There's No Such Thing as Settler Violence. It's Israeli Violence - Opinion - Haaretz.com
June 25. The village of Kafr Malik is on the steep slopes of Tall Asur, whose summit is the fourth highest among Palestine's mountains. On June 23, Amar Hamayel, a resident of the village, was shot in the back. Witnesses say soldiers shot him as they hid behind pine trees.
The bullet entered Amar's back and exited through his neck. He wasn't facing the soldiers when he was killed. For two hours the army blocked an ambulance from arriving, while also using violence to prevent relatives and neighbors from treating Amar's wounds. A white pickup truck, like those used by a settlement's security chief, was seen next to the body. He was 13 years old.
Two days later more than 100 Israelis raided the village. They swarmed down the hill, some with masks on. They destroyed houses, set on fire anything they could and left malicious graffiti on the walls.
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But they weren't alone. Behind this militia stood the official armed forces of the state, which marched into the village. They were the ones who killed three villagers – one a teenager and one at the entrance to his house – as the residents tried to defend themselves and their village from the pogrom.
A little later, Jafar Hamayel's broken voice thundered over the phone: "They're killing us and they've started a war that has only one side. Only they and their soldier dogs-on-a-leash have guns."
October 10. On the first day of the olive harvest, around 150 harvesters gathered on the Jabal Qamas hill near the Palestinian town of Beita. Several tents and temporary structures had been set up at the site, whose dwellers and the army call Mevaser Shalom – Herald of Peace. The harvesters found the fields filled with soldiers and militia members standing shoulder to shoulder.
By the end of the day, 20 harvesters had been wounded, including 12 who were taken to the hospital. Three were journalists and another was a young man whom the militia shot in the leg. The rioters set eight cars on fire, turned an ambulance on its side and tried to burn it.
Soldiers speaking with local Palestinians at Tarqumiya.Credit: Itai Ron
The next day, while a family was harvesting on its land, soldiers on a hill across the way fired tear gas at them. A 13-year-old boy, Aysam Mualla, choked on the gas and lost consciousness. His murderers delayed an ambulance from arriving for six long minutes of oxygen deprivation. Aysam never woke up from his coma and died a month later in the hospital. On the day of his funeral the army insisted on blocking the entrance to his village; soldiers in military vehicles were sent to the site to throw stun grenades at the mourners.
The West Bank isn't extraterritorial. The whole land, from the sea to the river, is a land of one law.
December 7. That Sunday night the army invaded the streets and narrow alleyways of the village of al-Mughayyer. The purpose wasn't clear as the army blocked all the entrances to the village and imposed an unofficial curfew, but nothing more. In the dead of night, soldiers fired tear gas and hurled stun grenades between the houses from inside their vehicles. There was no attempt to abduct any young people from the village. That night, they all remained free.
What did happen that night, during those very hours, was a raid by a group of Israelis on the Abu Hamam home on the outskirts of the village. Eight of the attackers came masked and armed with clubs from the direction of the Havat Shlisha settler outpost. Anyone not blinded by the smokescreens and lies of Israeli propaganda would know in advance what the results of the attack were and would not be surprised by the coordination between the army and the unofficial forces carrying out Israel's policy of violence.
The assailants left the village before the army did, leaving a 13-year-old boy wounded in the head and a 59-year-old woman with injuries to her head, torso and arms; even two days later in the hospital she had trouble standing up. Four activists from Britain, France and the United States were sent to the hospital, too.
During and immediately after the attack, villagers and medical teams rushed to the afflicted Abu Hamam family's help, but the army would not let them pass. The soldiers aimed their guns at the ambulance driver and the paramedics who tried to get to the wounded, threatening to arrest them if they approached. Only hours later could the wounded be evacuated.
A few hours later the threat of arrest became a reality. As the ambulance made its way back from the hospital, the soldiers blocked the road and arrested two paramedics. They tied their hands, covered their eyes and detained them for no reason at all, just because they were there. Then, several hours later, they just let them go. These soldiers weren't settlers or members of the regional defense units but merely army reservists, the same people who sit in cafés, startup offices and executive suites all over.
The attacks on the family continued over the next few days. As usual, the army found the solution in further victimizing the victims. First it issued a 24-hour order declaring the site a closed military zone. This was used to arrest two activists and keep others away.
Then soldiers and Border Police officers showed up with a month-long closure order. They arrested two American activists, who spent a week in jail and have now been deported, even though at no stage were they in the closed zone. Soldiers kept coming to the family's house to hunt down anyone who doesn't reside there, as long as they weren't from Havat Shlisha, that is.
December 13. Three young men wearing large knitted kippot and long side curls surrounded Hanan Khimel, who was in her ninth month of pregnancy. She was in her car with her two children, aged 4 and 5. The assailants threatened the three, beat them and sprayed them with pepper spray, while hurling racist insults at them.
The police, who at first insisted on calling the incident a dispute among drivers, arrested and questioned 17 residents of Khimel's hometown who had protested against the attack. None of them was suspected of violence but of telling the truth: The attack, which didn't take place in the West Bank but in Jaffa, was aimed at the city's entire Palestinian community.
None of this happened in a vacuum but in a climate created by a group of religious Jews who settled in Jaffa and are financed by the Tel Aviv municipality. This group has been terrorizing Jaffa's Palestinian residents for years and has been a source of tension and instability in the city.
The group is headed by Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, whom the state prosecutor decided not to indict on suspicions of incitement after he said that "today's terrorists are the children of the previous [military] operation that left them alive. The women are actually the ones who are producing the terrorists."
Settler violence doesn't exist. The violence against Palestinians in all its forms – that which is carried out by Israel's armed forces and bureaucrats and that which liberals like to imagine as taking place outside the law – isn't an irregular phenomenon but the essence of Israeliness. As in the West Bank, so in Gaza, Jaffa, the Galilee and everywhere else.
The West Bank isn't the land of the settlers, and the attackers aren't a handful of extremists. The attacks are the implementation of a long-established policy of ethnic cleansing that does not begin and does not end with "extremist settlers" or "the far-right government." The West Bank isn't extraterritorial. The whole land, from the sea to the river, is a land of one law. This is what Israel is.