“Trying to Repeat the Nakba”: Israel Launches Largest Military Raids in West Bank in Two Decades

AMY GOODMAN: At least nine Palestinians have been killed and 11 injured as the Israeli military launches its biggest operation in the occupied West Bank in close to two decades, with hundreds of troops, backed by armored vehicles, bulldozers, fighter jets and drones, launching simultaneous raids on the northern cities of Jenin and Tulkarm.

In Jenin, Israeli forces have surrounded the city, blocking exit and entry points and access to hospitals and ripping up infrastructure in the Jenin refugee camp. Israeli forces have also been closing down the main roads leading to Tulkarm and other cities. An Israeli military spokesman told a news conference the raids were the first stage of an even larger operation in the West Bank.

As the raids got underway, Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz called for the mass displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank. He wrote on social media, quote, “We need to deal with the threat exactly as we deal with terror infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian civilians and any other step needed. This is a war for everything and we must win it,” he said.

Over 650 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since October, nearly 150 of them children, most of them during near-daily raids by the Israeli military.

For more, we go to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where we’re joined by the Palestinian physician, activist and politician, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti. He serves as general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative.

Dr. Barghouti, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you explain what’s happening in the occupied West Bank?

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Well, Amy, thank you for having me.

But what’s happening is absolutely horrifying, because what we see here is Israel trying to transfer the genocide war that is conducted in Gaza and the war of ethnic cleansing from Gaza to the West Bank. And what we see here is a unilateral war from the side of a huge Israeli army, which has airplanes, which has tanks, which has huge number of soldiers, against a basically civilian Palestinian population.

You have to understand that the West Bank is an area that has been under Israeli military occupation continuously since 1967, so it’s an occupied territory. And now the Israeli army, which is occupying us all this time, is conducting a war on occupied people. It’s the worst and gravest possible violation of international law that governs the behavior of an occupying power.

And their goal is very clear. It’s as the Israeli minister of foreign affairs said. It’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This is a fascist Israeli government governed by fascists, like Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, whose goal and aim is to annex the West Bank, is to settle Israeli illegal settlers in Palestinian territory and displace the Palestinian population. They are trying to repeat the Nakba. They are trying to repeat the ethnic cleansing that took place in 1948.

And this time, the Israeli army is invading not only Jenin and Tulkarm and Nur Shams camp and Tubas and Faraa camp; they are invading in so many areas in the West Bank. So many villages tonight were attacked and continue to be attacked. Hundreds of people have been arrested in this campaign. And the worst thing is that the Israeli army and bulldozers are destroying the infrastructure in many refugee camps, especially Nur Shams camp and Jenin camp. They are destroying roads. They are destroying power infrastructure. They are destroying water pipelines. They are destroying homes. And there is no limit to what they are doing. And at the same time, the world is watching and doing nothing.

It’s an absolute, absolute, unacceptable, horrible war crime that the Israeli army is conducting once again inside the West Bank. And I repeat: They are trying to repeat the same ethnic cleansing, the same genocide that is committed in Gaza, where, by the way, the war crimes continue. And every day, the Israeli army is killing 40 or 50 Palestinians — most of them, of course, are civilians.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Barghouti, I’m wondering your sense of whether this extreme right-wing government in Israel is determined to keep the fighting going even in the face of huge international criticism, not only with the assassinations and the attacks in Iran and in Lebanon and in Gaza, but now in the West Bank. Is it your sense that they feel this is their opportunity to finally have a decisive cleansing of the Palestinian people?

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Absolutely. I think that’s what they are trying to do. This is a fascist government run by theofascist people who have no respect of any human right, no respect of any international law. And their goal is ethnic cleansing, yes. Their goal is annexation of the West Bank.

And what’s happening now in the West Bank proves that the Israeli attack on Palestinians is not because of Hamas, because Hamas is not governing in the West Bank. It’s the Palestinian Authority, which was stripped from all its authorities. And it’s not about 7th of October, because these same acts started to happen before the 7th of October. And that shows you that the 7th of October was a result rather than a cause of what’s happening.

And now the Israeli ministers are coming out claiming they are fighting Iran in the West Bank. What kind of lie this is? Where is — I mean, the people who are occupied by Israel since 57 years are Palestinians, not Iranians. The people who were displaced by Israel in 1948, 70% of the Palestinian population, became refugees because Israel displaced them through massacres. They were Palestinians, not Iranians. But as usual, Israel is trying to claim that it is fighting some kind of another country. Before, it was the Soviet Union. Then it was Egypt. Then it was Syria. Then it was Iraq.

Now they’re talking about Iran, because they don’t want to admit that the real struggle here is the struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom, to end the occupation, to end the system of apartheid. They are trying to cover up the reality. And the reality is that there is an occupier, which is Israel, and occupied people, who are Palestinians. There is an oppressor, which is Israel and its parties and its government and its society, actually, and there is an oppressed, which are the Palestinian population. And now not only they are occupying us and practicing apartheid against us and stealing our land and imprisoning our children, more than that, they are conducting war on us and trying to conduct ethnic cleansing one more time against the Palestinian population.

