Amira Hass
Haaretz / July 1, 2023
The so-called rogue attacks are another tool in executing Israeli policy.
Data collected by the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reveals that there have been at least 570 attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank this year – an average of three attacks a day.
Jewish settlers have been involved in an alarming average of 95 monthly attacks against Palestinians in 2023, according to data collected by the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs from the beginning of the year until June 26th.
In total, hundreds of Jewish Israelis took part these past six months in about 570 attacks of various types, with approximately 160 of these attacks causing physical injuries. That’s three attacks a day, including Saturdays and holidays. Data from the last weeks of June is still being reviewed, so this year’s monthly average is subject to change.
Compared to last year’s monthly average of 71 violent assaults against Palestinians perpetrated by Israelis, there has been a surge of such occurrences so far this year.
The data collected by the OCHA only includes encounters that resulted in bodily harm or property damage – one Palestinian was killed last year, many others were wounded, and sheep were slaughtered. It does not capture the trauma and stress brought about by these attacks.
Neither does it include incidents of mere intimidation that do not amount to bodily harm, such as when settlers inhibit the movement of Palestinian farmers and shepherds with their armed, or unarmed, presence or when they trespass on Palestinian land and just shoot in the air. In practice, settler presence pushes Palestinians out of huge tracts of agricultural and pasturing land and hiking grounds that have served their communities for years.
Hence, the phenomenon of Jewish violence against Palestinians in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) is grossly underreported even in existing statistics and certainly in Israeli media coverage.
Following the well-documented settler rampages in Turmus Ayya and Umm Safa, we’ve heard two conclusions: that the rioters have backers in the current government, and that the attacks came in response to Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians.
While logical, these conclusions do not fully explain the phenomenon of blatant violence by settlers and their guests in the most heavily surveilled area in Israel and Israeli-controlled areas – riddled with cameras, drones and military guard posts.
As has been emphasized in Haaretz more than once, these attacks serve the primary goal of usurping private and public Palestinian land in the West Bank. Settler attacks can achieve this goal quicker than the institutional methods used to grab land – such as expropriating land for military use, declaring new “state land,” legalizing settler outposts, and granting construction permits to Jews while denying the same permits for Palestinians.
Attacks on Palestinian vineyards and orchards can be traced as far back as the second half of the 1990s. These were directly associated with the establishments of illegal and unauthorized outposts, created as a counter measure to Israel’s commitment under the Oslo Accords to redeploy Israeli Defense Forces in the West Bank.
Anywhere an outpost was built, attacks on Palestinian farms, pastures and anyone living on that land increased overnight. In the first years of the Second Intifada, which began in September 2000, the IDF established restricted military zones in areas prone to settler violence to “reduce friction.” As a result, Palestinians weren’t allowed to access their own land, and Jewish Israelis planted trees, built greenhouses and other structures, and paved roads on this very land.
This is how outposts of the Jewish settlements of Shiloh and Eli took over some 9,000 dunam (2,250 acres) of land belonging to Palestinian villages north of Ramallah – Jalud, Qaryut, Turmus Ayya, al-Mughayir, and Sinjil. In recent years, the overt goal of these outposts is to expand to another large “patch” of land, measuring some 5,000 dunam, which mostly belongs to the Palestinian villages of Qaryut, Sinjil, and Luban al-Sharqiya, according to settlements policy analyst Dror Etkes.
With the same pattern of violence and the army’s assistance, the settlements and outposts of Itamar and Elon Moreh grabbed the land of Beit Dajan, Yanun, Deir al-Hatab and Salem east of Nablus. This is happening today in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills, with shepherd outposts, popping up like mushrooms after the rain. Joining the outposts are groups of youngsters who volunteer to “protect” the shepherds and attack Palestinians along the way.
Without acknowledging the violence, Zeev Hever, the Secretary-General of Amana (the executive arm of the Yesha Council of settlements,) has boasted that shepherd outposts have taken over more Palestinian land in the West Bank than construction in “traditional” settlements.
Shabtai Kushlevski, shepherd outpost owner and a co-founder of Hashomer Yosh, an organization providing volunteers to accompany shepherds living in the outposts, explained the importance of the shepherds in similar terms.
“The entire Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria is about 65 thousand dunams, while each shepherd outpost holds ten thousand dunams on average,” he said in a Zoom lecture to subscribers to an online Arabic course. “So a single family holds the territory of a medium-size city, and there will be no (Arab) incursion there. About 200 shepherd outposts control about 200,000 dunams.”
