Ongoing accusations that Israel, by seeking to subdue those bent on her destruction, is guilty of “genocide” ring hollow in the ears of those who consider Israel’s war goals crucial to the safety of its citizens.
Likewise, Israel’s raids on militants in Judea and Samaria, identified by Israel’s storied intelligence agencies as planning terror attacks, represent, to us, necessary self-defense.
But supporters of Israel cannot allow our defense of the defensible to devolve into acceptance of the unacceptable: The violence perpetrated against Arabs in Judea and Samaria by some violent Jewish residents of towns in the region.
When you read about “settler violence” in the mainstream media, it refers to these violent residents. They are extremists who attack Arab property and persons. They likely number only in the dozens—at most, in the hundreds—and are generally 15- to 20-year-olds. But they are despicable actors: violators of Israeli law, Jewish law and human decency.
“Settler,” it should be noted, like “Zionist,” is a word that has been grotesquely distorted. For most of history, “Zionist” simply meant someone who shared the aspiration to and believed in the legitimacy of a Jewish state in part of the ancient Jewish Holy Land. Today, it has been twisted by Israel-haters into a slur, an accusation of criminality.
“Settlers,” in the Israeli context, has long been the term employed for citizens who, encouraged by reasonable prices and beautiful vistas, purchased homes in parts of Judea and Samaria widely expected to be retained by Israel in the hoped-for event of a two-state solution to the regional conflict.
Those residents represent a diverse population of more than half a million, some 5% of Israel’s population. They are overwhelmingly law-abiding and peaceful citizens. They coexist as neighbors with Arabs in nearby towns and would never think of harming them.
So, “settler violence” is a rather misleading term. It’s like referring to murders in Chicago as “Chicagoan murders.” Yes, the hooligans are settlers. But only the tiniest portion of settlers are hooligans.
That said, these young men who engage in violence against Arab fields and homes are rightly called, as U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has labeled them, “Jewish terrorists.” They deserve the opprobrium of all Jews, especially those who are Orthodox.
This is because the misguided extremists consider themselves Orthodox, and, like us, wear kippot and tzitzit. They may be observant of the Jewish dietary and Sabbath laws, but their actions violate the grave prohibition against harming innocents.
They also violate the Jewish imperative of being a “light unto the nations.” The Talmud explains that the commandment to “love God” (Deuteronomy 6:5) means to make God beloved to others through one’s behavior. To inspire them, as the Talmud puts it, to say: “Fortunate are the ones who taught him Torah.”
Sadly, bad behavior can inspire the opposite.
Through their violence, these settler youth provide ammunition to anti-Israel propagandists. It allows even reasonable people to imagine—wrongly—that Israeli Jews in general are no different from Arab terrorists. That is reason enough for Israeli authorities to root the violent youth out and punish them.
But the hooligans do something much worse than delight Israel’s enemies. They sully Judaism itself, which respects every human as created in the image of the Divine and whose ways, in King Solomon’s words from the book of Proverbs, are “pleasant ways, and all her paths, peaceful.”
