Settler terrorism – it made Israel


February 2, 2016
Sarah Benton

Screen Shot 2016-02-03 at 10.52.21
A Palestinian farmer from the village of Twaneh reacts after finding his olive trees destroyed in the southern West Bank village of Yata near Hebron on 08 September 2013. Destruction of Palestinian property and livelihoods  has become a routine way of trying to subdue Palestinians. Photo by Abed Al Hashlamoun/ EPA

Zionist Terrorism, Then and Now

Journal of Palestine Studies, Special Focus
January 2016

On January 3, 2016, Israeli prosecutors filed a murder indictment against 21-year-old Amiram Ben-Uliel for reportedly firebombing the Dawabsha family home in the West Bank village of Duma, which killed 18-month-old Ali and his parents Saad and Riham; five-year-old brother Ahmed remains hospitalized in Israel.

The July attack revived international attention on Jewish terrorism in Israel; but while this case was lethal and extraordinary, other acts of violence against Palestinians are routine. In October 2014, for instance, the Washington Post reported that Palestinian olive farmers were once again bracing themselves in anticipation of Israeli settlers violently descending on their groves during the picking season. In 2013, settlers destroyed or damaged nearly 11,000 olive trees, according to the United Nations. That same year, the UN reported 386 assaults on Palestinians by Jewish settlers along with 50 attacks on Israelis by Palestinians in the West Bank. An oft-heard narrative of a cycle of violence would be false: Israeli settlers are protected by the occupying authority, which often arms them as well. (American-born settler Baruch Goldstein used an IDF-issued Galil assualt rifle to massacre 29 Palestinians at the Haram al-Ibrahimi in Hebron in February 1994.)

As Nasser Abu Farha, an olive grower, told the Post, “This is not only the fault of the settlers. The settlers who live in the security zone protected by the Israeli soldiers are the most vicious.” Another Palestinian farmer added, “If the settlers did not have the protection of the army, they would not dare touch our trees.”

Under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying power is responsible for protecting the local population, but, as Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has documented, settlers often attack Palestinians behind the cover of Israeli soldiers; what B’Tselem has called “tacit support of the settler rampage by forces on the ground.” Yesh Din, an Israeli NGO, has similarly reported that the Israel Defence Forces “shirks its obligation to protect the Palestinian population of the West Bank” in a report it appropriately titled “Standing Idly By.”

Akin to the public lynching of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South, routine violence against Palestinians would likely be far less frequent if not for the widespread official leniency toward Jewish perpetrators: Yesh Din reports that 85.3% of police investigations into settler violence are closed due to failure to locate suspects, only 7.4% yield indictments, and Palestinians have only a 1.9% chance that a complaint will be carried out to indictment and conviction.

The history of Jewish terrorism, however, predates the 1948 birth of Israel (albeit, in recent decades, it has acquired a fundamentalist garb). The Israeli settler movement and its contemporary allies are the descendants of Revisionist Zionist organizations that engaged in terrorism during the British Mandate years (1920-48) against both the Palestinians and the British. The Lehi (or “Stern Gang”) and Irgun, for instance, were notorious for bombing Palestinian cafes, buses, markets and cinemas; which cost the lives of hundreds of Arabs. While terrorism against Palestinians was far more frequent, the September 1948 murder of the UN representative to Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, and the July 1946 bombing of the British office at the King David Hotel by Revisionist terrorists made headlines around the world. In recent years, the most publicized act of Jewish terrorism was not against a Palestinian, but the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.


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