Two back-to-back incidents related to extremist Israeli violence against Palestinians in the West Bank are highlighting the government’s failures to prevent such attacks and its inconsistent approach to the issue.
Overnight, dozens of radical settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Jalud, setting fire to homes and cars, blocking roadways and assaulting Israeli troops who had been escorting a Palestinian family home after they had fled following regular harassment and attacks by neighboring settlers.
The Tubasi family left their home this summer, and earlier this month, the High Court of Justice ordered the military to enable their return. As security forces escorted them back, a message was reportedly sent to a WhatsApp group for extremist activists calling on them to disrupt the operation.
Three Border Police officers were lightly injured in the melee, and damage was caused to an Israeli security vehicle, the military said in a statement.
“Due to the violence, the mission to return the family to their home was not completed,” the IDF added.
This latest assault by Israeli extremists comes as such attacks on Palestinians have escalated significantly in recent years. Public figures associated with the settler movement — rabbis, journalists, local politicians — who once downplayed this violence have increasingly spoken out on the subject, seeing it as both a moral failure and a threat to the broader settlement enterprise.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who often refrains from commenting on such violence, condemned the marauders this morning, while referring to the more than 100 attackers as a “handful of rioters,” whom he said “are not representative of the law-abiding settler public in Judea and Samaria, cause it immense injustice and hinder our forces from fulfilling their mission.”
A number of other Israeli political figures, including Gadi Eisenkot, who is widely seen as Netanyahu’s main opponent in next month’s election, also decried the violence. In a statement, Eisenkot referred to the violence as a “campaign of terror and violence… [that is] not moral, not Jewish and damages the security of everyone, as well as the work of the security services.” Eisenkot blamed the current government for allowing the “anarchy and loss of control” to reach new heights under its watch.
Yisrael Gantz, mayor of the West Bank’s Mateh Binyamin region and chair of the Yesha Council, which broadly represents the settlement movement, called for those involved to be arrested. “The law must be enforced in Judea and Samaria exactly as it is enforced in Tel Aviv or Kfar Saba. Whoever behaves violently must meet the long arm of the law,” he wrote.
The overnight attack came shortly after Haaretz reported that Israel’s Interior Ministry was blocking the immigration applications for two people — a British Jewish man and an American Jewish woman — because of their past activism to prevent Israeli extremist violence against Palestinians.
On the one hand, the Israeli government is criticizing Israeli extremist violence in the West Bank; on the other, it is barring citizenship from foreign-born Jews lawfully working to prevent it.
Fearing retribution, the American woman declined to be named, while the British man was identified as Lawrence Shenkin, a graduate of several Orthodox and religious Zionist institutions, including the Bnei Akiva and Ezra youth movements, Yeshivat HaKotel and the Jerusalem College of Technology.
“Those of you who know me well know how far my love of the Land and People of Israel extends. Indeed, from the first time I fully comprehended the Land of Israel, it has been one of my greatest loves, a love that nothing, truly nothing, can ever hinder,” Shenkin wrote on his Facebook yesterday. “Many of my English friends have mocked me for being ‘too Zionist,’ for always encouraging and promoting aliyah, always asking when they’ll be joining their brethren in the Land of Israel, as the Torah mandates them to. I will never stop being that, or doing that.”
Their blocks on their immigration are based on their legal political activities in the West Bank as so-called “protective presence activists,” staying in Palestinian areas that have been targeted by Israeli extremists to prevent or mitigate future violence. Through an unclear legal mechanism, the Interior Ministry’s Population and Immigration Authority halted their aliyah applications. This is already being challenged in court, and as such follows a similar “win-win” logic for coalition parties as in the recent disqualification of Arab political parties — if the immigration refusals stand, it’s a win; if they are overturned, it provides further ammunition for calls to overhaul the courts.
Unlike the overnight violence, their refusals have not garnered widespread condemnation in Israel, by politicians or organizations. Labor MK Rabbi Gilad Kariv said that he planned to hold a Knesset committee hearing on the subject, calling the refusals an “illegal act.”
The two main nonprofits that encourage and facilitate aliyah — the Jewish Agency and Nefesh B’Nefesh — have similarly been mum on the issue. This appears to be a combination of apprehension at openly criticizing the government offices with which they work most closely, recognition of the limitation of their authorities and, to a lesser extent, the Sukkot holiday, when many Israeli offices are shut.
In the Diaspora, however, the move was lambasted, including by those associated with the Orthodox community, who decried the refusal as a violation of Israel’s Law of Return, which guarantees Israeli citizenship to nearly anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent. The law allows exceptions on the basis of public health and safety, though the government would likely struggle to make such a case.
“The Law of Return cannot be meaningful only when we approve of the choices made by the Jew seeking to invoke it,” Joanne Greenaway, CEO of the London School of Jewish Studies, wrote in an opinion piece today in the U.K.’s Jewish News. “Of course, Israel has the right to protect itself from genuine threats. But any exception on grounds of national security must be justified, rigorously and transparently applied. If provisions of the Entry into Israel Law can be used to prevent an otherwise eligible Jew from completing aliyah because of lawful political activity, the effect is to introduce a political test into the operation of the Law of Return.”