Ethnic Cleansing Accelerates in the West Bank

Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, director of Israel-Palestine Research at the non-profit DAWN (Democracy in the Arab World Now), discusses the accelerating pace of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank,  which is sparking fears of a new genocide. He describes the history of settler violence, the U.S. role in enabling Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide, and the need for measures that could prompt Israel to chart a different path. The author of the recently published book,"From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine," written with co-author Sarah Leah Whitson, Omer-Man says international allegiance to the Oslo two-state solution has entrenched Israeli occupation and apartheid and prevented countries from challenging it or developing new strategies for resolving the conflict.

Transcript

This is Understanding Israel Palestine. I’m Margot Patterson, the producer of this week’s episode. We’ll be looking at fears of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank after the news summary.

The UN Security Council approved a U.S.-drafted resolution endorsing  the Trump peace-plan for Gaza on Nov. 17. China and Russia abstained, noting that the plan created a vague and dangerous framework for post-war governance, one which hands unchecked power to a “Board of Peace” headed by Donald Trump and an International Stabilization Force without mandates or accountability. Hamas and a broad cross section of Palestinian political groups rejected the resolution. The plan authorizes the International Stabilization Force to disarm Hamas, a key Israeli demand, and provide no clear path to Palestinian liberation. The plan a provide no clear path to Palestinian liberation and authorizes the International Stabilization Force to disarm Hamas, which Hamas s says turns the force into a party to the conflict in favor of the Israeli occupation. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas endorsed the resolution..

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Occupied Palestine, said Nov. 18 that the European Union is failing to uphold its international obligations as regards Gaza and Palestine. Speaking to reporters at the European Parliament in Brussels, Francesca Albanese rebuked the EU for not going forward with the suspension of its trade agreement with Israel due to opposition from Germany and Italy. Albanese said the failure of the EU is is more than simply inaction; Citing ongoing ties between the EU and Israel, including weapons transfers, she said the European Union is aiding the destruction of Palestine. She warned of a new genocide in the West Bank, saying ”There is an ethnic cleansing in the West Bank that is almost unprecedented in the last 80 years, and with extraordinary violence," she said.

A Nov. 18th Israeli air strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon near the city of Sidon killed 13 persons and wounded several others. Separate Israeli drone attacks earlier in the day killed two. Despite the US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah that began a year ago n November 2024, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes across Lebanon. Lebanon reports that since the truce, Israel has killed more than 270 people by October of this year, including 107 civilians and other non-combatants, with approximately 850 wounded. Israeli continued air strikes in Lebanon Nov. 19. Air strikes in Gaza that day killed 25 persons and wounded 77.

Margot Patterson: My guest today is Michael Schaeffer Omer Mann. He's the Director of Research at DAWN, the acronym for Democracy in the Arab World now, an NGO, founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018  to promote democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Arab countries. Khashoggi was slain in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul a few months later. Prior to joining DAWN, Michael Omer-Man  worked as a journalist in Israel Palestine for more than 10 years. He was the editor in chief of Plus 9 72 Magazine for seven years, and before that worked as an editor for The Jerusalem Post. His focus has been on Israel's policies of occupation and annexation. Its civil and human rights record, and the influence of the U.S.-Israel relationship over those areas. His book, “From Apartheid to Democracy, A Blueprint for Peace in Israel Palestine” was co-written with Sarah Leia Whitson, and published in September, 2025. 

Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, welcome to Understanding Israel. 

MSOM: Thanks for having me, 

MP: Michael. The medical NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres,  known in this country as Doctors Without Borders or Simply MSF, published an article in September warning of the rising threat of ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank. It wrote: “During 2025, MSF teams have witnessed policies and practices that are blatantly designed to remove people from their land and prevent any possibility of return.”

More than 1000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers over the last two years. Since the start of 2025 over 30,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes in the northern West Bank. The U.N. humanitarian office reported over 260 Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in October of this year, more than in any other month since the UN began keeping track. The UN office reported at least 29 settler attacks in the West Bank between November 4th and November 10th. The attacks continue. Could you talk about what's happening in the West Bank and put it in the context of the past two years?

