangsters like Netanyahu or Ben Gvir or Smoltrich or others such as enabling supporters in the West in the U.S. is what not just the Mideast, but the entire world must deal with for the time being. The cruelties are likely to become worse for a while until vocal opposition becomes so strong around the globe that changes will finally be forced and the Zionists and others of their ilk finally have their day of reckoning.