Israeli settlers went on a rampage earlier today in the Palestinian town of Huwara, setting fires to homes and cars and killing at least one civilian. The vicious mayhem followed a shooting attack by Palestinian militants which killed two Israelis, and settler rhetoric quickly took on a terrifying tone calling for ethnic cleansing.
The deputy head of the Samaria Regional Council, Davidi Ben Zion, called for Huwara to be “wiped out” in response to the attack.
“Here in Huwara the blood of our children was spilled on the road… Huwara needs to be wiped out today. Enough talk about building and strengthening the settlements. The deterrence that was lost must return now, there’s no room for mercy,” he said in a post on Twitter.
That "wiped out" tweet, incidentally, was "liked" by far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich, who recently announced a deal with the Defense Ministry that would render him effective Governor of the West Bank and formalize an apartheid policy in the West Bank territories.
The scale of the violence, which occurred directly under the nose of area IDF forces who were reportedly less-than-interested in intervening or responding, appears to be qualitatively different in scale than previous incidents of settler violence, underscoring the complete breakdown of order ushered in by the new Israeli government as the settler thugs who comprise its base are allowed to run wild.
In many ways, though, this spurt of street violence is the dark parallel of the street protests that have gripped Israel for the past few days -- hundreds of thousands gathering to decry the new government's efforts to undermine an independent judiciary and the country's basic status as a liberal democracy. Those protesters are living out their values on the street. And, in their own perverse way, so are the settlers -- it's just that their "values" are apartheid and violent ethnic suppression of the Palestinian people. Both segments of the population are putting their values into practice in the most visceral way possible.
The difference is that the latter segment is the support base for the current Israeli government, and the latter values are the ones held by the current Israeli government coalition. Settler violence to enforce apartheid is little more than a (very) slightly-too-enthusiastic application of what figures like Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and yes, Netanyahu too, have long promoted as their explicit West Bank policy. The base is merely carrying out to the wishes of the government.
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