MSOM:: I want to go a little further back because this is not a new phenomenon. Settler violence has been targeting Palestinians and their land and their ability to stay on that land as long as there have been settlers in the West Bank. And of course these are tactics that we've seen the Israeli settler movement use elsewhere as well. The Israeli Human Rights Organization, B’Tselem put out a report a number of years ago putting it as clearly as it can be put, it was called “Settler violence equals state violence.” And that is because the impunity with which these settlers operate. It's only possible with the implicit and explicit support of the Israeli authorities, namely the Israeli army ,and their unwillingness to intervene when these attacks happen. But also the lack of accountability afterwards and actual active participation in more cases than ever. Over the past two years we've seen the face and the M.O. of settler violence change in a very worrying direction. And this has been for a few different reasons. Obviously the main thing over the past two years was the Hamas attacks of October 7th on Israeli communities and military bases in southern Israel followed by the genocidal campaign that Israel unleashed in response. What happened at that time is that settlers, and they spoke very openly about this. saw this as an opportunity to, grab as much as they could. And the way to do that is with violence. In the first few months of the war alone, we saw dozens of Palestinian villages, depopulated, forcibly transferred due to threats and actual violence coming from settlers who were very explicit: Get out or we will come back and do worse. 

 At the same time, the Israeli army effectively deputized all of the settlement civilian security teams so that when they went out to carry out this violence, they were no longer doing it in civilian clothes, but in their military uniforms and effectively under the color of law, which means that not only was it difficult for Palestinians and Israeli human rights defenders to distinguish between the settlers and the army, even the army could no longer distinguish what was settler violence and what was state violence. Now, over the past month or so, this has gotten even worse because of the Palestinian olive harvest, which is seasonal and a time when settler violence increases, both because Palestinians are out there working their land, which settlers have their eyes on. They, the settlers, want to stop them from.using that land. But also it makes them, the Palestinians much more exposed, because they're out in the fields. And none of this would happen as I mentioned at the beginning without the support of the state and without people like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir ,who are notorious settler advocates. And Ben-Gvir, who’s in charge of the police, has even been convicted on terrorism charges related to violence against Palestinians. It's really no surprise the direction that this has gone and just how worrying it's become 

MP: Israeli leaders, uncharacteristically, decried, the settler violence that occurred ton Nov. 11. That is uncharacteristic. Why do you think they did that? 

MSOM: It’s uncharacteristic, but it's not unheard of. The Israeli government and establishment understands that this is a bad look for them, and that even their closest allies don't like seeing it. The previous administration, which didn't hesitate for a moment to support Israel and in every single thing that it did in Gaza, in Lebanon and Iran and elsewhere, actually put the first ever sanctions program against Israel executive order 141115 targeting violent settlers, a program that was replicated by European countries and Canada and others. There's a dissonance in the willingness to act on one thing or another, but for whatever reason and I can get into, if you're interested, what those reasons might be, the West in particular, and including this Trump administration, has been pushing back. Also the ways that this violence has been broadcast on Israeli television, on international television means that the Israeli authorities can't ignore it. And thirdly, with the Gaza ceasefire in effect, as tenuous as it may be, it means that there's a little bit more oxygen in the room to to pay attention to this phenomenon, which as I said, has been going at an unprecedented worrying pace, leading MSF and many others to, to warn about impending ethnic cleansing in the West Bank over the past two years .

MP:In terms of impending ethnic cleansing, how do you see that taking shape? Are you concerned about a sort of catastrophic event or more of a slow displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank? 

