“Man gets used to everything, the scoundrel.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

The Banality of Settler Violence

There is something almost flattering in calling these men “extremists.” The word gives them ideological stature. It places them inside a historical drama and invites us to search for theology, nationalism, trauma and political conviction before looking at what they actually did. But sometimes a man with a stick is simply a man beating another man. Sometimes people carrying property out of somebody else’s home are not performing history. They are suspected of stealing.

Perhaps the first thing we should take away from settler violence is its grandeur. Strip away the hilltops, the flags, the biblical vocabulary and the language of national destiny. Look first at the verbs. They beat, take, burn, threaten and sometimes kill. Criminal law has known these verbs for a very long time.

I write this as a Jew, not as an activist visiting from London who can spend several days in the West Bank and return home with a finished theory of Israel. I need no instruction in Jewish vulnerability. Our history has supplied enough, and October 7 supplied another unbearable lesson. But the experience of having been victims cannot become a device that makes it difficult to recognize a Jew as a perpetrator. Memory that recognizes only our suffering eventually stops functioning as moral memory and begins functioning as immunity.

Recent events in the West Bank make the problem painfully mundane. In Masafer Yatta, men identified in reports as settlers were filmed apparently removing property from a Palestinian home and driving away on an ATV. The Times of Israel noted that the vehicle appeared identical to ATVs previously supplied by the state to residents of illegal Israeli outposts. That does not establish that this particular vehicle came from that program, and it should not be presented as established fact. Yet we do not need to solve the provenance of the vehicle before noticing what the recording appears to show: people carrying someone else’s possessions out of his home.

In Jannatah near Bethlehem, settlers attacked Israeli activists and AFP journalists. People were beaten, vehicles were damaged and several required medical treatment. Video showed soldiers present during part of the violence, yet none of the attackers was detained........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)