Don't Buy the Lie That Israeli Settler Violence Is the Exception. It's the Rule

Haaretz Editorial

Aug 13, 2024 

https://archive.is/LMush

In the land of the "wild weeds" of the West Bank, the Jews are above the law and Arabs may be killed with impunity. Four Bedouin women and a 2-year-old girl – Israeli citizens from the city of Rahat – entered the Givat Ronen settlement outpost by mistake on Friday evening. A navigational error nearly cost them their lives. They were beaten, their car was torched and according to one of the women, one of the assailants put a rifle to the toddler's head.

We must look squarely at the dangerous ultranationalist violence from the breeding ground of the Jewish supremacy enterprise. "We wanted to go toward Nablus, and [the navigation app] Waze misled us," one of the women related. "We accidentally entered some place and then people started running after the vehicle, throwing rocks from the hill. After they broke all the windows, they sprayed tear gas. What they threw wasn't stones, but rather [concrete] blocks, big rocks. They all had weapons, there were a lot of them," she said. "They told us to get out of the car. We told them that we were Israeli citizens, that we didn't do anything, we just got confused with Waze – and they didn't even hear us."

They got out of the car and fled for their lives as the settlers set their car on fire. The women called the police, which was slow to arrive, and it was the army that eventually rescued them. They were admitted to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva and discharged about two hours later; two of the women had rib and shoulder fractures.

Two suspects in the attack were arrested by the Shin Bet security service and the police on Monday. We must hope that this time, by virtue of the victims being Israeli, the hateful criminals from the territories will be brought to justice. But we must not be deluded into thinking that this will solve the problem of violence in the territories. After all, there are lawmakers who justify it. MK Limor Son Har-Melech did exactly that, claiming that the settlers feared "an incident of espionage, intelligence-gathering." This is the same Knesset member who, two weeks ago, demonstrated alongside members of the far right who broke into the Sde Teiman base and who attacked and threatened the military advocate general.

"Violence eats away at the foundations of democracy. It must be condemned, denounced, isolated," Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said just moments before he was murdered for political reasons. We must not turn a blind eye to the winds of lynches and pogroms blowing here. The denial mechanism must not be allowed to label this case as an exception that proves the rule. It's not just a "handful" of people, they aren't "wild weeds" and it's not that settlers occasionally slip up and lynch someone. Enough with this lie.

In the absence of a government that wants to deal with this menace, law enforcement and the courts must treat settler violence with the utmost severity. At the same time, the Israeli public must awaken from its moral coma regarding the barbarization of Jewish ultranationalism, which has long since crossed the Green Line into Israel proper.

The above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.