MSOM: As you mentioned, this is a slow process that's been going on for decades, and it certainly has been accelerated over the past two years and even in the years before that. But there's a few different ways that it happens and how it looks. One is by pushing agricultural communities off of their lands and into cities, which allows the Israeli settlers to grab as much of that land as possible. The amount of land that Israeli settlers have seized or taken control of in the West Bank over the past two years is equal in size almost to the amount of land that Israel has come to control and the Gaza Strip through two years of war. So part of it is pushing them off agricultural land. Part of it is making life more and more difficult, which is a coercive, way of pushing Palestinians to seek life elsewhere. And, as Palestinians are pushed into cities not only is their livelihood taken away and restricted, cities get more crowded.

 We've also seen massive destruction and displacement campaigns. In Palestinian cities and refugee camps I think close to 30,000 people have been displaced in Jenin and other cities and refugee camps over the past two years. And that's more directly from the army as opposed to just settlers. So there's a concerted effort and it's the aggregate.There very well could be an apocalyptic moment more akin to what we've seen in Gaza where people are just pushed out in mass or internally displaced in mass, such that they don't have anywhere to return to. But more likely we're just seeing an accelerated campaign of slowly pushing people off their land and making their lives more and more difficult to carry out in a way that they wanna stay.

 And that’s the. MO that Israel has used all over for the past 70 or 80 years. It's what happened in 1948 when 700 some odd villages were depopulated by Israeli forces in its War of Independence. And it's what happened in 1967. It's what happened at an unprecedented scale and violence in Gaza, and it's what we're seeing today in the West Bank.

MP: It’s been said that Israel is now applying some of the same measures and methods it used in its war on Gaza to the West Bank. Could you comment on that and tick through some of the ways that life has become more tenuous for Palestinians in the West Bank? 

As I said earlier, one of the first things that happened in the West Bank at the start of the Gazaf war was that the Israeli authorities deputized, and it effectively called up to the Army as almost permanent reserves, these civilian security squads or militias that operated within the settlement as civilian bodies beforehand and now as the army, which means that it effectively is the army that's carrying out a lot of this violence. Secondly, the appetite for harming Palestinians has increased out of the sort of vengeful public sentiment that erupted after October 7th and made the Gaza genocidal campaign possible. And the willingness to intervene, which was already very small, all but disappeared. That is why. I think Israeli authorities are speaking up a little bit more now, even though they have done so in the past at various intervals ,because they understand that they've lost control to some degree and that, whether or not they agree with the aims or the tactics, that losing control for a state is never a good thing. We've also seen the return of airstrikes to the West Bank, Israeli airstrikes that we hadn't seen since the Second Intifada some 20 years ago. That was something that was very new that came back at the start of the war in Gaza. But really, it's less what has been actively duplicated and more what's been allowed to happen in the shadow of the war, which is to say that very few people were paying attention, and particularly with the handover from the Biden administration to the Trump administration and the removal of all restraints, at least visible public ones, that this phenomenon has just been allowed to reach levels that, even the most seasoned and weathered activists and Palestinians and Israelis were not prepared for.

MP: In July, 2024, in response to a request by the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, the world's highest court issued an advisory opinion about the legality of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territory. It ruled that Israel's occupation is unlawful, that the Jewish settlements and the annexation of Palestinian land are in violation of international law and stated that Israel must immediately end its occupation, cease new settlement activity, remove existing settlements, and pay reparations to the Palestinian people.

 It ruled that Israel should comply with these orders by September, 2025. It's November now. It's very clear that Israel has no intention of complying with the ICJ ruling since that opinion. In fact, Israel has gone ahead with dozens of new settlements. The executive director of DAWN, Sarah Whitson, said.”Israel's defiance of the UN's deadline to end its apartheid and genocidal acts represents not just contempt of the UN, but a calculated rejection of the entire international legal order. “DAWN has recommended measures for the UN and the international community to take to pressure Israel to obey international. law. Could you talk about what some of those measures are and explain why so many countries seem so reluctant to impose any kind of coercive measures on Israel?

