Israel jolted by ‘shocking’ settler violence

Israeli President Isaac Herzog this week condemned the latest outbreak of settler-instigated violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, decrying a recent arson attack near the city of Tulkarm as “shocking and serious” in some of his most high-profile public statements on the longstanding trend to date. Herzog’s comments come during the seasonal olive harvest that brings Palestinian farmers into their neighboring fields, often setting the stage for attacks from groups of Israeli settlers. According to United Nations monitors, settler violence against Palestinians has reached a record high, with some 1,500 incidents recorded this year.

‘Act decisively to eradicate the phenomenon’

While the olive harvest has always been a time for heightened settler violence against Palestinians, this year’s “situation on the ground is out of control,” said Anton Goodman, Partnership Director of Rabbis for Human Rights, to the Haaretz podcast. The group, which monitors rights abuses in the occupied territories, has never seen “such a peak moment of violence” impacting “so many communities” in the West Bank as they have this season, said Goodman. In the latest of such instances, “dozens” of Israeli settlers attacked the Deir Sharaf Bedouin village and Al-Juneidi dairy factory near Tulkarm on Tuesday, “brandishing clubs and setting fire to parked vehicles,” said CNN.

This attack “crosses a red line,” Herzog said on X, urging Israeli officials to “act decisively to eradicate the phenomenon.” In doing so, he offered a “rare and powerful voice” to the ordinarily “muted criticism by top Israeli officials of the settler violence,” said The Associated Press. Rights groups have long criticized the Israeli government’s alleged tendency to “turn a blind eye to the violence,” including by dispatching Israeli Defense Force soldiers to incidents, only for them to “frequently leave without detaining the assailants or arrest only Palestinians,” said The New York Times.

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Bad apples ‘tarnish a law-abiding public’

Within the Israeli Defense Forces, the uptick in West Bank violence against Palestinians has been pinned on “fringe anarchist teenagers” who need “intervention from welfare and education institutions,” said a briefing from IDF Central Command obtained by Haaretz. Those responsible are a “criminal minority tarnishing a law-abiding public” whose actions “violate our values, cross a red line and divert forces’ attention from their mission,” said IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir on Wednesday during a training exercise in the West Bank. That mission is “protecting settlements and carrying out offensive operations.”

Speaking in “closed discussions,” IDF Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, who leads the country’s central command, has “demanded expanded legal powers” to “tackle the growing wave of settler violence,” said YNet News. The ask comes amid “mounting pressure from field commanders” to reinstate “administrative detention orders for Jewish extremists” that were canceled one year ago. The extremists’ goal, said left-wing Israeli Knesset member Gilad Kariv, is to “ignite a third intifada” that will draw in the IDF in a way “reminiscent of the operation in Gaza.”

Noting that military officials are “already speaking openly about this danger,” Kariv said on X that the violence against West Bank Palestinians is not “isolated pogroms” but are the “initial stages of implementing the nationalist right’s plan.”