They would not have dared to do all of that if it wasn’t for the United States of America, if it wasn’t for the unlimited military support that the United States is providing to Israel. They would not have dared to do so if it wasn’t for Germany, which is providing them also with military equipment, if it wasn’t for so many European countries — and I don’t want to put everyone in the same basket, but if it wasn’t for all this European support to Israel, while — and if it wasn’t for the double standard that is used internationally against the Palestinian population. I would also add Israel would not have dared to go so far if it wasn’t for the silence and the weak inaction from so many Arab governments and Muslim governments.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, I wanted to ask you about that, the Arab and Muslim governments, the role that they are playing right now. And what could they be doing?

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Well, there, it seems they don’t have a free will, most of them. Again, I don’t like to put everybody in the same basket. There are differences here. But the least they can do is boycott Israel, declare sanctions on Israel, cut all the normalization agreements with Israel. That’s the minimal thing they can do. We’re not asking them to send armies to fight Israel, but at least impose sanctions on Israel. And I say that the world community itself is responsible if it does not immediately engage in boycott, divestment, sanctions against this terrible fascist regime in Israel that is driving the whole region into a catastrophe and that continues this terrible crime against the Palestinian people.

How long can we continue to — how long can we continue to tolerate this terrible oppression? We’ve been subjected to ethnic cleansing, to occupation, to apartheid, to oppression, to persecution for 76 years. Why should we tolerate that? And why we don’t have the right to struggle for our freedom and for our independence and for our dignity like everybody else in this world?

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Barghouti, can you talk about the timing of this? You even have the Israeli generals putting pressure on Netanyahu, the prime minister, to sign off on a ceasefire. He hasn’t done that, has added more conditions to it, the whole issue of what’s happening in Gaza right now and then shifting to or adding the West Bank, not that they haven’t been attacking the West Bank before.

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: You know, Amy, what is really shocking is that everything that is happening was not a secret. Everything that we see today in the West Bank and what we see in Gaza was declared as a plan by Israeli ministers continuously and repeatedly. They never — they didn’t even try to hide their intentions, and they’re declaring it every day, including the intention of annexing the West Bank, including the intention of ethnically cleansing Palestinians. They’re not hiding that.

And I don’t buy that there are differences really anymore between the security apparatus and the army and Netanyahu. If they really had these differences, they would force him to stop.

But I think what you see here is a very dangerous phenomenon. It’s not just that we just have an Israeli fascist government; we also have a fascist society. I’ve never seen anything like that in previous history, except maybe the rise of Nazis in Germany, where a huge number of the people, out of fear, out of misleading information, out of extreme Zionist ideology, are behaving as fascists. And the reality is that Netanyahu, each time he declares that he’s continuing the war, he’s getting better votes in the polls. And that encourages him to continue. And that’s what pushed him to take this terrible step of moving the war and of continuing the war in Gaza and then moving it to the West Bank.

AMY GOODMAN: And Israel Katz, the foreign minister of Israel, saying this is a war on everything?

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Yeah, he means war on every Palestinian, war on every Palestinian child. Out of the 11 people they’ve just killed in Jenin and Tulkarm, many are children, and two children in the Faraa refugee camp. It’s a war on all Palestinians. It’s a war of a settler-colonial system that wants to erase the Palestinian population, to erase the Palestinian people in the 21st century. That is the meaning of what he says — a war on everything — because they mean that they want to ethnically cleanse the whole of the West Bank, the whole of East Jerusalem, and to annex them to Israel.

And that’s why we are attacked not only by the Israeli army, but also by Israeli illegal settlers, who are behaving like gangs, reminding us of the same gangs, the Zionist gangs of Stern and Haganah, that committed more than 52 massacres in 1948 and that razed to the ground 520 Palestinian communities in what became called Israel later. It’s a continuation of this terrible war of ethnic cleansing. That is the reality.

And this is happening in front of the whole world. It’s happening in front of the American government, which does nothing — nothing — to stop this terrible atrocity and does nothing to stop this terrible ethnic cleansing. On the contrary, they continue to provide Israel with weapons, continue to provide Israel with bombs, and continue to protect Israel in the United Nations Security Council and in every other political venue.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, we thank you for being with us, Palestinian physician and politician who serves as general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, speaking to us from the occupied West Bank, from Ramallah.

Coming up, Democrats are suing to halt new Trump-backed election rules that could be used to block certification of the November election. We’ll speak with voting rights journalist Ari Berman and with the CEO of LULAC, the oldest Latino civil rights organization in this country, which is asking the Department of Justice to investigate the Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for raiding the homes of LULAC members, accusing them of vote harvesting and more. Stay with us.