MSOM: The reason that so many countries are hesitant to put that type of pressure on Israel comes down to one thing and one thing alone, which is the United States. This administration in particular but almost every administration that proceeded it have been very consistent about shielding Israel from any diplomatic or international repercussions for its actions in the West Bank or anywhere else. That means vetoing, UN Security Council resolutions that could have any teeth or any at all. Itmeans threatening countries that have sought to impose their own unilateral sanctions on Israel, particularly around the Gaza war. Some of those measures, what they could be are the same tools that the international community uses against other rogue nations, be they targeted or broader sanctions, weapons embargoes. suspension from, certain privileges in the United Nations system. A renegotiation or revocation of certain trade agreements. And some of these measures we have seen countries take and, starting from the biggest, the EU announced a few months ago that it was gonna reevaluate its free trade agreement with. Israel. Now that hasn't led to anything yet, but I think just airing that and the ways that European countries in particular have shown, at least their declared loyalty to the international system and to international law, has put them in a big bind.And I think if it weren't for the United States pressuring so hard against those types of measures and already these countries needing to stay on the good graces of this administration because of the tariff wars we would see a lot more. However, we are seeing countries from the global South, in particular South Africa and Columbia, put restrictions on coal exports to Israel. We saw a royal decree in Spain that, that supposedly suspended most commerce and trade with Israel. We've seen lots of countries refuse to ship weapons to Israel, including measures in the UK and the Netherlands related to parts for the F 35 fighter jet, and, Turkey or Turqiie, as it's known no, .effectively ended its economic relationship with Israel, at least on paper very soon after the Gaza war started. These two things happen simultaneously, but they are separate tracks, the ICJ opinion and the Gaza war, But I think the Gaza war tested the patience of most of the world in a way that they are, and were willing to do a little bit more than before. So while the ICJ opinion and the following UN General Assembly resolution, giving Israel a one-year deadline to end the occupation, has not been answered positively and while Israel has certainly continued its intransigent settlement policy and all of the ugly violence that entails, which we started our conversation talking about, I do think that there's more of an appetite today to implement that type of pressure and to push back on Israel's illegal occupation and apartheid regimes, which have reached a  growing consensus in the international community that these are things that need to end and whether or not the political program exists to see the way out right now. 

And, to plug my book, there are ways to get out of it that have been explored and researched and that policy makers are aware of. It's going to require that kind of pressure to get to that point because Israel is the side with all the power and all of the backing of the most powerful nation in the world. And until that power balance changes in some way, that it'll have no incentive to change. 

MP: You may be explaining the answer that I want to  ask you, which is, DAWN was established to foster democracy and human rights and the rule of law in Arab countries. Why have Arab states provided so little opposition to Israel's war on Gaza? You know what explains it? Just simply what you already have said or are these Arab states so enmeshed with their own relationship is with Israel that they don't speak out. 

MSOM: I think it's a number of factors. One is definitely what you said, that particularly in the past few years, a lot of the Gulf states, the Emirates and others, have built strong, open, economic relationships with Israel and diplomatic ones at that. Especially countries like Qatar have used their diplomatic influence to to create very central diplomatic roles and closeness with the U.S.  as one of the main brokers of all the talks between Israel and Hamas. The more difficult answer is that the Arab states have historically, and at least since 1973 with the war that happened that year, they've done very little for the Palestinians. They've done very little to confront Israel and. Its injustices. They've done very little to pressure the United States to change its role or the European states or the other countries that tend to provide the diplomatic backstop that gives Israel the free reign to  carry on these policies.

 And they've done very little as far as treating better the Palestinians living in their own countries, whether that be in Jordan or Syria or Lebanon or Egypt. And and of course normalizing relations with Israel before the Palestinian issue has been seriously addressed, really demonstrates that the answer is not coming from the Arab countries. I know that's been a huge betrayal for a lot of Palestinians. But unfortunately, I think that's a fact that we and they and everyone else has to reckon with when looking for a way out of this. 

MP: The United States has provided protection to Israel in the UN Security Council for years.It's tolerated and enabled Occupation. Would you say it's encouraged it? In fact, the IRS has allowed tax deductible gifts to Israeli settlements for years to buy calls to end the allowance for them. Are we talking about more than simply passive enablement, but active encouragement. 

