Israeli politicians cower before Jewish terror
The political outcry over settler youths arrested for causing the death of a Palestinian woman reflects the Israeli leadership's fear of the settlers’ political power.
About 15 years ago, Idith Zertal and my fellow Al-Monitor columnist Akiva Eldar wrote “Lords of the Land.” In their in-depth book they investigated the settlement enterprise and showed how the settlers receive preferential treatment over the rest of the nation, delineating the perks and privileges they enjoy. Today the situation is even worse. The prime minister and political leaders are simply afraid of the settlers.
There were two dramatic events this past week: another evacuation of the Amona outpost in the West Bank (evacuated by court order in February 2017) and the arrest of Jewish teenagers on suspicion of terrorism. These events and their fallout show that the State of Israel has become the land of the settlers, and its elected leaders their servants.
In the 1999 elections, in which Benjamin Netanyahu lost to Ehud Barak, Netanyahu created the slogan “They are afraid," a contemptuous reference to Israeli media outlets and his critics. Now he himself is so afraid to lose the far-right settler votes that to appease them over Amona, he was willing to humiliate his military secretary, Brig. Gen. Avi Blot.
The small Amona outpost, north of Ramallah, has become notorious in Israel even though it was populated by a mere 40 families. In the years between its establishment and its 2017 evacuation and even after, right-wing Knesset members behaved like the Amona settlers' servants. They paid visits to the outpost to encourage the residents and went out of their way to compensate them for their “distress and anguish” in the forced evacuation.
