When settler violence targets Israelis instead of Palestinians after decades of occupation

Three residents of Rahat who were injured when settlers accidentally entered the settlement of Giv’at Ronen and attacked them, August 2024

Hanin Majadli writes in Haaretz on 19 August 2024:

It’s not clear why the assault by settlers on two Bedouin women and a toddler who entered the Givat Ronen outpost by mistake, received more media and public attention than other incidents in the area. One might think that someone cares what happens to Arab or Bedouin women. Or perhaps it’s that Israelis realize that what is happening in the West Bank is already spilling over to them, that they too have become a target of violence from settlers and right-wing extremists, working hand in glove with the police.

It is commonplace (the audacity!) for Israelis to argue that residents of the Gaza Strip should “reject all support for terrorism” or “resist Hamas.” These absurd words are spoken, without a hint of self-awareness, by people who have accepted a decades-long regime of criminal occupation, in which the military and the settlers torment the Palestinians. Unlike the residents of Gaza, the majority of Israelis actively participated, as military conscripts and reservists as well as apathetic civilians, in nurturing the state, the military, and the settlers’ machine of violence; they served it, protected it, sustained it, and gave it legitimacy.

Two years ago I watched the movie “H2: The Occupation Lab,” by Idit Avrahami and Noam Sheizaf. It presents Hebron as an example of “managing the Israeli occupation”: a place where the walls and barriers, the intifadas, the apartheid, the expulsion of Palestinians in favor of Jews and the struggle over sacred sites were tested. This example, at the center of which is the trampling of the lives of 250,000 Palestinians because of their 800 Jewish neighbors, was later replicated in the rest of the West Bank.

This Zionist messianism has been normalized by all Israeli governments, including those with liberal, secular and supposedly “left-wing” leadership. They too are responsible for “settler violence,” a euphemism for serious crimes that aims to conceal and legitimize the basis for such violence—namely, the occupation. The occupation is responsible for nighttime raids, and the seizure of natural springs. it’s the army that established a policy according to which families are roused from sleep and their homes turned upside down, in which illegal outposts of 20 people and settlers marching in the Old City of Jerusalem are guarded by the state. They turned a blind eye to Jews who overturn market stalls, curse and spit on Palestinians, and stop Palestinian traffic on Jewish holidays. How are you not ashamed to call yourselves leftists or liberals or democrats? When you have no issue with the central injustice but only with its consequences?

And the icing on the cake? The so-respected, so-leftist High Court of Justice, the main body responsible for whitewashing the crimes of the occupation, which allowed and defended Israel’s right to conquer and occupy and control the Palestinians. Truly the “jewel in the crown” of Israeli democracy. Don’t be ridiculous.

And suddenly the violence of the settlers troubled Israelis a little. But only a little, and only because these women are Israeli citizens. But will the injustices done to the Palestinians on a daily basis trouble anyone here? Did a sufficient number of Jews ever rise up and demand the end of the occupation? No. And most Jews also send their children to the army, to serve in the occupied territories. And most Jews whitewash the crimes of the government and remain silent in the face of the occupation’s injustices. And most of the Jews participate in the occupation and validate a prolonged regime of physical and psychological violence against Palestinians.

Thus, if the violence of the settlers reaches Israel proper and harms the Jews themselves: They made their bed, they can lie in it.

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