The West Bank has known many instances of rioting by Jews in response to terrorist attacks, but what we saw on Sunday evening in the Palestinian town of Hawara seems to be unprecedented in scope.
Over a period of hours, scores of settlers ran riot in the town after the murder of Hillel and Yagel Yaniv, two brothers from the settlement of Har Bracha. The rioters assaulted Palestinians and torched homes and vehicles. The army and the police, which had stationed relatively small forces there despite mounting warning signs of what was about to happen, failed to stop the rioting.
On social media, videos were uploaded showing the rioters taking a break from the violence in order to say the evening prayer and kaddish for the victims of the terror attack. It is hard to think of a more serious distortion of the country’s declared values than prayers uttered by these Cossacks as they are pouring out their wrath on the Palestinians of Hawara and destroying their property.
The Hawara pogrom was not born in a vacuum. It has an ideological mother and father who have never hidden their aspirations. Immediately after the murder of the brothers, posters were plastered across Samaria calling for settlers to march out of the settlement of Yitzhar to Hawara to demand revenge. The deputy chairman of the Samaria Council (who for some reason remains a deputy battalion commander in the reserves) took to Twitter to call for the village to be destroyed immediately, saying “there’s no room for mercy.” Bezalel Smotrich, who is both finance minister and minister in the Defense Ministry, responded to the tweet with a like – which he later removed after facing criticism.
Somehow, none of this was enough to spur the security forces into vigorous action or for the Shai (Judea and Samaria) district police’s intelligence unit to issue a high alert. Who knows – perhaps the police were too busy in studying the plans of dangerous leftist anarchists inside Israel, ahead of the next big demonstration in Tel Aviv.
Another question relates to the Shin Bet security service’s Jewish division. Sources at the agency said on Monday that because the disturbances involved public disorder that was known about in advance, it was the Israel Police’s responsibility to deal with it. But that’s not a convincing answer, so it is commendable that the Shin Bet took action and began investigating the affair on Monday, albeit belatedly.
As the extent of the rioting was becoming apparent, Daniella Weiss, one the settlement movement’s leaders, was interviewed on a Kan television broadcast Sunday night and rejected calls to condemn the rioting or urge the rioters to leave Hawara. On Monday morning, Zvika Fogel, a lawmaker belonging to Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, contended that burning villages was the best way to deter terrorand that the rioters had created a level of deterrence for Israel not seen since Operation Protective Shield in 2002.
Fogel is well known to long-time military correspondents from the days of the second intifada as a friendly staff officer fond of being interviewed. After he retired from military service, he ran for mayor of Be’er Sheva as part of the Shinui party (headed by Tommy Lapid). What went wrong afterwards isn’t clear, but if things calm down, maybe the IDF will one day conduct an internal investigation as to how a man with that kind of moral sense succeeded in reaching the rank of brigadier general.
Still, those who are surprised by the extreme right’s reaction to the attack simply haven’t been following carefully enough what has been happening in the West Bank recently. All the ingredients for an explosion are there, this time around ready to be detonated due to a serious systemic failure on the part of all the security forces. Two hours after the terror attack, the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Central Command and the head of the Judea and Samaria Division were at the scene. Later, the head of the Samaria Brigade arrived, and not long after that, Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi and senior officers met in order to conduct a situational assessment. By the time the meeting ended at about 9 P.M., some 20 homes and stores in Hawara were aflame.
Only a few hundred meters separate the outskirts of Hawara and the brigade headquarters. If I remember correctly, from the meeting room, which sits at the crest of the hill that the base occupies, you have a view of the entire village. If someone had bothered to open a window, perhaps the army brass would have detected the stench emanating from the burning cars and buildings right under their noses.
The IDF admits the failure and says local forces should have responded more assertively. At the time of the rioting, there were two companies of Border Police on the scene, who were joined by a reserve battalion. As night fell, a regular paratroopers brigade also arrived after being called at the last minute from the Elyakim base. But it didn’t have enough time to prepare. The settlers’ protest wasn’t of the ordinary kind. The army believes that in addition to rioters who acted spontaneously, the violence was led by an organized group that had planned in advance to torch as many houses as possible and had divided up tasks among themselves.
Sunday night, as the security forces struggled to contain the rioting, and were forced to cut back the scale of the manhunt underway for the terrorist who had killed the two brothers, they had to contend with another distraction. Hundreds of settlers, led by Weiss, returned to Evyatar, the West Bank outpost that was evacuated voluntarily by the settlers who had quietly returned to it in May 2021 as Operation Guardian of the Walls was under way in Gaza.
On Monday, the IDF and police made several attempts to evacuate the site again, a task that became significantly more complicated when Ben-Gvir, the minister in charge of the police, arrived at the outpost to hold an emergency meeting with the lawmakers from his party. The insanity of the current situation, the strange distribution of powers in the territories and the authority given to ministers of the extreme right, was amply demonstrated to the IDF command in the territories. Things cannot continue this way, they said on Monday.
Above this unprecedented rioting hovers the somewhat elusive figure of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is the one who opened the door to the madness when he decided to give Smotrich and Ben-Gvir unprecedented power in the current government, hoping that they would help him get out of his criminal trial.
On Sunday evening, at the urgent request of senior security officials, Netanyahu released a video in which he called on Israelis “not to take the law into their own hands,” despite the anger and sorrow over the death of the two brothers. However, as time goes on, Netanyahu will find it harder and harder to ride the tiger that he let loose with his return to power. The frenzy the country has entered, under his full responsibility, since he launched the governmental coup, is now affecting the territories as well.
The question is whether he can put the genie of violence back in its bottle with just three-and-a-half weeks until the start of Ramadan. Since the beginning of the year, 13 Israelis have been killed in Jerusalem and the West Bank and more than 50 Palestinians have died. These are numbers the likes of which we haven’t seen since the final days on the second intifada, excepting perhaps for a few weeks during the 2015 “lone wolf” terror wave.
The events in Hawara cast a somewhat pathetic light on the American effort to restore calm in the West Bank through the conference held in the Jordanian town of Aqaba on Sunday. The Israeli position at the conference and the criticism leveled at it by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir after the terror attack, only served to underscore the impossible situation the prime minister has created for himself. At the conference his envoys signed a memorandum of understanding with the Palestinians in which Israel pledged to gradually reduce military operations in Area A and to freeze new construction in the settlements for several months.
In practice, Israel should have no problem making such promises since the government has already approved legalizing nine outposts and plans to build 9,000 homes (originally, there was talk of 14,000, a number that was cut under U.S. pressure). But even that was too much for the ministers of the far right, who publicly disowned the pledge.
At a time when Netanyahu needs the Americans to coordinate efforts to disrupt the Iranian nuclear project, yet annoys them day in and day out with Israeli actions in the territories and the governmental coup, he has yet another embarrassment in the West Bank to contend with. His government is simply incapable of fulfilling international obligations or establishing clear policies. As time passes, it is becoming more difficult to understand how the prime minister intends to navigate his way through this – between the protests and refusal to serve in the reserves, between the deteriorating economy and American pressure – all happening amid the billowing smoke arising in the territories.