Israel's Violent Jewish Settlers Are Neither Marginal nor a Handful - Haaretz Editorial - Haaretz.com
If in fact they are only a minority, a few dozen Jewish settlers who are destroying olive groves, wounding harvesters, torching homes, cars and mosques and driving communities from their homes, their output is impressive.
They commit more than two attacks a day on average, by the military's calculations; more than eight a day in October; more than four a day in the November 4-10 period, according to a meticulous examination by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and about 15 a day according to data reaching the PLO's Negotiations Affairs Department.
The latter's list, unlike the UN agency's does not include only attacks that resulted in casualties, in olives stolen and branches sawn off. After all, for the Palestinians even a threatening march by a few armed and masked Israelis with a herd of cows and an all-terrain vehicle into a Palestinian spring, grove or tent encampment, or around homes on the outskirts of a community, is a terrifying assault.
Its purpose, like that of the bleeding attacks, is to displace people from their land for the next proud Jewish settlement outpost.
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To call these anomalous, marginal cases is a blatant lie: A handful of hooligans would not have been able to displace nearly 60 Palestinian communities since 2022, according to the organization Kerem Navot – 44 of them since October 2023, according to B'Tselem. A few rioters would not have been able to take control, on their own, of about 200,000 acres of West Bank land by the end of 2024, according to a study by Kerem Navot and Peace Now.
After all, there are organizations that bought the herds of cows and sheep and distributed them to the young couples who ascended the mountain in order to settle. There are institutions that supply the structures and the security. There is a government that provides ATVs and drones, a police force that repeatedly fails to locate suspects and a military that arms residents of the outposts and also protects them during their raids on the neighboring village.
If suddenly there is talk about a few rotten apples, it's because a few television channels deviated from their silence and broadcast a small sample of the videos of Jewish violence that are circulating freely on social media. The flavor-of-the-month shock, therefore, is self-deception.
Israeli soldiers stand behind a masked man during a settler attack on the Palestinian village of Beita, south of Nablus, in October.Credit: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP
- Under the radar, quiet and persistent population transfer is underway in the West Bank
- IDF reports surge in West Bank settler attacks, says police and Shin Bet looking away
- Violent settlers are 'fringe teens' but can 'destabilize' West Bank, IDF source says
This is a process of organized and calculated violence that began in the second half of the 1990s and intensified during the 2000s. Settlement outposts were established frequently, generating cycles of violence against Palestinians. To avoid "friction," the military prevented and prevents the legal owners and cultivators of the land from reaching it.
The outposts have been expanding. Some of them are already neighborhoods of existing settlements that invite the Israeli masses to purchase "boutique" one-family homes in them. And the process continues tirelessly, on an upward trajectory that has peaked under the current government. The purported handful succeeds because its violence serves official policy. It's only if the Israeli public renounces it that the "handful" of rioters can only be stopped.
The above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.