Neither vicious
settler violence nor unusually blatant Biden
administration criticism have given the Israeli government pause as it goes ahead with its irresponsible
decision to rebuild the settlement at Homesh, in the northern West Bank.
Last week, despite US requests to cease and desist the process of rebuilding the settlement (“The Homesh outpost in
the West Bank is illegal; it is illegal even under Israeli law,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price), the
government of Israel went ahead and connected this rogue settlement to the water grid. Haaretz ran a poignant
editorial, commenting that “in his sixth term as prime minister, Netanyahu believes that the international
community in general and the United States in particular talk a lot but in fact let Israel do whatever it pleases
in the occupied territories.” And Israel’s leading strategic affairs think tank, the Institute for National
Strategic Studies (INSS) published an unusually scathing
report on the topic of Homesh, concluding that the government of Israel “prefers to undermine the rule of
law, violate Israel’s commitments to the United States, and pay the price for the escalation of terrorism in the
northern West Bank in order to advance the ideology of the radical right wing in the government, which seeks to
chain the West Bank forever to the State of Israel and thwart any chance of a political-territorial compromise with
the Palestinians.”
