Why Israelis Don't Flinch When Settlers Kill Palestinians - Israel News - Haaretz.com
Since Saturday evening, all eyes are on Israel and Iran's macabre military dance. Last Friday morning feels like a different world – but a no less dangerous one.
At about 6:30 A.M. that day, a 14-year-old Israeli shepherd settler, Binyamin Ahimeir, took his herd from the outpost in the Samaria region of the West Bank called Malachei Hashalom – "angels of peace," a term drawn from a traditional song welcoming the Sabbath – to graze. Ahimeir wandered toward Palestinian villages north of Ramallah. A few hours later, his herd returned without him.
News bulletins throughout the day reported on the search, noting that the army and Shin Bet security service were considering all possibilities – injury, dehydration – with no evidence of an attack at that point. But settler groups descended on nearby Palestinian villages; the army got involved and the clashes escalated. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs described what happened:
"On 12 and 13 April, following the boy's disappearance, large groups of Israeli settlers raided at least 17 Palestinian villages and communities in Ramallah, Nablus, and Jerusalem governorates... Two Palestinians, including a 17-year-old boy, were killed in Al-Mughayyir and Beitin, and at least 45 were injured. Some 40 percent (18) of those injured were shot with live ammunition.
A Palestinian inspects the damage to a home in the West Bank village of Al-Mughayyir near Ramallah on April 13, 2024, after an attack by Israeli settlers on the villageCredit: AFP
"20 households have been displaced when their homes were set on fire, and dozens of homes and vehicles were destroyed or [damaged]. Additionally, several agricultural structures sustained damage, with initial information indicating the killing of 50 heads of livestock and the stealing of another 120 sheep in Al-Mughayyir village."
At 1 P.M. on Saturday, Ahimeir's body was found, presumably killed by Palestinians from the area. Much of the violence and at least one Palestinian death had already happened.
These events are almost a complete replay of February 2023, when Palestinians killed two brothers, Hillel and Yagel Yaniv, near Nablus. The murders sparked violent vigilante attacks by settlers on the entire town of Hawara. When it was over, a Palestinian had been killed, and the long line of burnt cars looked much like the rows of charred Israeli vehicles later in the year, on October 7. Many Israelis immediately labeled the Hawara events a pogrom – not just as a political statement but as a description.
Armed Israeli settlers gather on a hill overlooking the West Bank village of Al-Mughayyir near Ramallah last weekendCredit: AFP
There were some key differences between the two events. Last February, Israelis were reeling from an uptick in deadly Palestinian attacks on civilians and escalating Israel Defense Forces raids throughout the West Bank, but they were still shocked by the collective vengeance and mob violence committed against the residents of Hawara. There was reckoning, conversation and some condemnation from a few political leaders.
At present, in the days since Ahimeir's killing and the vigilante terror on Palestinian villages, the events have hardly registered in the public discourse.
- Two Palestinians were fatally shot in a clash with West Bank settlers. No one was detained
- Iran and Israel are still one miscalculation away from war
- War first, then annexation: Is Israel preparing to permanently occupy Gaza?
- Banning violent settlers: U.S., Europe formulating criteria on who will be refused entry (no problem for them when Trump gets elected!)
But there is another difference – and February was a harbinger. After the Hawara attacks, Israel's extremist de facto settlement and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich openly stated that he supported the destruction of Hawara, but hoped the state would do it rather than vigilantes. His supporters clearly heard selectively and saw it as permission; on Friday, the attackers didn't wait to find out what had happened to Ahimeir.
Nor did settlers wait for an additional killing before attacking again. On Sunday, two Palestinians were shot dead in the Jordan Valley, in a fresh wave of clashes between settlers, the army and Palestinians. The IDF spokesperson's unit later stated that it had received reports of "suspicion that a Palestinian had attacked a shepherd," and arrived to break up the fights. But Palestinians said dozens of settlers had invaded their land and attacked them.
Israeli soldiers stand by as Israeli settlers throw stones at Palestinians (unseen) during clashes in the West Bank town of Huwara on October 13, 2022Credit: OREN ZIV - AFP
The army denied firing at anyone, and Channel 13 reported that an IDF source said settlers had killed the two Palestinians. Here, too, media attention was minimal among the understandable avalanche of coverage and frantic speculation about Iran.
The West Bank is, of course, another precarious front in Israel's wars. For years, each new escalation raised fears that this time the fuse could blow. This is just as true now.
But the workaday treatment of the killings this weekend – despite the justified attention to Iran – raises an equally disturbing prospect. The war in Gaza felt extreme at first, but it is drifting into normal rather than formally ending. In the West Bank, Palestinian attacks and Israeli state (or state-backed) violence have escalated drastically before and after October 7 – but all of it seems like background noise.
On the Israeli side, is Israeli mob and vigilante violence, extrajudicial killing or sheer terrorism becoming routine and forgettable?
A slogan in Hebrew reading 'Revenge' and graffiti bearing Stars of David on the wall of a Palestinian house after a reported attack by Israeli settlers in the West Bank village of Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya, south of Nablus on April 11, 2024Credit: AFP
Bad apples or part of the fold?
