For Palestinians, being an Israeli citizen doesn’t mean you’re safe from settlers

Nagham Zbeedat writes in Haaretz on 30 September 2026:

Late on Monday night, Israeli settlers and right-wing activists returned to the hills outside the Palestinian town of Majd al-Krum in northern Israel. Video footage from the scene shows them chanting “May your village burn,” calling to settle the Galilee and confronting Palestinian residents with a question: “Are you citizens of Israel?”

It is difficult to find a more precise summary of the citizenship that Israel offers Palestinians. Israelis can arrive at the edge of your town, call for it to burn and declare that your land should be settled by Jews. You, meanwhile, are asked to prove that you belong – and to do so calmly, in the face of people allowed to threaten you openly.

Had Palestinians chanted even a fraction of what was heard in those videos, police would have arrived before dawn and dragged them from their homes in their pajamas.

Residents are now considering filing police complaints. The local council and popular committee say that without police intervention, they will resume the organized, peaceful protests that forced the settlers out when they originally set up the encampment earlier this month, during which several residents wound up being arrested.

According to land records cited by the Palestinian-run legal center Adalah, half of the plot in the Al-Rus area at the center of the clash is privately owned by Majd al-Krum residents, with the remainder belonging to the Jewish National Fund. The group of settlers – who said they had come from the West Bank to establish a Jewish settlement in the Galilee – set up tents, a sheep pen, water tanks and flags, leveled ground and connected the site to water and electricity.

The Jewish National Fund said it had authorized grazing, but no flock had been brought there. The occupants had no permission to build structures or establish the “farm for youth accommodation” they advertised, and JNF sources described the encampment as a deliberate provocation. Only after public protest and legal pressure did the JNF order its dismantlement.

The settlers left and the spectacle ended. The project did not.

Last week, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich brought his Religious Zionism faction to the area for a party meeting under heavy police protection. He portrayed the evacuation as the result of Arab nationalist intimidation and said Israel was “losing the Galilee and the Negev.” He then explained his plan: To take the capabilities he had used in the West Bank and apply them to “Judaize” both regions.

Days later, during Sukkot, activists returned and chanted for Majd al-Krum to burn, performing the political program a government minister had just articulated at the same site.

“Settler” is often treated as an address: An Israeli living beyond the Green Line. What has unfolded at Majd al-Krum exposes a political mentality and a method. From the conviction that Jewish presence creates a superior right to Palestinian land, and that Palestinians defending their property constitute a security threat, state institutions are expected to negotiate the terms of Jewish encroachment while policing the Palestinian response.

That same mentality was on display this week in the West Bank village of Jalud, which around 150 settlers attacked as Israeli forces were attempting to return a Palestinian family to the homes it had been driven from in July. Settlers burned homes and cars, blocked roads and injured three Border Police officers. The army abandoned the mission of returning the family. Three settlers were arrested.

Netanyahu said the “small number” of rioters did not represent the settler community, and Defense Minister Israel Katz described them as a “handful.” Apparently, more than 100 people can constitute a handful when the purpose is to preserve the fiction that settler violence is marginal.

But the statistics dismantle that fiction. Only 3 percent of police investigations into ideologically motivated offenses by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005 monitored by human rights group Yesh Din ended with a full or partial conviction. The vast majority – 93.6 percent – ended without an indictment at all.

This impunity is part of the model being imported into the Galilee. Those threatening Majd al-Krum are presented as a regrettable fringe detached from the politicians, institutions and land policies enabling them. The Palestinians facing them are treated as a demographic danger whose loyalty must always be tested.

This is what it means to be a Palestinian citizen of Israel: to stand on your own land while outsiders threaten to burn your town – and still be the one asked what you are doing there.

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