Israel heads toward its most fateful elections, with law and order, governance and morality at stake |
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In the village of Jalud near Nablus on Monday, a group of settler extremists reportedly set fire to a building and beat up a 14-year-old Palestinian boy, in what nowadays constitutes a relatively minor incident of Jewish violence in the West Bank.
According to Army Radio reporting, some 12 settlers were involved in the attack, and Israeli soldiers stood by and watched for several minutes while it was going on. Army Radio said the soldiers (un)involved were from a reservist unit trained in handling nuclear, biological, and chemical materials (abach in Hebrew) rather than in confronting Palestinian or Jewish terrorism, but were deployed to the West Bank because of the IDF’s chronic manpower shortage.
In a statement, the IDF confirmed that a Palestinian had been injured in the incident “and evacuated for medical treatment.” It said that the troops “acted to disperse the gathering using crowd control measures, questioned the civilians at the scene, and detained an Israeli civilian, who will be transferred for further handling by Israel Police.”
One Israeli was indeed arrested. He was brought to court and released on Tuesday.
The radio outlet’s military reporter added on Wednesday morning that many of the assailants made no attempt to hide their faces, evidently unconcerned by the possibility that they would be detained, much less brought to justice. He further noted that the identities of many settler extremists involved in a soaring number of attacks on Palestinian civilians in recent weeks are known to the Shin Bet security service, which has not been taking concerted action against them.
With Jewish terror in the West Bank thus largely unconstrained, the left-wing Yesh Din human rights organization reported earlier this month that there were 378 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians and their property during the nearly six weeks of the war with Iran between February 28 and April 8, when national attention was elsewhere, in which eight Palestinians were shot and killed, and 200 were injured.
The IDF’s Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, last month condemned settler violence, which has also seen attacks on soldiers, calling it “morally and ethically unacceptable” and noting dryly that it was also a major strategic impediment. But he has proved unable to tackle it effectively.
The IDF is supposed to intervene, and to detain the perpetrators of such attacks, but broadly prefers that the police make such arrests. And the principal responsibility, and some of the capacity, indeed, rests with the police and the Shin Bet. Both the police and the Shin Bet are legally permitted, for instance, to gather intelligence on Jewish citizens in the West Bank; the IDF is not.
In the complex, confusing distribution of responsibility and authority in the West Bank, the paramilitary Border Police are supposedly subordinate to the IDF. The blue-uniformed Israel Police has a Judea and Samaria District force, responsible for a very large area with a relatively small number of personnel. Even were these various components of Israel’s defense and security apparatus encouraged by their senior commanders and political masters to try to crack down on Jewish terror in the West Bank, the low likelihood of success in efforts at prosecution would be a powerful disincentive.
No such encouragement is forthcoming, however, from two key ministers deeply hostile to West Bank Palestinians, and fervently supportive of both Israeli sovereignty throughout the West Bank and the “voluntary” relocation of the Palestinian populace beyond Israel’s expanded borders: Itamar Ben Gvir, who as national security minister is responsible for the police, and Bezalel Smotrich, who in addition to his responsibilities as finance minister serves as a minister in the Defense Ministry with far-reaching authority over the West Bank.
Both men are Jewish supremacists. Ben Gvir is a lifelong anti-Arab activist, with convictions for incitement to racism and support for the racist Kach movement, a designated terrorist organization. Smotrich, who was arrested in 2005, held for three weeks by the Shin Bet but never charged over a plot to blow up cars on an Israeli highway during the disengagement from Gaza, wants to see Israel turned into a theocracy — run according to the laws of the Torah. Ben Gvir did not serve in the IDF as a young man; he was not conscripted because of his extremist background; Smotrich pushed off military service as a student, and served only briefly.
Three years ago, relatively early in the life of the current Israeli government, The Times of Israel’s military reporter, Emanuel Fabian, wrote an article headlined “Can’t or won’t? IDF fails to prevent settler attacks, and that’s unlikely to change.” The headline has proved prescient, but the intensity of the attacks today is of a whole different order.
And the strategy is increasingly overt. Our settlements reporter, Jeremy Sharon, wrote an article earlier this month headlined “After uprooting Palestinian hamlets, extremist settlers set sights on purge of entire West Bank.” A week later, underlining the coalition’s strategic vision, the government approved a record 34 new West Bank settlements.
Rebuffed repeatedly by his political masters as he pleads for tens of thousands of eligible ultra-Orthodox youths to be conscripted, Zamir is running an IDF pushed to the brink of what he has warned is collapse as it battles against Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, and appears powerless to thwart deadly West Bank Jewish terror that is, at the very least, indulged by some of his own uniformed troops.
