Jasper Nathaniel (87:57)
Yes, and I think that that's a really important point to like, pause on for a minute because that is actually the biggest change in the last two years is that the. Maybe I'll just take a step back and explain sort of the Smotrich takeover and then I'll lead into that. So basically, like the military occupation of the west bank in a weird way has provided some insulation between the Palestinian people and the most extremist right wing Israelis and the settlers in particular. And what I mean by that is it's not to say that the Israeli military in the west bank has ever been a benevolent force. In fact, I think it's Been just the opposite for pretty much as long as it's been there. But the military has lawyers, and these lawyers, ostensibly on some level, have to adhere to international law. And people might hear that and laugh, be like, yeah, what does editor care about international law these days? But the fact is there were these sort of bureaucratic procedures that the military was going through for decades to prove that it was sort of like within the guidelines of Geneva and the Hague. So in that sense, these guys like Smotrich who are running around the hills trying to build these little outposts, they were constantly in violation of international law. And so the military would often chase them around basically, and try to stop them because they had their own way of building illegal settlements in alignment with the, the way the government was doing it. So Smotrich understands from a young age that actually, like, his dreams of taking over the entire west bank, which they call Judea and Samaria because it's the, it's the, you know, the, the old kingdom of the kingdoms of Israel from the Old Testament days. So it has this real, like, biblical value to them. He understood that actually the, the military occupation is the biggest thing in the way of us being able to take over the entire west bank, more so than the Palestinians who are actually living there. And so what happens in February 2023? And this is a part that I think most people don't know about, because everybody knows that after October 7, the violence got much worse there. And I think it's understandable why. But what happened before that basically was after Netanyahu has to build this coalition with these far right leaders to have a majority governing coalition. SMoteric and Ben Gvir, I think people know a lot of these names by now. They're two of the guys that just instantly become ministers. Smotrich is the finance minister, which obviously that's like the Treasury Secretary in America. But the other thing that happens is Smotrich works out a deal with the Defense Minister, who at the time was Yoav Gallant. And it's pretty murky exactly how this happened, but it was almost certainly, you know, Netanyahu sort of like gifted this to Smotarich on a promise that he would, like, behave in some different ways. And so Smotarich becomes literally an additional minister in the Ministry of Defense. He's not now, you know, Smotrich is a civilian. He wasn't even allowed into the Israeli military because he was a terror supporter. But he suddenly is just given this arbitrary role as additional minister in the Ministry of Defense. And what he then does is he basically builds a entire shadow government inside of the military that sort of takes. Begins routing all of the decisions around building settlements, around demolishing Palestinian villages, around infrastructure. And it routes it away from those military lawyers who had been a pain in the ass to him for all these years, and just sends him straight to these settler ideologues like himself. And so after that happens, basically all of the guardrails that had been on the settlement movement because of the military occupation and these nominal laws they had to adhere to are just gone. And so the reason this is so significant is because technically and legally, the west bank is still under a military occupation, but it has effectively just been taken over by settler ideologues who have no respect whatsoever for the international law. And so that is even before October 7, why you saw this crazy acceleration in settlement building and why, you know, soldiers sudden became. Suddenly became emboldened and were becoming more violent. And then basically October 7th happens, and smo church immediately, immediately begins framing what happened. You know, the Hamas attack as no different from what the Palestinians in the west bank would have done. There's this quote from him where he says, you know, the Nazis in Gaza are the same Nazis in the West Bank. They want to throw us into the same sea. So he's immediately trying to collapse the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. So then that allows him to basically use the security justification to supercharge everything that he's already been doing. And so that sort of like, fundamental bureaucratic change in the way the west bank is governed, from the military to smoterich, paired with this new justification after October 7th security, that is what has allowed things to just go absolutely, the settlers to go absolutely wild in the west bank to these unprecedented land grabs. 60 Palestinian villages being chased off their land, over 1,000 people murdered in the last two years. So that's the sort of backdrop and how that all happened.
