Amid two years of collective punishment wrought by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip, the intimidation and violence inflicted on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has too often been treated as a secondary story. But this week a disturbing video emerged of a masked Israeli settler clubbing a 55-year-old Palestinian woman to the ground.
In the incident, which was shared widely on social media, the attacker rushes towards the woman who was harvesting olives in the Palestinian village of Turmus Ayya. Jasper Nathaniel, the US journalist and activist who filmed Sunday’s assault, said the assailant struck the woman again as she lay unconscious.
Such anarchy in the West Bank is nothing new – a report issued by the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said 36 of 71 documented settler attacks between October 7 and 13 this year occurred in the context of the olive harvest, which began on October 9. Israel’s decades-long military occupation is accompanied by a two-tier justice system that disfavours Palestinians and security forces unwilling or unable to rein in militant settlers.
But what this latest incident reveals is not just the impunity enjoyed by ultra-nationalists. It illustrates the danger that this extremist current poses to mainstream Israeli society as well as to wider hopes for an independent Palestinian state that could bring the overall conflict to an end.
Those with a background in Israel’s nationalist-settler milieu have risen to some of the highest offices in the land. Several prominent Cabinet members have built divisive and destructive careers on championing the settlers’ cause and by pushing the Israeli mainstream in a more extreme direction. The country’s military is changing, too; in October 2022, Herzi Halevi became the first IDF chief of staff from a West Bank settlement. An increasing number of Israeli officers now hail from a religious-nationalist background.
The growing number of governing figures and military commanders steeped in the politics of the settler right should be a cause for concern. Some countries have belatedly recognised that, when it comes to efforts to end the conflict, Israel’s sons of anarchy remain a dangerous spoiler.
The US, the EU and some western countries have imposed sanctions on individual settlers whose rhetoric and behaviour have been deemed egregious, even by the standards of their movement. But too little pressure has been exerted on the Israeli authorities to end the kind of West Bank lawlessness embodied in Sunday’s shocking video clip.
However, if the recalcitrant Israeli leadership can be made to engage with a Gaza truce and peace process – no matter how reluctantly – it could also be pushed towards de-escalation in the West Bank. The true believers in Israel’s current government will not be persuaded, but those who value the country’s cohesion, stability and long-term future in the Middle East should recognise the dangers posed by extremist ideologues.
Palestinians face physical danger from violent settlers regularly. However, without a change of course, the general Israeli public may find themselves having to reckon with the settlers’ agenda in Israel itself. Confronting the danger in their midst would not only be good for reaching a just peace with the Palestinians, it would be good for Israeli society, too.
