This weekend B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights org, came out and said what Israelis and Palestinians have long known: settler violence is state sponsored terrorism.
To understand this you need to go back to 1967, when the Israeli government had a plan to take over the West Bank, but publicly treated the settler takeover of the West Bank as if it were done organically, by accident.
Subsequent research has shown over and over again that the Israeli government funnelled money and weapons to early settlers and we also know that it deployed the IDF to protect them. The early settlers, especially in Hebron, were violent race supremacists whose extremist doctrine directly connects to the massacre at the Ibrahimi mosque in 1994.
Israel has, with US blessing, always maintained a policy of ambiguity in the West Bank. Settlements are Israeli not governed by all the laws of Israel. Outside their fences, it is definitely not Israel. But increasingly, as land theft continues, these lands are also definitively not Palestine.
There has long been a revolving door between the military and settlers, most obviously where land stolen from Palestinians for military outposts, military firing ranges or training areas is turned over for settlers. This is never legally explicit, although it has happened enough in the past five decades that it is clearly planned.
Since the mid-1990s, the other big change has been the revolving door between extremist settlers and combat troops operating in the West Bank, as religious nationalists are now taking over the Israeli military and security services, which used to be bastions of secular "realists".
The ambiguity that lies at the heart of the West Bank project, namely that the violence, theft, damage and terror to which Palestinians have been subjected daily since 1967 under the watchful eye of the IDF, is unravelling.
The new generation of unashamed race supremacists like Naftali Bennett run Israel and openly talk about their comfort with apartheid, their musings on further ethnic cleansing and their aspirations to settle the West Bank.
So, a new step in the public consciousness is emerging. Just as people talked for the first time openly about Israeli apartheid 15 years ago and it is now firmly part of public discourse today, so B'Tselem is helping the world understand how apartheid work
... keep reading on reddit ➡Almost every discussion I see on terror today skips over any notion of the US being a purveyor of state terror. I’ve found some good things regarding the Phoenix Program in Vietnam but little else. I feel like the acceptable definition of terrorism is deliberately or necessarily pre-exemptive of any violent, repressive actions the US takes and I would like to expand my definitions and understanding of the topic.
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2016.1159069
- URL: tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2016.1159069
Thank you
>##REUTERS
>^WORLD ^NEWS ^December ^24th, ^2025 ^/ ^4:22 ^PM ^/ ^ONE ^DAY ^AGO
>###USA VR games banned in China after apparent terror campaign
>____
>NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Following a spate of incidents in which Chinese VR users reported being terrorized by "horrifying" photorealistic games depicting PLA terror bombings against civilians and insurgents, the PFC's Security Directorate has removed all USA-based VR games from the Euphoria platform. According to Security Directorate officials, the games were designed to appear as mindless clickbait, of the sort that see millions of downloads on common media platforms, before slowly hijacking the platform to maximize user immersion and trap the user in the program, then subjecting them to a photorealistic depiction of a military terror bombing campaign in Myanmar or Xinjiang. Many victims are reported to be receiving psychiatric therapy after experiencing PTSD-like symptoms. The incident is believed to have strongly damaged consumer trust in the Euphoria platform.
Introduced: Sponsor: Sen. Susan Collins [R-ME]
This bill was referred to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary which will consider it before sending it to the Senate floor for consideration.
