Each and every Israeli bears responsibility for anti-Palestinian pogroms in the West Bank

The aftermath of the October 2025 arson attack in Mukhmas, in the central West Bank.

Irit Keynan writes in Haaretz on 29 March 2026:

When I was a child I heard from my grandmother, who was born in Ukraine in 1903, about the pogroms against the Jews following the Communist Revolution. Her memories of those experiences stayed with her until her dying day; I will never forget how, toward the end of her life, when the past was mixed up with the present, she stood at the window and whispered, in a heartbreaking tone, “Gevalt, gevalt!” This cry, a call for help from victims everywhere, resonates within me today in the face of the violent pogroms that Jews are carrying out against Palestinians in the West Bank, which is controlled by Israel.

Try to imagine the constant fear when rioting gangs storm the neighborhood, armed with clubs and knives and sometimes guns that the Israeli military gave them – ostensibly for protection. They will strike, destroy, burn, loot, humiliate and kill. If something like this were to happen to Jews, would you remain silent?

The Palestinians are abandoned to their fate in the hands of Jewish marauders and criminals from the settlements, farms and outposts who brutalize them daily, unhindered. This violence does not take place in a vacuum: Often it occurs in the presence of the military, without interference. There are no arrests, no effective investigations and no prosecutions. The incidents are labeled, again and again, as “friction,” as if they involved two equal parties, and treated by the system as if they were anomalies rather than part of a recurring pattern.

These are not isolated incidents. When violence occurs regularly – unchanged and without the intervention of law enforcement or deterrent measures – it is not a failure, but a policy.

My grandmother believed that we are better, that we would never do to others as was done to her. When I think about her and about my parents, who fought for the establishment of the state out of a belief that we would be worthy of it, I am filled with shame. I ask myself, are we truly worthy of this miracle, for which so many lives have been and continue to be sacrificed?

Each and every Israeli bears responsibility for what is happening in the West Bank. Taxes fund the “hilltop” criminals, and the public leaves it to the government to handle the crimes and the military to enable and sometimes even encourage them. It is not the Iranian missiles that will destroy Israel, but the moral atrophy from within. No claim of self-defense can acquit us, especially not our conscience. The claim of “necessity” is also an empty one. We all bear the mark of shame.

I am convinced that most Israelis are sick and tired of this abhorrent violence, but the majority is silent: some out of helplessness and some, like many of my fellow activists against the government coup, out of the belief that it’s impossible to fight on all fronts at once. But we don’t have the privilege to surrender to helplessness, and Israel will never have a genuine democracy unless its citizens stop the violent, reckless insanity in the territories. These manifestations are intertwined, part of the same power system, and they must be addressed simultaneously.

We will deserve to live here only if we succeed in eradicating the atrocities and the treatment of Palestinians as inferior human beings whose lives are worthless. If we continue to behave like storm troopers or let criminals from the settlements and their supporters do so, the moral justification for us to live here will be lost.

Words do not rock systems, as they did in the days of Émile Zola and his “J’Accuse!” against the French government after Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason. But when tens and hundreds of thousands of people stand behind them, words turn into actions and have an impact. There is no choice but to come together in a collective “J’Accuse!” against the government and the military that will be heard throughout the country and shake the very foundations, until the atrocities stop.

We accuse you of allowing the blood of Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank to be spilled. Of ignoring the ongoing violence against them and the efforts to expel them.

We accuse you of failing to enforce the law, to investigate and to prosecute and of turning this violence into a daily routine that goes unhindered. We demand immediate action: Stop the violence, protect the residents, investigate fully and prosecute the perpetrators.

We demand that you recognize us as moral entities with moral judgment, and that our judgment says “No more!” Silence is complicity. Do not stand idly by.

Prof. Irit Keynan, an author and poet, is a faculty member at Tel Aviv’s Hakibbutzim College of Education (Seminar Hakibbutzim) and an activist in Black Flag in Academia.

This article is reproduced in its entirety