Version imprimableAs expected, the elections are being used as a pretext for a wave of racist and genocidal remarks. Almost the whole of Israeli society agrees on the essentials: acceptance of the genocide and rejection of any Palestinian state. Ben-Gvir outbids the rest with a video featuring concentration camps where Palestinian prisoners are starving, while Smotrich promises the annexation of the West Bank. They certainly belong to the Israeli far right, but Netanyahu and his “opponents” are campaigning on the backs of the Palestinians, or rather their corpses.
Lebanon, Gaza, West Bank... the horror continues
In Lebanon, Israel has resumed its military attacks, using the pretext of the sending of two FPV drones by Hezbollah to massively bomb the south of Nabatiyeh, already heavily affected. Several Israeli strikes have caused deaths in Gaza, including children, in the middle of the new school year.
The situation is most tense in the West Bank. On 2 September, in Masafer Yatta, the Israeli army destroyed the homes of 12 Palestinian families without warning, leaving 70 people, including 28 children, homeless. This is the 66th Palestinian community to be fully displaced since October 2023, while partial displacement has left thousands more homeless. In addition, 32,000refugees were expelled in January 2025 from the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nour camps.
The first four months of 2026 saw as many forced displacements in the West Bank as the whole of 2025. The violence also left nearly a thousand injured and 23 dead. Under Netanyahu’s government, Israeli settlers have established 248 new settlements in the West Bank, 65 of them since the beginning of the year. The settlement project is organized by all the bodies of the Israeli administration: while pretending to criticize the violence of the settlers, the state plans their settlement, their equipment and their protection.
Settlers in the vanguard of the Israeli state
The Israeli state relies on these semi-civilian and semi-military groups to pursue its projects while masking its involvement, if that is still a goal in 2026. The colonial project is indeed less and less concealed. Israeli personalities now describe it as such, such as Efraim Sneh, a former minister, who speaks of “ethnic cleansing” in the New York Times.
But settlers always pave the way for the Israeli state: in mid-August, the Ministry of Housing launched a call for tenders for 1,234 settlement housing units in the so-called E1 area. Considered “empty”, it stretches from the east of Jerusalem to the Jordanian border in Area C. Nearly5,000 Palestinians live there and are threatened with eviction. The call for tenders expires on the eve of the elections: a grand manoeuvre to impose the fait accompli. The construction of E1 would cut the West Bank between the north and the south and further fragment the territorial confetti of a hypothetical Palestinian state.
International condemnation is multiplying without being followed up. In August, seven Western countries — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada and Norway — called the tenders “unacceptable” saying they would undermine the two-state solution by breaking Palestinian territorial continuity. As usual, they are content to describe what they are letting happen.
The French minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, has affirmed, without irony, that France was the country that had done the most for the Palestinians. The construction of E1 is a colonial project of ethnic cleansing in a genocidal context. Several European banks, especially French ones, are solicited to finance these settlements, at the risk of becoming complicit in a crime against humanity. The state that claims to do the most for Palestine could start by prohibiting them.
10 September 2026
Translated by International Viewpoint from l’Anticapitaliste.
