Last Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces announced that violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians was causing “enormous damage to security in the West Bank.” A week earlier, Ronen Bar, the head of Shabak, the country’s internal-security agency, sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that settler violence leads to “chaos and loss of control; the damage to Israel is indescribable.” Bar added that the Israeli police has been helpless to stop the attacks, if not secretly supportive of them.

Just yesterday, a Turkish American woman was shot dead by the Israeli military while protesting at a West Bank settlement. But most of the West Bank violence is of a different nature, involving assaults by settlers on Palestinian civilians. July and August saw a terrible spate of these incidents.

A group of off-duty reservists from a settlement shot and killed a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem. Settlers attacked Palestinians, foreigners, and Israelis in the village of Kusra; shot a Palestinian and threw stones at a pizzeria in Hawara; burned fields and threw stones in the village of Rujib; attacked Palestinians with batons in the village of Susya; threw stones and burned the car of four Bedouin Israeli women and a baby in the settlement of Givat Ronen; and rampaged through the village of Jit, shooting a Palestinian dead.

These are acts of terror, meant to scare people and wreak havoc. They are not part of any military operation, even though in some cases, IDF soldiers have been present and stood by. And few such incidents tend to capture the attention of the mainstream Israeli news media, let alone the security forces.

The episodes in Jit and Givat Ronen were exceptions. In Jit, where dozens of masked settlers burned cars, vandalized property, and attacked residents, reserve soldiers on the scene did nothing to stop them. But Israeli police and Shabak forces have since arrested four settlers—likely because the White House called for the criminals to be held to account, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, posted on X that he was “appalled” by the settlers’ violence. In Givat Ronen, the four women who accidentally drove into the settlement, only to come under a hail of stones, tear gas, window smashing, and death threats, were from Rahat, a Bedouin village in the south of Israel. Had the women been run-of-the-mill West Bank Palestinians, as the settlers assumed, rather than Israeli citizens, their story might well have gone unreported.

Settler violence against Palestinians is certainly not a new story. When I researched my novel The Hilltop, published in the U.S. in 2014, I heard about and even witnessed such acts: Settlers physically assaulted Palestinians, burned their olive trees, vandalized their property. But the past year has seen a dramatic increase in the number of attacks.

[Read: ‘You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba’]

The chaos of war may be one reason for this. The settlers see the level of aggression that the state is employing against Palestinians in Gaza. Perhaps motivated by their own feelings of humiliation and desire for revenge after the Hamas attack of October 7, they take advantage of the war footing to employ similar force and brutality against Palestinians in the West Bank, knowing that the world’s attention is fixed on other theaters.

But perhaps the more important factor is that the Israeli establishment is supporting settler violence to an entirely new degree. Not only are the IDF or police failing to stop the attacks, but members of the Knesset openly praise and legitimize them. One such politician, Limor Son Har-Melech, suggested that the assault on the Bedouin women was justified because it “could have been a case of espionage.” Netanyahu’s right-wing minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, presides over the national police force and is particularly supportive of the settler movement. His subordinates seem to understand, even when not getting direct instructions, that they are not to stand in the way of rampaging settlers. The head of Shabak intimated as much in his letter—and Ben-Gvir has since called for his dismissal.

Foreign governments, amazingly, have been the ones to step into this vacuum of law enforcement and governance. Since the beginning of the year, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan have placed financial sanctions on individual settlers, as well as particular outposts and right-wing organizations. Such penalties aren’t game changers, but they do hamper the ability of those sanctioned to carry on their regular activities.

Adam Tsachi is a film scholar from the settlement of Tekoa whom I befriended during my Hilltop research. I asked him via WhatsApp what he made of the recent wave of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. He responded:

I deeply oppose this behavior and I can say that the absolute majority of settlers I know—and I know many—are opposed and shocked by it very much. The attackers are a violent handful who do not represent in any way the majority. And it is terrible. First and foremost, they hurt innocent people. Then they hurt us, the settlement movement, discrediting and demonizing it. Finally, they harm the state of Israel.

