On Shabbat at 2:24 P.M. a WhatsApp message appeared: “[The West Bank village of] Burin is under attack by gangs of settlers… And while the residents were trying to extinguish the fires, they were attacked.”
A video clip by Yesh Din Volunteers for Human Rights accompanied the report by Jack Khoury on Haaretz. In it five young men are seen in typical settlers’ masks, emerging from a smoking olive grove and climbing up the mountain, in the direction of the settlement of Yitzhar, according to Burin residents.
The message also included a picture of a section of orchard engulfed in flames, and a video clip in which a breathless voice narrates what we can see: Four young men, masked as in the previous video, skipping down towards the people trying to extinguish the fire.
A video taken by Palestinians showing Israeli settlers setting fire to Palestinian fields near the West Bank village of Burin.
The messages were sent in a Palestinian WhatsApp group called "Documentation of Settler Attacks." On Saturday, two laconic reports also appeared in the group: “For the second time in hours, the settlers are attacking resident Abu Amer on the edges of the village of Tekoa” and “Settlers are circulating among the homes of the residents in the Arab al-Ka'abneh (Maarjat) area northwest of Jericho this morning.”
A video clip from the same day in the same village shows four armed female soldiers next to a fence and a sheep's pen, three of them shouting at a Palestinian, whose hand is visible in the frame, “Hey, hey, quiet,” “Shut your mouth” among other unclear calls. Behind them stands a Jew wearing a large kippa, in a white shirt (it's Shabbat, after all) armed with tzitzit (ritual fringes) and a rifle. He doesn’t say a word. A herd of goats behind him emerges when they hear cries in Arabic of “Out, get out.”
The scene isn’t clear in itself, but the body language, the soldiers’ shouts and the silence of the armed Jew say it all: Here is the lord and master, there are the people whose job it is to guard him, and the Palestinians, who are a nuisance to be gotten rid of.
One of the residents in Maarjat explained to me what happened. Settlers from a nearby violent outpost sent their herd to this Bedouin village so that they could claim that it had been “stolen” and invade the village following the event. The residents insisted on blocking the settlers with their bodies and removing their uninvited herd.
This is one in a series of daily harassments, because of which the Palestinian shepherds can no longer take their herds out to pasture. In this way, thanks to harassment by settlers and the soldiers who protect them, several communities of shepherds have been forced in the past two to three years to leave their homes.
Every day at least five similar texts are sent in the WhatsApp group, sometimes seasoned with documentation of demolitions of buildings and water cisterns by the Civil Administration. This is a broadcast, in real time, of the progress of Jewish settler colonialism and of the planned, step-by-step assault, whose goal is to continue to expel the Palestinians from their land.
For every assault that reaches the media because harm was caused to people and property, there are dozens of attacks that are simply daily incidents, which only reach WhatsApp.
This consecutive live broadcast is painful proof of the impotence of those opposed to state terrorism and of some of us, journalists, who would like to investigate each case, but cannot do so. And it also illustrates the fact that the Palestinian leadership has lost its way. It maintains security coordination with Israel but doesn’t see fit to protect its people from the predators.