If the Hilltop Youth Were in New York City, Attacking Jews, Would the Israeli Media Care?
Imagine that every day, 10 to 20 groups of people with keffiyehs around their necks and iron bars or clubs in their hands were threatening, harassing and pestering Jews in New York or London. Imagine them singing as they entered the offices of Jewish lawyers and drove away their clients. Sometimes they would smash up the furniture with open glee.
Still smiling, they would kick the salesman in the clothing store that's called Levy's or Cohen's. In another store, they would beat up a female customer wearing a wig and long sleeves. Some would make do with blocking children's access to their school, the one with a Star of David on it, or torching one of the teacher's cars, or taking over the gardens of Jewish homes. Sometimes they would grab a smartphone from its owner. As a rule, they would smile and laugh for the cameras.
Minors, also wearing keffiyehs, would mock elderly women wearing headscarves and scream things like "Don't touch me," "Leave the neighborhood," "You're only here temporarily" at them. They would also grab whatever they pleased from the delicatessen.
And then imagine all of the above happening day after day, month after month, year after year.
Is there any Jewish organization that wouldn't raise an outcry and demand that police officers be fired and put on trial for their failure to stop this? Is there a media outlet that would ignore this story, or make do with reporting on it only when the keffiyeh-clad assailant, armed with a handgun, killed or wounded a kippah-wearing Jew? How many times would the word "antisemitism" be repeated?
What is not in fact happening in New York or London, and wouldn't meet an indifferent complicit response if it did, is happening in spades over here. But the recidivist harassers are actually Israelis whose clothing defines them as God-fearing religious Jews. Their daily prey are Palestinians. And the response has been an embrace from the army and other state institutions, coupled with miserly reporting.
The olive harvest offers a special opportunity for displays of unrestrained Jewish supremacy, in the full confidence of impunity. That was evident from Matan Golan's article in Haaretz in Hebrew on Tuesday, and is also proven by a flood of videos and testimony in real time.
A settler waves a slingshot toward Palestinians harvesting olives in the village of Beita, near Nablus earlier this month.Credit: Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP
In the week of October 7 to October 13, the United Nations counted 71 attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Half of them, in 27 different villages, were connected to the olive harvest. They included direct damage to the trees, theft of the olives and assaults on the harvesters.
In total, 99 people were wounded in these attacks, and one man was killed by Israeli fire in the village of Deir Jarir. One family was uprooted from its home. And these statistics don't include all the garden-variety harassment and intimidation.
Why is this serial violence, which doesn't always end in bloodshed, considered news that is "unfit to print," or to broadcast, by Israeli media? Because once something has become normal and accepted, it is not upsetting.
Through their overt, direct violence, the serial assailants and harassers are achieving what the official agencies – Israel's Civil Administration in the West Bank, the army, the Jewish National Fund, the World Zionist Organization and agencies tasked with protecting nature or doing archaeological research – have also been achieving, but too slowly. To wit, the removal of more Palestinians from this place, which, after all, is intended solely for us – the Jews in Israel and worldwide.
Just like the sun rising in the east isn't a news story, neither are the daily incidents of routine violence by Jews (soldiers or civilians) against Palestinians – who, after all, are members of a superfluous nation. And it never occurs to our research institutes, packed with veterans of the career army or the Shin Bet security service, to factor in this violence and its supreme, shared, goal as the main driver of our surefire descent into new abysses.