The brutality—and frequency—of violent attacks on Palestinian communities in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has become so appalling that even U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently expressed “concern” over it.
“That is a topic we follow very closely,” he said. “I think you’ll see the government there do something about it.”
Not only Rubio appears to have been moved to say—if not actually do—“something about it.” IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir spoke out against it, Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth (the West Bank’s military commander) issued an entire letter against it, and even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bothered to show up in person at Israel’s Central Command headquarters, where he—so it was reported—“pounded the table”.
That any of these nothingburgers is even dignified with reporting is no less than pathetic. These are cost-free public relations fixes for Israel’s national project of ethnically cleansing growing areas of occupied Palestinian land of as many Palestinians as possible. This is not a project of some “out-of-control hilltop teens,” the oft-deployed lie Israel used until recently as its earlier line of PR nonsense. It is a state-led project, expressing—if anything—the extent to which Israel is, in fact, in control: controlling more land with fewer Palestinians.
One vivid way of seeing through the propaganda is by identifying a key aspect that is carefully absent from all the recent verbiage: return. None of the abovementioned officials—or their many peers in that chorus of hypocrisy, carefully posturing now to be “concerned”—is demanding, or even speaking of, that most obvious remedy to the violent displacement of dozens of Palestinian communities over the past two-and-a-half years: that those that have been displaced will be compensated, protected, and allowed to safely return to the lands they were uprooted from. According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem’s figures, Israel forcibly displaced (as of March 16 2026, since October 7, 2023) 59 Palestinian communities, home to more than 4,003 people, in Areas C and B of the West Bank. They should all be allowed to return.
Another assured way for spotting nonsense is noting the strange phenomenon of people in power doing everything in order to avoid using, well, their power. Moving their lips, writing letters, even pounding on a table! But since when does a military commander write a letter in order to achieve an objective? If Bluth was genuinely concerned with the war crime of forcible transfer committed under his watch, he would issue his officers an order and follow up on its implementation. Instead, he wrote a letter. Similarly, when Rubio was asked about expecting potential “repercussions” if “attacks continue against the Palestinians,” he flatly replied, “I don’t”.
Finally, it is worth remembering for how long Israel has been “failing” in dealing with “settler violence.” More than 40 years ago, Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp resigned from leading a special Israeli government team appointed to examine “law enforcement” over Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Approximately a year after issuing a scalding interim report detailing her team’s findings, Karp wrote to the Attorney General that “no real action has been taken to draw the conclusions required by the report, and it remains ignored.”
Really, at what point will it finally be recognized that a decades-old “failure to take action” is in fact not a break in the system, but rather a key part of the system itself—the system which is using all forms of violence against Palestinians in order to displace them? That state-organized violence can be bureaucratic, using the Israeli-controlled planning committees to designate Palestinian homes as “illegal,” then issuing demolition orders against them? Or it can be applied through direct military action, as in the Gaza Strip or throughout Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank? Or it can be in the form of political backing, legal impunity, and state-funded infrastructure underwriting the supposedly non-state violence of repeated pogroms against Palestinian communities?
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Rubio was correct in commenting that “there’s a lot going on in the world right now.” Indeed. Be that as it may, what Israel does in the West Bank is underwritten by its closest ally—the United States. As such, American citizens appalled by Israeli actions against Palestinian civilians should know that their government hasn’t gone beyond that lowest of diplomatic bars: “concern.”
State sanctioned ethnic violence shouldn’t be met with hollow “concern.” It is a war crime, and it should be dealt with as such: not with letters, but with accountability.
