Extremist settlers exploit pandemic to step up violence
While the Israel Defense Forces and the political leadership are busy fighting the novel coronavirus, Israel's notorious hilltop youth are rioting and attacking Palestinians with impunity.
Israel was under lockdown during the Passover holidays. Large police and military forces manned checkpoints outside the cities and patrolled the streets to ensure that the curfew was enforced. Yet even as a modern-day plague ravages the country, it's clear who the country’s favored residents are.
On April 6, about 20 of the young extremist settlers known as the "hilltop youth" were ordered to self-isolate after coming into contact with a coronavirus patient. Some of them had even shown symptoms of the disease. They refused to be confined in a hotel in Jerusalem and then rioted on the way to a confinement facility in the south of Israel.
What would have happened if these young men were run-of-the-mill Israelis and not part of a group that has long been accustomed to preferential treatment? They would certainly have been punished in one way or another — perhaps a fine or jail time.
But when these young people rioted and resisted confinement, the government set up a tent camp for them at Metzoke Dragot in the Judean Desert, one of the most stunningly beautiful natural attractions in the country and a major draw for desert hikers. Surely many of the Israelis who did follow instructions, who kept to the curfew and stayed pent up in their apartments, would have preferred to be isolated at a major tourism destination. But even in the war against COVID-19, that kind of treatment is reserved for rowdy settler teens who break the law. And since the Israel Defense Forces is busy enforcing the curfew throughout the rest of the country and assisting the regions hardest hit by the epidemic, like Bnei Brak and Jerusalem, there were fewer troops to fulfill their routine duties in the occupied territories, leaving the hilltop youth on their own in a facility created especially for them.
