Mike Huckabee’s intervention provides a concrete test of Omer Bartov’s argument about occupation, unequal protection and Israeli institutions.  This is the first of three posts. It tests Omer Bartov’s diagnosis against settler violence in the West Bank; the second asks whether Jews could remain under Palestinian sovereignty; the third examines why American politics may now be placing limits on Israeli conduct.

U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee was an unlikely person to use the word “terrorists” for violent Israeli settlers. A Baptist minister and committed supporter of Jewish claims to Judea and Samaria, he has long stood on the side of the settlement movement. Yet after attacks on Palestinian American families in Qusra and Turmus Ayya, he publicly crossed a line that many Israeli and American officials had avoided.  “If they burn a car, if they torch a mosque, if they go into someone’s home and vandalize it,” Huckabee said during his September visit to Turmus Ayya, the conduct goes beyond ordinary crime. “It’s an act of terror.”  His intervention does not settle the argument over Omer Bartov’s new book, Israel: What Went Wrong? It does, however, give us a specific case through which to test it.

Bartov’s book asks how Zionism changed from a movement seeking Jewish emancipation into what he describes as an increasingly militarized, expansionist and exclusionary state ideology. His argument is much broader than the West Bank, and his conclusion that Israel committed genocide in Gaza remains the most disputed part of his work.  But one part of his analysis can be considered independently of that conclusion: Bartov argues that a prolonged occupation changes not only the people living under it but also the state and society exercising power. When two populations live in the same territory under different political and legal arrangements, unequal treatment gradually becomes routine.

That claim is visible in the West Bank.........

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