MSOM: That’s a question that I think only the policy makers and bureaucrats and civil servants enforcing and creating those policies can answer. But, whether it started out as a passive sort of allowance and not wanting to hold Israel accountable or to confront it, after so many decades of watching how that support has been used, I don't think that anybody can argue that it's done without knowing exactly what it's going to result in. And, it's very easy to make the argument that is active support, as you were saying. I think it's impossible to say that nobody knows  how this is possible. And by continuing that support the United States, and its various the ways that it supports Israel, is the number one enabler of Israel's illegal occupation and apartheid regime and the settler violence that comes from both of those. And of course, the genocide and Gaza 

MP: Talking about the genocide in Gaza, on November 11th, the emergency coordinator in Gaza for MSF, Doctors without Borders said, conditions remain desperate there and sufficient aid is not coming in. It's my understanding that Israel has yet to scale up aid at the amount it pledged to. Could you confirm whether that's true and why isn't it? 

MSOM: Yes, that is true, and it's doing that because it, in my assessment, it never had any intention of turning this into a full permanent ceasefire that included a withdrawal from Gaza and handing over the territory to Palestinians or any other international stabilizing or peacekeeping force as was envisioned in the Trump plan. And I think the Trump plan is very problematic in this regard that it leaves Israel in charge of the borders, which means that it is able to continue using food and starvation as a weapon of war, whether it's continuing to bomb or not without any end in sight, as, as long as Israel controls the border between Israel and Gaza, between Egypt and Gaza, and the maritime and air borders, that could potentially connect Gaza to the outside world, preventing a siege like this from ever happening again. As long as those things are true, which they are true today, there's no horizon for them ending under the current program. Israel's been demonstrating for 20 years that it's willing to implement collective punishment by limiting food and other commerce and humanitarian aid in and out of Gaza. And that was certainly escalated in unprecedented ways that led to the charge of genocide being, brought against Israel in the International Court of Justice and elsewhere.

 To connect it to your previous question, we know what Israel has been doing here and to leave it in charge of the borders almost guaranteeing that it will continue to use limitations on humanitarian aid, which again is food and medical supplies, in addition to the commercial transfer of those same goods as a weapon as pressure, as a way of punishing Palestinians for the acts or non acts of their unelected leaders in Gaza. Which of course is collective punishment. And particularly in the wake of such an ongoing manmade humanitarian disaster to leave those same levers in the hands of the people who created that disaster is simply I it's difficult to watch. 

MP: Do you think, is it your assessment that the aim of Israel's actions in Gaza is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza in addition to the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank?

MSOM: That's been stated openly. There's lots of contradictions within the Israeli system. And the military will say one thing and the political echelons will say different things, but they certainly have made it very clear and open that they want to make Gaza unlivable, or at least most of it. That they'd like to see most of the Palestinians leave, whether that's by force or as they call it encouraged migration.And, destroying most of the homes in Gaza and making it difficult to find food and shelter and water and medical care. These are the reasons  that the genocide charge was brought. And if that's almost worse than ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is moving one people from one place to another.Genocide is eliminating their ability to continue functioning as a society. And that means pushing them out. And if it doesn't mean pushing them out today, it means creating the conditions that life is unlivable, such that people, the moment the borders are opened, will, rightfully seek a better life. And all of those things, amount to ethnic cleansing and far more. 

MP: You and DAWN director Sarah Whitson have just published a book “From Apartheid to Democracy, a Blueprint for Peace in Israel Palestine. Talk about why you two wrote this book and what you hope to achieve with it. 