He is also battling what he on Monday denounced as “unethical conduct” and a “rebellion” against IDF values within the ranks, exemplified by an IDF reservist smashing a statue of Jesus in south Lebanon, and the trend of soldiers adding insignia to their uniforms professing themselves to be in the service of the Messiah and carrying messages inciting hatred and violence.
The malaise afflicting Israel’s various security forces is not limited to the West Bank, south Lebanon and other war fronts.
Israel’s police force, under Ben Gvir, has proved unable to stem the murderous crime wave in the Arab Israeli community — with some 250 homicides last year and almost 100 so far this year. Separately, a state comptroller’s report released on Tuesday found that protection rackets and other forms of crime are out of control in the Negev, especially in Bedouin towns, where governance has broken down. The minister dismissed the findings as distorted.
The murder of Yemanu Binyamin Zelka, a shift manager at Pizza Hut in Petah Tikva, by a gang of Jewish youths who ambushed him at the end of his Independence Day shift because he had politely asked them to stop using party spray in the restaurant, appallingly highlighted the wider rising incidence of brutal crime by teen Jewish gangs in central Israel.
And the readiness of Ben Gvir’s police to take a laissez-faire approach to violent ultra-Orthodox demonstrations — while targeting nonviolent anti-government protesters — culminated on Tuesday night with Haredi extremists breaking into the yard of the IDF’s Military Police chief; he wasn’t at home, but his wife and children were.
That attack was carried out by the “extremist” Jerusalem Faction of the ultra-Orthodox community, as part of a series of public order disturbances to protest and deter the arrests of ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers — to prevent the rare instances, that is, when the IDF, as legally required, tries to enforce their draft orders.
It should, of course, be no great surprise, that groups of young Haredi men, who ought to be in the midst of performing their mandatory military service, instead spend their illegally free time blocking roads, staging protests at IDF induction centers, attacking IDF soldiers, and now directly targeting a senior IDF officer. Not when the government of Israel is openly defying the High Court, and any democratic notion of equality and shared responsibility, by maintaining broad ultra-Orthodox exemption from military service and moving to further entrench it in fresh legislation.
Indeed, blame for the entire catalog of horrors briefly detailed above, all of them exemplifying the breakdown of law and order and responsible governance, lies entirely with the government of Israel, and ultimately with the man who has been at its helm for more than 15 of the past 17 years.
It is Benjamin Netanyahu who was best equipped, with the intelligence information, the years of experience, and the levers of power, to recognize ahead of time that Hamas was preparing to invade on October 7, 2023, but failed to do so, and has since steadfastly prevented the establishment of the state commission of inquiry that is essential to ensure nothing like it can happen again.
But it is also Netanyahu who, prizing power over the essential interests of the state and its citizens, has for almost four years capitulated to the demands of his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners, and — despite the desperate appeals of IDF commanders, and the needs of a standing army and reserve force pushed far beyond their limits — exempted the fastest-growing community in the country from shared responsibility for Israel’s defense, while funding that community’s skewed Judaism from the taxes of those who do serve.
And it is that same Netanyahu who chose, eyes wide open, to bring two dangerous, corrosive, Jewish supremacist thugs into the very heart of Israel’s government, and gave them immense power and responsibility over law enforcement, over policies and day-to-day life in the West Bank, and over national security. (Not incidentally, it was also Netanyahu who appointed former senior IDF officer David Zini as Shin Bet chief six months ago, having reportedly previously refrained from selecting Zini as his military secretary because he was “too messianic.”)
All this while demonizing and discrediting the judicial system, triggering such hostility to the justices from among his supporters that the Supreme Court is no longer able to so much as hold its hearings without actual danger of attack by demonstrators.
Sometime in the next six months, Israel is supposed to go to the polls again. Election season kicked off this week with former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid merging their parties in a bid to again unseat Netanyahu, as they did for 18 months in 2021-22, fellow opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot declining to join forces with them, and snap opinion polls showing the ever-fragmented anti-Netanyahu Zionist bloc still just short of a Knesset majority.
Netanyahu abused his prime ministerial authority to turn the state’s 78th Independence Day state ceremony into what amounted to his own campaign launch, and will, as ever, be a formidable opponent, branding all opponents as leftists who are dangerous to the security of the state while avoiding all responsibility for leadership that has, in practice, devastated Israel’s external and internal security.
Hopefully, there are enough Israelis who can see the evidence before their eyes of where this country is heading under the current administration. With every passing, lawless, violent day, after all, it becomes increasingly horrifying and unmistakable.
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