Jericho: eight Palestinian homes seized by settlers, dozens displaced

According to Al Jazeera, Israeli settlers have seized eight Palestinian homes in Jericho, displacing dozens of people. Citing the UN, the broadcaster reports that the settlers reportedly fired live rounds and struck Palestinians, pushing families to leave for their safety. The dispatch says nothing, at this stage, about the identity of the victims, any injured, the response of Israeli authorities, or the possibility of a return. We will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not a fact established by the dispatch.

Eight homes is no minor incident. A home is shelter, but it is also the neighbouring field, the well, the path to school, the possibility of staying on one's land. Driving families out at gunpoint means emptying a territory of those who live on it in order to hand it to others. Let us call it by its name: dispossession, carried out under occupation, with all the asymmetry that implies. On one side, civilians with no protection. On the other, settlers whose presence is backed by a state apparatus and an army.

Colonial history is here less a backdrop than an instruction manual. Wherever powers have sought to appropriate land, the method has proceeded in stages: take the soil, displace the population, install another community, then present the fait accompli as an ordinary situation. Extraction does not concern only minerals. It concerns the land itself, and the labour of those who work it, who are deprived of their means of subsistence.

The notion of dependency sheds light on one point: a population whose soil, water and movement are controlled sees its economy shaped to serve the centre. It becomes a reservoir of labour and a captive market rather than a society master of its own development. Every lost home tightens this vice. Displacing dozens of people also weakens them economically, and so makes them easier to dislodge still.

It will be objected that the dispatch speaks of settlers, not of the state. That is precisely the question to ask. Who lets it happen, who protects, who will investigate? The dispatch does not answer, and this silence is itself information: at this stage, nothing indicates that any officials will have to account for anything. When private violence thrives within a framework that the state tolerates or organises, the distinction between the two becomes awfully convenient.

We will need to follow what comes next: whether the families can return, whether the UN documents further, whether accountability is demanded. Capitals that condemn half-heartedly have the means to go further. They generally prefer the communiqué to the consequence. Meanwhile, dozens of people are sleeping somewhere other than their homes.