Israel's Settlers Can't Hide the Brutal Reality in the West Bank, Just Like They Couldn't Hide Gaza
Efforts by Israeli right-wing pundits like Amit Segal and Gadi Taub to obscure the truth about settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank reveal that the settlers are on the cusp of a legitimacy crisis. They have no one to blame but themselves
The attacks of October 7 and Israel's subsequent devastation of Gaza also ignited a lethal conflagration of settler violence in the occupied West Bank. Over the same two-year period that Israeli forces killed more than 68,000 Palestinians in Gaza, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. New settler outposts have been constructed with rapid speed, displacing entire Palestinian communities – a process often facilitated by Israel's army.
While the tenuous cease-fire in Gaza has allowed the besieged territory's residents a small measure of relief, the settler attacks in the West Bank have not stopped. Each week brings harrowing testimonies and more images of gruesome brutality. Much like the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel wrought in Gaza, the settler pogroms in the West Bank are widely documented, often recorded on video, and viewed by millions around the world.
In the face of this reality, there appears to be a concerted campaign on the part of the pro-Israel right to deny it. In Tablet Magazine, the neoconservative pundit Gadi Taub published an article titled "The Settler Violence Myth," in which he relies almost entirely on a report by the right-wing settler group Regavim to argue that the narrative of growing settler violence is a foreign NGO-funded conspiracy to force a two-state solution on Israel.
Haaretz |
