Do Jewish parents know what their children are doing in the West Bank?
Tamer Nafar writes in Haaretz on 13 October 2026:
The videos constantly emerging from the West Bank are ugly – apart from the whole Jewish-Arab issue. Watching them is simply seeing evil – a group of children beating up elderly people, kicking dogs, poisoning sheep, breaking bones with clubs. They’re videos that should turn any stomach.
And even though in every such video, the physical act is what receives the most screen time, there’s always some military extra in the frame. A masked settler forces a goat to drink poison and kicks another, and for a second, the camera captures a young soldier standing there. A gang of thugs mercilessly assaults elderly people with clubs, and a military jeep hovers in the frame.
Someone with a cinematic eye would call them extras, but the more of these videos you watch, the more you understand that they’re members of the cast.
I’m no stranger to violence. I grew up in the central Israeli town of Lod. We were neighbors, violence and I. I knew how to deal with it, for better or worse – either the beater or the beaten – whatever it took to survive the neighborhood. But the following day, we would always work things out. We talked; we apologized. And then we went back to fighting the day after that. But it wasn’t violence like this. The violence that I knew broke out quickly and was quickly put out.
What I see in these videos isn’t an outbreak of violence due to some misunderstanding. It’s more reminiscent of the new kind of violence – organized crime. That’s what these videos look like. Organized evil.
And don’t look surprised. This is old news. Your sons and daughters are part of it. Whether they’re physically attacking Palestinians alongside the settlers, holding back Palestinians who are trying to defend their sheep, sitting in a jeep within sight of what’s happening to make a statement, or sitting in some air-conditioned room with a picture of their beautiful family hanging near the computer and issuing the orders that send soldiers to the next act of thuggery.
Let’s put the Jewish-Arab issue aside for a moment. Let’s talk as parents. If I knew that one of my children was either actively or passively a party to humiliating another person, he would get it from his mom and me. It would begin with: “Get over here right now. What is this? Is this how we raised you? You’re going to apologize right now, and I mean now. And you’re going to explain to us, to yourself and to them, why you’re apologizing. Should we help you understand why? Or do you already understand?”
So I have a question for Jewish parents: Do you have those kinds of educational conversations with your sons and daughters? Conversations about what’s good and what’s evil and the capacity to tell them apart, even when the situation isn’t clear-cut? Even though a white man poisoning a black goat is about as black and white as it could get.
For now, I won’t get into the bigger story of the army and the occupation, about whether to serve or refuse to serve. Let’s put that aside. We’re light-years apart on that right now, and it’s also too big an issue for me. And as they say, you need to pick your battles. So here is something small – an evening conversation, a family gathering.
A video pops up on an iPhone of children younger than 15 kicking a father and his son, after which soldiers arrive and shake the assailants’ hands. What happens then at your house?
Will the mother drop her glass of wine? Will she say, “Oy, my son,” and call over her husband? Will they corner him and ask: “Is that you in the video? Were you there? How could you not have intervened?” Does it make you confront an educational failure for a second? Or would you carry on as if nothing happened? I won’t answer that question. I won’t put answers into my own head or into your mouths.
But this is something that I would like to pose to you – a conversation that, in my view, is more important than the question of whether the prime minister was asleep when the attack began on October 7, 2023 and whether he wasn’t awakened in time.
Because at the moment, it seems to me that an entire country – one in which almost every household has someone in uniform – is refusing to wake up in time.
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