Perspective 95. West Bank Settler Violence: A New Wave?

In the last week of January two Palestinian gunmen – one only 13 years old – killed seven Israelis and wounded another five. In the same week Israeli settlers on the West Bank reportedly carried out 22 attacks on Palestinians and their property. Does settler violence on the West Bank promise to add a new dimension to what is already an explosive situation?

No. There is nothing new about settler violence against their Arab neighbors. In the month of January alone, 70 attacks by West Bank settlers were recorded, so the last week of that month was nothing special.

In perspective, settler violence against Palestinians has accompanied the settlement movement since its origins after the Six-Day War of 1967, and has sharply increased since the turn of the twenty-first century. According to a UN report, there were about 2100 attacks by West Bank settlers on Palestinian targets in the years 2006-2014. Just over a month ago the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that there were 1049 settler attacks in 2022, marking the sixth straight year that such attacks had increased.

Also in perspective, there are now about half a million Jewish residents in the West Bank, and only a small minority – perhaps only a few hundred – are regularly involved in this violence. Leading voices in the settler community have also condemned the attacks. But these leaders, as well as the army and police, have been ineffective in bringing them to a halt.

An Israeli human rights group estimates that since 2005 only about three percent of the attacks have led to an indictment of the perpetrators.

The attacks involve vandalizing homes, shops, vehicles, and mosques, as well as the uprooting or burning of olive trees, arson, and assault. In recent years so-called “price tag” attacks have become common; when the army demolishes an illegal settler outpost, the settlers respond by destroying Palestinian property to make Palestinians “pay the price.”

Some of the more extreme elements openly declare, however, that the ultimate intention is to drive Palestinians from certain areas or to force them out completely.

It is of course possible that the composition of Israel’s new government will, in the end, encourage even more attacks. An extremist settler, considered too radical to serve in Israel’s army, is now in charge of the border police. Another radical settler, now Minister of Finance, was given a broad role in the government’s civil administration of the West Bank. Prosecution of attacks on Arabs seems less likely than ever.

Though living outside official Israeli jurisdiction, Jews in the West Bank – now 17 percent of the population there – are governed under Israeli civil law with all its safeguards. Police of the Palestinian Authority, operating in the 40 percent of the West Bank governed by the PA, are not allowed to deal with Jewish settlers. Palestinians on the West Bank fall under PA laws, or pre-existing Jordanian law, or – more to the point – the many regulations issued by the Israeli army under the international law of military occupation.

Definitions of apartheid revolve around the implementation and maintenance of different systems of law for different groups, with one group in a privileged position. As previously argued in this space, this does not apply to Israel within its juridically recognized borders. And Israel defends its actions in the West Bank by citing the latitude allowed under the laws of military occupation, implicitly disclaiming sovereignty there.

But as the Jewish population in the West Bank grows, the harsh reality of two legal systems operating in close proximity also grows, and it becomes more and more difficult to deny the applicability of the “A” word to what is happening there.