David Shulman describes Israeli settler violence

I subscribe to The New York Review of Books. One of the frequent contributors from Israel is David Shulman. He is an author and a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also a longtime activist with Ta’ayush, the Arab-Jewish Partnership, in the occupied Palestinian Territories. While the rogue regime of Benjamin Netanyahu carries out its atrocities in Gaza, extremists in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank are attacking Palestinian homes and villages, crops and herds, in what Shulman describes as a second Nabka. I cannot provide here Shulman’s entire article because about half of it is behind a NYR firewall. But the excerpt provides a chilling on-the-ground account of the terrorism being wrought by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Canada long a full-throated supporter of Israel, has now become a mild critic. That is not enough. Our government must act with like-minded democracies to apply intense diplomatic pressure upon the Israeli government, including the use of economic sanctions, and boycotts if necessary.  

David Shulman’s NYR article

For many years Israeli human rights activists in the occupied Palestinian territories have been saying, as vociferously as we could, that the intricately intermeshed system of the occupation—settlers, soldiers, police, military courts, the media, and, behind it all, the government—has been committed to a single overriding goal: ruthless ethnic cleansing in all of Area C (the 60 percent of the West Bank under Israeli control) and, more recently, in parts of Area B (the 22 percent under joint Israeli-Palestinian control) as well. Stealing vast tracts of Palestinian land has been the primary mechanism. The courts, including the Supreme Court, have usually gone along with it. Brutal settler violence against Palestinian villagers has become routine, as I have documented frequently in these pages.

Settler thugs attack Palestinians  

We have done whatever we could to halt this remorseless machine. Over the years we have had many relatively minor victories that were nonetheless crucial for the survival of entire clans and families; after long years of tedious struggle in the field and in the courts, many acres of Palestinian land were restored to their rightful owners. But what we have been seeing in the last few weeks, following upon continuous violence against Palestinian communities from the start of the Gaza war, is the denouement of the tragedy. Palestinian farmers and shepherds in the West Bank are cut off from water, attacked by settler thugs, and repeatedly threatened with death; their herds are stolen in huge numbers by the settlers, with the active support of police and soldiers; the minimal infrastructure in the villages—electricity, sanitation, housing, food reserves—is being savaged. Some sixty villages have been destroyed and their people violently expelled. In short, life for Palestinians in Area C has become a living hell.

Let there be no mistake. This is the second Nakba, by now in full gear. We are seeing war crimes and crimes against humanity on a large scale. I want to describe what happened in the once lovely village of Magha’ir a-Dir in the central West Bank, not far from Ramallah.

Settlers expel Palestinian villagers

On May 18, Israeli settlers arrived in the village and began constructing the rudiments of an outpost only a few meters from the Palestinian sheepfolds and houses. For the last two years settler harassment there has been a quotidian reality. We used to protect the villagers every morning at dawn when they drew water from a pipe near the main north–south road. They paid for the water, but the settlers repeatedly tried to prevent them from filling up their tankers. Sometimes the settlers shot at them. Now they were installing themselves inside the village in order to pursue their goal of expelling its people once and for all. And the Palestinians knew what was in store if they tried to stay in their homes. Within a week they had fled—I don’t know where.

Even as the villagers were taking apart their homes and fences, trying to salvage some remnant of their former lives, on May 24 the settlers attacked, shooting, throwing rocks, and beating them viciously with clubs. At least eight Palestinians were wounded, along with two Israeli activists who were trying to protect them; one of the latter, Avishay Mohar, was hospitalized with serious injuries. It wasn’t enough for the settlers that they had destroyed the village; they couldn’t resist the impulse to inflict more pain. They are motivated by intense hatred of all Arab people and by a depraved messianic ideology—a travesty of the Jewish tradition. As one of them said when the outpost was set up in Magha’ir a-Dir, “This is what redemption looks like.”

Settlers steal sheep

The settlers are now trying the same tactics in two villages I know well in the Southern Jordan Valley: Mu’arrajat and Ras al-‘Ain. We are doing what we can to stop them, but the future looks bleak. In early March a group of fifty or more armed settlers invaded Ras al-‘Ain, with soldiers and police leading them in, and stole between 1,000 and 1,500 sheep. The Bedouin shepherds live off their sheep. The financial loss to the families is over a million Israeli shekels (around $300,000 USD), possibly more than twice that sum. These are people eking out a bare existence in conditions of extreme hardship with the settlers always at their throats. The beginnings of a new settler outpost have now been built deep inside Ras al-‘Ain, thus making the treat of expulsion immediate. The settlers have already plowed a field – always a claim to ownership. . .

Netanyahu a hardcore extremist

A prevalent misconception defines [Benjamin] Netanyahu as a cynical opportunist, when in fact he is a hardcore ideological extremist like his late father, Ben Givr, and Smotrich. His entire life has been committed to the idea that it is possible to annihilate the Palestinian national movement forever. These days he speaks in public of an alternative to the “Oslo narrative,” which was based on mutuality between the two peoples in Israel/Palestine. You can guess what that alternative will look like.    

Source

The New York Review of Books, July 24, 2025