This year’s noticeable spike in settler violence comes after a decade of attacks that have consistently escalated in daring and scope. As previously mentioned, there was an average of 71 attacks every month in 2022, during the Naftali Bennett–Yair Lapid government.
In total, Israeli citizens living or staying in West Bank settlements and outposts committed 849 assaults of various types in 2022, with 228 of them leading to wounded Palestinians. This is two thirds greater than in 2021, when 496 attacks were documented. In 2020, the year the pandemic began, saw an almost identical number of attacks (358) as the previous year (335.)
The consistent rise in the number of assaults is clearly seen in the case of Turmus Ayya. From 2008 to 2017, there were 55 attacks against residents of this village, with a maximum of ten attacks in 2015 and a minimum of one attack the following year. Attacks have generally increased between 2018 and 2022, with 16, 14, 26, 13 and 30 attacks each respective year. Before the pogrom of June 21st, settlers attacked Turmus Aya 10 times this year.
Although in the past, Israeli ministers’ resumes haven’t been so similar to that of the hilltop youth, as is the case with current ministers, the hundreds of assailants understood that the authorities encouraged them, albeit indirectly, to continue. According to the Yesh Din organization, they were not indicted, most were not investigated, nor was any effort even made to locate them.
Yesh Din is a non-governmental organization that was founded in the early 2000s to monitor human rights violations in the West Bank and bring the full weight of justice to bear on Israeli assailants. Between 2005 and 2022, the organization tracked 1,579 complaints filed with Israeli Police by West Bank Palestinians who were assaulted by Israeli citizens. However, this is only a sample of all complaints, and certainly doesn’t encompass all assaults.
Thirty-nine percent of complaints and cases filed were for assaults that caused direct injury to people or animals, such as murder, wounding, shooting at and killing of animals. Forty-seven percent of the cases deal with property damage: arson of homes, mosques, and cars, damage to crops, and destruction of property. And 14 percent of cases deal with the trespassing of Palestinian residents’ lands.
As of the end of 2022, 1,531 files were closed. In 93% of them (1,428 cases) the police acknowledge that a crime has been committed but that they failed to locate the perpetrator in 885 cases (64%) and failed to find enough evidence in 287 cases.
It is no wonder that, according to Yesh Din, 38 percent of Palestinians who were victims of assault chose not to file a complaint. Not only do they know that no true investigation will take place, they are also convinced that their assailants acted on behalf of the authorities, not in defiance thereof.
It is not new for the establishment to turn a blind eye towards settler violence. In the early 1980s, an official monitoring committee was established to look into the investigations conducted in some cases of settler violence against Palestinians – including murders – since the late 1970s.
The committee – made up of Justice Ministry representatives (the attorney general and prosecution), the IDF and the police – was created following a letter published by law professors at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University. The letter expressed the professors’ concern regarding the lack of investigations into incidents of Jewish violence against Palestinians “due to local lobbying by the settlers with the police and military administration representatives, or at higher levels.”
Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp, who headed the monitoring committee, wrote in May 1983 that it found “real faults” in police investigation into “neighbor disputes” between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank, as well as the handling of the latter’s complaints against settlers.
Describing it as a deeply rooted and dangerous issue, Karp went on to say that it “would be wrong to focus solely on the police or the Investigative Military Police and their actions.”
Karp wrote that the issue and its “severe implications” must be addressed by a unified government approach “in order to prevent deterioration and harm to the foundations of the rule of law.” Eight months after writing this statement, Karp warned the then-Justice Minister, Moshe Nissim, that nothing had been done to fix the situation.
Even then, Karp hinted that the political elite had turned a blind eye to the problem she identified, although it seems that she found it hard to believe her own conclusion.
The decision to turn a blind eye has remained the modus operandi over the past 40 years. This has encouraged settlers and their supporters to expand their attacks.
The four administrative detentions – detention without trial – issued by the Shin Bet security service this week will not deter the serial rioters. On the contrary – these administrative detentions are a signal that the police and Shin Bet do not intend to make any effort to use the obvious evidence available, which tie known figures directly to the attacks.
They do not intend to force IDF soldiers who protected the rioters to testify. They do not wish to question hundreds of youths, if not more, and those who sent them, and they do not wish to deal with the well-oiled propaganda machine of the right if they were to indict most of the assailants.
Everyone knows, after all, that the so-called rogue attacks are another tool in executing Israeli policy.