MSOM: The impetus for the book which we started writing long before October 7th, was that the international community had been so constrained by this idea that the Oslo two state process, which began 30 years ago and never resulted in two states or peace or anything.even remotely resembling either of those two, And that the process and the lack of any alternatives to it really allowed Israel to entrench and maintain this system of permanent occupation, which the ICJ has found is illegal. And made other states very reluctant to create consequences for that illegal behavior precisely because they were so committed to this two-state process. which means Israel was able to say it's waiting for the perfect Palestinian partner or the perfect political moment. And what we're arguing is that you don't have to wait for the perfect political moment. What you can do is first end the illegal acts and crimes of of occupation and apartheid. By transforming what many people have already come to the conclusion is a one state reality, an undemocratic, one state reality into a more democratic one, you can effectively, level the political playing field such that Israelis and Palestinians can decide how to resolve the bigger political questions and the questions of how many states they want to live in, whether it's one or two, or confederation or a federation or any other configuration, And to do that democratically. Something that is not possible today, first off, because if you were to hold a referendum today and it failed, the fallback would still be occupation and apartheid. And secondly, because Israel has worked for, almost a hundred years to actively stymie the emergence of an effective Palestinian leadership. And, before that sort of system of ethnic and national supremacy is dismantled,  there's really no chance of  coming to a just and fair and thus sustainable resolution to this conflict. . Now our plan is very much looking at if there were political will tomorrow, how would you go about dismantling these regimes, precisely to give policymakers and leaders around the world the language to imagine different policies. And if we're encouraging them to create pressure and sanctions against Israel, to give them an off ramp and say, okay, if you want to rejoin the community of nations, Israel, here's what you have to do

 And we think by giving them that blueprint and, we hope it spurs debate about alternate possibilities and injects vitality into a conversation that's been utterly lacking for decades now. We hope  we can help policymakers and states around the world come up with a different path forward and different policies of their own that will lead to pressure on Israel to ultimately take a different path.

MP: Last question for you, Michael. I read the final letter you wrote to readers as editor of +972 Magazine and in that letter you referred to 2013 when you began your editorship of 9 72. You mentioned that conditions in Israel-Palestine looked very different in 2013 than they did in 2020 when you were leaving — far more hopeful and certainly far more hopeful than today. So what happened in those years? What do you think went wrong? 

MSOM: I don't remember exactly what I wrote in that letter because that was some years ago. But I think it comes down to a few different things. The first I would say is that the Israeli opposition, meaning what used to be the left, all but disappeared, and with it disappeared any alternate vision for the future vis-a-vis the Palestinians, which is to say that Israelis no longer.had any hope for something different..There was nobody arguing why two states or peace or an end to the occupation could at all be beneficial or why it was the right thing to do. And with that, you saw a hardening of positions and a sort of race to the right, where the type of forces in the settler movement and those that have effectively taken over the Israeli government today speak in terms of total victory. as opposed to peace and compromise. There was certainly not a great political scene in 2013 or before that in Israel, but there was, I think more of a political camp where people could find a home if they wanted to express those ideas and were looking for an alternative.

Secondly I think that, Israelis, the generation that grew up in the post Oslo era where there was no such hope and where Israel literally built a wall between its own citizens and Palestinians such that the ability to dehumanize and and demonize the other became much easier because there was less and less face-to-face contact between the two peoples, and  that led to a real radicalization process in Jewish Israeli society. And on top of that, the fact that without a peace process, Israel has been able to maintain its regimes of occupation and apartheid and now genocide without any consequences internationally, I think really fed the Israeli sense of impunity such that there was zero incentive on the inside, from within Jewish Israeli society, to say, Hey, maybe this isn't a good idea. Irrespective of the moral or ethical or long-term consequences but simply from a real politics sense of there might be consequences. It was clear that there would not be, that nobody was coming to end the occupation. And so I think all of those things and I'm sure I'm missing a lot of other elements here, really contributed to this very strong right-wing swing where there was no alternative being presented to Israeli people, where there's no consequences for their actions and where there's a growing echo chamber that dehumanizing and solutions like ethnic cleansing are acceptable policy discussions, let alone actions that can be taken.

MP: Michael Schaefer Omer-Man, thank you so much for joining us today. 

MSOM: Thanks so much for having me.