He defined stopping the violence as a “critical national mission” and lamented that the government seemed to lack the necessary enforcement mechanisms. And he sent me links to statements by settler leaders and op-eds in right-wing newspapers expressing similar sentiments.

I believe in Tsachi’s honesty, and I believe him when he says that some others in the settlements also think like him. But when I followed the links he sent me, I found the statements and op-eds from settler leaders condemning the violence very general and lacking in context. One portrayed the instigators as “dropout youths from all over the country,” as though these weeds had not grown in their own garden; others claimed that the altercations had been started by Palestinians. I was reminded of the time when an extremist with ties to settlers assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995: No real self-reflection or regret emanated from the movement that had produced that crime. Here again was what felt like a rushed, frightened effort to cut losses after a line had been crossed.

[Read: Israel’s disaster foretold]

Settler violence is an emanation of the doctrine of Jewish superiority, which to my mind is disgusting and shameful, a racist ideology as bad as any in history. The manifestations of this worldview on the ground must be crushed forcefully and quickly. But the Israeli establishment has leaned the other way: The escalation of violence in the West Bank over the past year is the result not of random acts but of a government that has encouraged it and can count the results among its disastrous failures.

I don’t think that Israel’s politics will remain like this forever. This government is an anomaly that will one day come to an end. But settler violence has already inflicted enormous damage: to innocent lives and property, to the future of coexistence, to Israel’s legitimacy and security, and to the quiet endeavor to reach agreements that might end the latest cycle of war. In the absence of principled enforcement, we will need to rely on the continued help of foreign governments, and to strengthen our resistance inside Israel.

Calling itself the world’s first “AI-driven solar company,” Monalee is cutting the soft costs associated with solar by more than 50%, and they’re passing those savings – sometimes thousands of dollars – directly to the homeowner.

A screenshot from the adaptation Citizenk took the time to remind us of an old, yet incredibly ambitious project, Blade Runner: the Aquarel Edition. It's a shot by shot recreation of the movie, but done in watercolors and it is stunning to see.

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Enlarge / A Waymo self-driving car in front of Google's San Francisco headquarters, San Francisco, California, June 7, 2024. (credit: Getty Images)

Silicon Valley's latest disruption? Your sleep schedule. On Saturday, NBC Bay Area reported that San Francisco's South of Market residents are being awakened throughout the night by Waymo self-driving cars honking at each other in a parking lot. No one is inside the cars, and they appear to be automatically reacting to each other's presence.

Videos provided by residents to NBC show Waymo cars filing into the parking lot and attempting to back into spots, which seems to trigger honking from other Waymo vehicles. The automatic nature of these interactions—which seem to peak around 4 am every night—has left neighbors bewildered and sleep-deprived.

NBC Bay Area's report: "Waymo cars keep SF neighborhood awake."

According to NBC, the disturbances began several weeks ago when Waymo vehicles started using a parking lot off 2nd Street near Harrison Street. Residents in nearby high-rise buildings have observed the autonomous vehicles entering the lot to pause between rides, but the cars' behavior has become a source of frustration for the neighborhood.

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The US, always a questionable friend, threatens, if Trump wins, to become our greatest threat.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  4^th July 2024

Soon after Labour forms a government, it will find itself in a new world. It now seems likely that Donald Trump will win the presidency of the United States. If he does, this should bring an end to our abiding fantasies about a special relationship.

It was always an illusion. After the astonishing, heroic intervention of the US in the second world war preserved us from invasion and fascism, we built a romantic fairytale of enduring love. But both countries act in their own interests. While the UK and Europe have leant on the US for security, the dominant power has long used us as an instrument of policy.

Our joint enterprise has often been devastating to other people. Take, to give just a few examples, the US-UK coup that overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the 2003 Iraq war, or the staunch support offered by Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak for the unfolding genocide in Gaza.

Our countries have also collaborated in developing a global trade and legal regime that favours capital over the democratic state. One example is the system known as investor-state dispute settlement, which grants offshore courts primacy over national sovereignty.

