The persistent violence from Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank has become such common fare it risks becoming banal. Unfortunately, it takes events such as those befalling veteran photojournalist Heidi Levine of The Washington Post and European diplomats to return the attention to something that is not only grotesque but programmatic.
On October 16, while covering the annual olive harvest in the West Bank Levine, fellow journalists and a group of Palestinians became the ripe targets of Israeli settlers. The auguries of violence were already present: over the course of 24 days since the season commenced, 125 physical attacks on Palestinian olive harvesters had been reported. After an initial gathering at a hilltop in the proximity of Abu Falah, the numbers of the assailants ominously swelled. They approached the group menacingly, burning olive trees on route. Then came tear gas and shots. A Palestinian was wounded in the leg. Levine, in her description, was forced to the ground. “They just kept kicking me and hitting me with sticks, and it just kept going on and on. And then I actually thought, okay, maybe I’ll just play dead and pretend I’m dead, and they’ll stop and they’ll leave me alone.” The decision failed to yield the desired result. Her camera bag, lenses, pouch filled with her US passport, credit cards, documents and relevant items were seized. She was hauled to her feet.
Eventually, a group of Palestinian men intervened to stand “in front of me to protect us, me and my rescuers from being attacked again.” Without that involvement, the group “would have been in the same situation as me.” In that encounter, Levine suffered a broken rib, a broken vertebra and a severe finger injury needing surgery.
In a separate attack on October 17, French, Belgian and Polish diplomats and dignitaries of the Catholic Church found themselves targets at the mostly Christian village of Taybeh near Ramallah. The window of a car from the Belgian consulate was smashed. Bernard Baudoux, mayor of the northern French town of Aulnoye-Aymeries, was beaten.
The response from the Israeli government was, as to be expected, guarded, qualified and, in the end, light on the egregious conduct of the assailants. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar merely called the attacks on the European officials the cavalier work of “Israeli rioters”, blaming those who had organised the convoy for not coordinating “with the IDF in advance. Such coordination could have helped safeguard the visitors’ security.” Presumably, irresponsible Palestinian olive pickers do not coordinate with the IDF sufficiently to prevent settler attacks they invite upon themselves for simply being there.
An official statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office suggested that “serious questions” remained unanswered regarding the attack on Levine, a neat way of suggesting that non-settler accounts were to be treated as mendacious, self-interested and ultimately, unreliable. “Reports indicate some 200 Arabs and far-left activists confronted approximately 40 Israeli youths.” Those Arabs, those leftists, in a struggle against unblemished Israeli youth. The violence that ensued had a certain equivalence – so the PM’s office seemed to imply. “Footage shows masked individual on both sides hurling objects, amid reports of fireworks fired at Jewish youths.”
As for Levine, was she to be trusted? After all, “footage appears to show Levine knocked down and immediately helped to her feet by the same unidentified individual.” Not so, rebutted Levine. The attackers “only stood me up because they couldn’t manage to get everything off my shoulders to rob me, including ripping off my gold necklace that my daughter gave me for my birthday.”
The statement went on to reveal the whole rationale of such parrying responses. “We will not allow disputed incidents to be exploited to demonize the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria.” Hard to be law abiding if one’s entire presence is premised on illegal occupation.
Stung into modest, cosmetic action, the Israeli authorities detained ten suspects regarding the two attacks on October 19. On October 21, nine of them were ordered by a Jerusalem court to be released to house arrest. “In the vast majority of attacks against Palestinians, no arrests are made at all,” explained Yonatan Kanonich, head of research at the Israeli rights outfit Yesh Din. “In cases that receive media coverage … the police arrest several settlers and release most of them shortly afterward.” Assaf Gonen of the legal aid organisation Honenu, bluntly claimed that such arrests were only “for show” with the intention of satisfying “media pressure and foreign interests.”
Interest has now shifted to the latest spate of bloodletting, with the October 23 shooting deaths of two IDF soldiers at a checkpoint in Hebron giving Netanyahu the pretext to dig in, condemn and authorise acts of collective punishment. The IDF describes its avenging operation as “focused and limited to the area from which the terrorists operated”, which suggest that the area in question is likely to be flattened. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is unreserved in justifying the demolition orders against “illegal structures” to “create deterrence and exact a price for the serious attack”.
The PM has an election to win, and the security and military forces have become his electioneering playthings. As for the terrorising settlers, Netanyahu only has warm words of praise. They were “heroic” emissaries of Israel’s broader project of settlement. “You are standing in the breach. You are a role model for the people of Israel, you are role model for the State of Israel. We are going to destroy the terror infrastructures, and we are going to build the settlement infrastructures.”
Levine acknowledges the asymmetrical interest shown for Palestinian residents relative to the tenacious, gluttonous coverage given notable foreign visitors who have suffered injury at the hands of the same assailants. “What hurts me most is I can now really understand what others have gone through, what Palestinian women, children, men have gone through,” she reflected in an October 22 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I’m an American, I work for The Washington Post, my story is getting a lot of attention around the world, everyone wants to talk to me – but I can’t imagine what it’s like for all the victims that have gone through the same ordeal and are living with the threat of this violence on a daily basis.”
The response from Democratic Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut to the attack had the good sense to note that the Palestinian “farmers in the grove had no flak jackets and no helmets. They had no major American newspaper behind them. If the settlers will do this to an American journalist on camera, in broad daylight, imagine what Palestinian families face when no one is watching.” Heroic deeds, according to Netanyahu, with more to come.