Why are Israelis turning a blind eye to settler violence?
The murders of a Palestinian toddler and a teenage girl have shaken Israelis from a willful blindness toward an already deteriorating situation that must be addressed to prevent a slide toward even more violence.
An entire country, or at least most of it, shuddered this week in the face of Jewish terrorism and the knowledge that there are people among us capable of burning a family alive in its home. “We’re not like that,” we tend to think. We claim the moral high ground, which is in contrast to the other side, whose incitement encourages the murder of civilians and the use of suicide bombers.
For years, however, we’ve been turning a blind eye to the uprooting of Palestinian olive trees and the perpetrators of the violent and vandalistic “price tag” attacks. We tell ourselves that these incidents are nothing more than graffiti sprayed on the walls of a house in an Arab village and that its perpetrators are just a bunch of bad apples, a small group of radical settlers gone wild who do as they please, representing no one but themselves. Thus, we refused to see that these bad apples have multiplied rampantly and that there is no one stopping their growth.
“Every society has its radical fringes. But today we need to ask ourselves: What is it in the public atmosphere that allows extremism and extremists to walk freely in broad daylight?” asked President Reuven Rivlin at an Aug. 1 protest rally in Jerusalem, following a July 30 stabbing attack by an ultra-Orthodox man at the Gay Pride parade in which a teenage girl was killed and the July 31 torching of the home of the Dawabsha family in Douma, an Arab village in the West Bank. Rivlin aptly described how, after years, we have woken up to a reality that Israelis had preferred to suppress while going about daily life, as if these phenomena were occurring on a different planet — one that had nothing to do with us.
What has led to the escalation and intensification of Jewish terrorism is not only that the Israeli public that does not reside in the territories had turned a blind eye to events. It was made possible by the ineptness of the Israeli law enforcement agencies in the territories as well as the patent and outright discrimination against Palestinians in favor of the settlers.