If Trump is installed in the White House again, the US government, always a questionable friend, is likely to become a clear threat to our peace, security and wellbeing. It will rip up what remains of global security and detente, environmental and human rights agreements, and international law. The age of multilateralism, flawed as it always was, would be over, and something much worse will take its place.

In short, the UK and Europe will need to find the means of defending ourselves against a Trump regime and its allies. We might also need, as the lessons of the past century are unlearnt and the far right rises again, to defend ourselves against each other.

Trump has developed a special relationship; not with us, but with Vladimir Putin, to whom he defers as the iron dictator he would like to be. Russia sought to help Trump win in 2016, tried again in 2020 and has long backed Trump for 2024. As if in return, when he was president, Trump announced that he trusted Putin ahead of US intelligence agencies. Subsequently, he praised Putin for his invasion of Ukraine, and has stated he would encourage Russia to attack any Nato member that doesn’t spend heavily on defence.

One result of this special relationship is that Trump, if elected, is likely to end US military support for Ukraine. This means that if European nations don’t step up, Putin will be able to complete his invasion. It seems unlikely that he will stop there. A Kremlin memo last year announced that Russia would take “symmetrical and asymmetrical measures necessary to suppress” such “unfriendly acts” as the use of sanctions. In February, the Danish defence minister warned that Russia could launch an attack on a Nato country within five years. Poland, the Baltic states … ? With a supporter in the White House and the possible collapse of Nato, why would Putin not pursue his advantage?

Ukraine’s strongest ally in western Europe, Emmanuel Macron, is now flailing, while Putin’s friends in Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and Slovakia sense that history is on their side.

When circumstances change, so should our positions, however disquieting it might be. I have long called for disarmament. This made sense when the Ministry of Defence concluded in 2003 that “there are currently no major conventional military threats to the UK or Nato … it is now clear that we no longer need to retain a capability against the re-emergence of a direct conventional strategic threat” and when Nato decided a few years later that “large-scale conventional aggression against the alliance will be highly unlikely”.

But the situation has changed. With great discomfort, I find myself open to arguments for rearmament. I now believe we need to enhance our conventional capabilities, both to support other European nations against Russia and – something that seemed unimaginable a few years ago – perhaps to defend ourselves.

Currently, according to a former senior official at the MoD, the UK’s forces would be unable to “fight and win an armed conflict of any scale”. We would rapidly run out of ammunition, could not prevent missile strikes and could not stop an attack on our territory.

Conversely, this is also a good moment for the UK government to rethink its position on nuclear weapons. It’s time to recognise that our “independent nuclear deterrent” has never been independent. Because key components are supplied and controlled by the US, we cannot operate it without US consent. So, if Trump regains the White House, it would not be a deterrent, either: Putin knows we cannot use it. The UK’s nuclear programme is a £172bn heap of bricks. Why waste more money on it?

We are faced throughout our lives with a choice of consistencies. Either our values or our positions can remain unchanged, but not both. Consistently defending our values – such as opposition to imperialism, fascism and wars of aggression – demands that we should be ready to alter our assessments as the nature of these threats changes.

The UK’s foreign policy will require other sharp turns. On Israel and Palestine, a Labour government should defend peace, justice and international law. Following Keir Starmer’s initial moral failure, Labour’s position has begun to change: David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has said that if the international criminal court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, he would be prepared to implement it. Now he should also demand a complete embargo of British arms to Israel.

As Trump rips up US environmental commitments, other countries will have to redouble theirs to avoid planetary catastrophe. It will do us no economic harm to embrace 21st-century technologies while the US remains in the fossil age. All this becomes especially urgent in the UK if that gurning minion of both Trump and Putin, Nigel Farage, achieves a foothold in politics. The collaborators are already lining up to betray their country.

Independence from the US is difficult, hazardous and uncertain of success. But remaining a loyal servant of the US if Trump becomes commander-in-chief is a certain formula for disaster. There is nothing we can do to stop his election, except to plead with US voters not to let a convicted felon, coup plotter, sex assaulter, liar, fraud and wannabe dictator into the White House. But we can seek to defend ourselves against it.

www.monbiot.com