The government has encouraged acts of terror in the West Bank. It can count the results among its failures.
Last Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces announced that violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians was causing “enormous damage to security in the West Bank.” A week earlier, Ronen Bar, the head of Shabak, the country’s internal-security agency, sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that settler violence leads to “chaos and loss of control; the damage to Israel is indescribable.” Bar added that the Israeli police has been helpless to stop the attacks, if not secretly supportive of them.
Just yesterday, a Turkish American woman was shot dead by the Israeli military while protesting at a West Bank settlement. But most of the West Bank violence is of a different nature, involving assaults by settlers on Palestinian civilians. July and August saw a terrible spate of these incidents.
A group of off-duty reservists from a settlement shot and killed a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem. Settlers attacked Palestinians, foreigners, and Israelis in the village of Kusra; shot a Palestinian and threw stones at a pizzeria in Hawara; burned fields and threw stones in the village of Rujib; attacked Palestinians with batons in the village of Susya; threw stones and burned the car of four Bedouin Israeli women and a baby in the settlement of Givat Ronen; and rampaged through the village of Jit, shooting a Palestinian dead.
These are acts of terror, meant to scare people and wreak havoc. They are not part of any military operation, even though in some cases, IDF soldiers have been present and stood by. And few such incidents tend to capture the attention of the mainstream Israeli news media, let alone the security forces.
The episodes in Jit and Givat Ronen were exceptions. In Jit, where dozens of masked settlers burned cars, vandalized property, and attacked residents, reserve soldiers on the scene did nothing to stop them. But Israeli police and Shabak forces have since arrested four settlers—likely because the White House called for the criminals to be held to account, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, posted on X that he was “appalled” by the settlers’ violence. In Givat Ronen, the four women who accidentally drove into the settlement, only to come under a hail of stones, tear gas, window smashing, and death threats, were from Rahat, a Bedouin village in the south of Israel.