Hadassah Froman, a settler from Tekoa, is pained by the turn toward violence among what she calls hilltop youth (the name has stuck, although ranches and agriculture in the West Bank expanses are as popular as hilltops for the young Jewish extremists). She believes they are a tiny fringe among settlers.
Froman herself is an anomaly in the settlements: she is a well-known peace activist advocating Israeli-Palestinian coexistence and is the widow of the charismatic Rabbi Menachem Froman, who devoted his life to this work, as does she. But as a settler, she feels responsible for the fringe extremist behavior, she said in an interview, and tries to talk with and to these communities.
Froman believes this group of settlers is mostly very young, and "very, very ideological." They are far more anti-Arab than the original Gush Emunim settler movement, which she views as moderate regarding sentiment toward Arabs.
An aerial view of burnt and destroyed vehicles in the West Bank town of Huwara after settlers set houses and cars on fire following the shooting death of two Israelis fired on at a crossroads south of the Palestinian city of Nablus, October 2022Credit: Ilia Yefimovich/dpa
Secular Israelis never saw Gush Emunim as moderate, but the distinction from the perspective of the settlers is interesting. Some of the extremists are animated by a fire for their cause, she suggested, as well as feelings of vengeance at each Palestinian attack. Others might be at-risk youth who don't cope well with regular school frameworks and found their passion in the tinderbox.
It isn't only school frameworks they don't like. One of the most powerful narratives in the radical settler communities, which settlers relate in conversation and amplify on social media platforms, is the notion of hafkara – abandonment. This means by the Israeli authorities, including the army. Through the looking glass, far-right settler channels are full of Arab and Bedouin operations to take over swaths of land (the word "Palestinians" is rare), and the need to defend the Jewish grip.
Videos show outpost caravans being demolished in slow motion to keening music, mournful mock-ups of settlers huddled and handcuffed in "Shin Bet dungeons" of the security service's hated "Jewish division." They criticize their own ultranationalist parties for tolerating the administrative detention of settlers, or the army for failing to act more harshly against Palestinian people, property, land.
On his Telegram channel, the well-known far-right settler activist Elisha Yered posted: "The horrifying murder [of Ahimeir] is not our fate, it's a matter of ongoing abandonment!!" in bold type. Also in bold: "Those who for years turned the victim into the aggressor, his brother into an enemy, and the Nazis of the villages into friends of the system, cannot … deny spilling this blood!" In this light, Smotrich's statement on Wednesday that he no longer trusts the army looks like both pandering and incitement.
Froman thinks the settlers marauding through Palestinian villages may tell themselves they are creating deterrence. But "there's a gap between deterrence and disturbance," she says, using the Hebrew word for "boiling things up." They think they're taking responsibility for their security. She thinks "it's stupid and very dangerous," and their actions are "irresponsible and immoral." But she believes they are on the margins.
But are they? For years, Israelis have spoken of margins, exceptions and bad apples – at least as far back as Yigal Amir, who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. That theme recurred when Israeli Jews kidnapped and immolated the East Jerusalem youngster Mohammed Abu Khdeir in 2014; when settlers burned the Dawabsheh family alive in their sleep in 2015; when Elor Azaria executed an incapacitated Palestinian who had stabbed soldiers in 2016.
At least Israel still paid attention to those incidents, but that was hardly a big ask when the victim was a Jewish prime minister. And the attention paid to Azaria largely garnered resentment at the authorities who prosecuted him, generating support for Azaria. How many more Azaria killings weren't caught on film since then?
Elor Azaria receives a hero's welcome in May 2018 on his return home after serving nine months in jail for shooting an incapacitated Palestinian attacker in HebronCredit: Ilan Assayag
A depraved new normal
It's hard to know when once-extraordinary fringe violence crosses the Rubicon into the normal. But its routinization in any society – Israelis are not exceptional – can be the most dangerous process of all.
Neuroscientist Tali Sharot and law professor Cass Sunstein wrote recently in a riveting New York Times column about the human capacity for habituation, defined as "our tendency to respond less and less to things that are constant or that change slowly."
Smoke fills the sky after Israeli settlers set fire to the properties of Palestinian villagers in the West Bank village of al-Mughayyir on Saturday.Credit: Nasser Nasser/AP
They argued that habituation explains some of the worst human-generated horrors. With replication or incremental exposure to once-new stimuli, "neurons stop firing." Translated: our brains and perhaps our collective conscience becomes desensitized, unfazed by terrible acts. It is worth considering that Palestinians have lived for generations under a violent, suppressive regime, and what this might have done to normalize violence in society along the way.
The authors recall – as if anyone can forget – Stanley Milgram's experiments showing notoriously high rates of compliance with instructions to administer sadistic electrical shocks (fake, unbeknownst to the subjects), in the name of obedience. Milgram wanted to know if Americans could fall for Nazi-level behavior, since Germans were once seen as uniquely conformist.
But, as documented thoughtfully in Behavioral Scientist magazine, Milgram found that nearly two-thirds of his American subjects administered shocks at the highest levels of voltage. The French would be dismayed to find that a similar study in France found even higher levels of compliance there than the U.S. experiment.
What does all this have to do with the fanatic, violent sliver of settler thugs? No one should assume that we as a society are above it, especially if our society is too distracted – even by war – to be outraged by it.