I spent 10 days in the West Bank, watching the impunity of Israeli settlers

In August, I spent 10 days in the West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territories. Here is some of what I saw and heard there during my visit.

First, the settlers’ violence. Forget about statistics. Forget about the record numbers of incidents. On the face of it, the number of actual fatalities, of Palestinians getting killed by settlers, is not so high.

But the feeling of fear and terrorism is extremely present. 

I stay the night at the village of Umm al-Khair, in Masafer Yatta, southern West Bank, a tiny Bedouin community of around 200 inhabitants.

The quiet desert landscape with the special light during sunset is very misleading. Three weeks earlier, end of July, an Israeli settler, Yinon Levy, shot dead Awda Hathaleen.

Hathaleen was a prominent human rights defender, a well-known peace activist and a beloved community leader of this small Bedouin village. Awda was 31-years old, father of three small children and a beloved English teacher in the village’s school.

The killer, Yinon Levy, is a known violent settler who already had international sanctions against him due to previous violent incidents.

He lives in the nearby settlement of Karmel, which was built right next to Umm al-Khair. The community practices popular non-violent resistance since many years, through documenting the human rights violations and by hosting international solidarity activists, including many Jewish Israelis.

Funeral harassment

Despite all the video footages of the killing of Hathaleen, from different angles, including from Hathaleen's own cell phone — he was filming at the time of the shooting — as many Palestinians do while they are being harassed and attacked by settlers, the Israeli court released the killer later that day to home arrest, and five days later was free once again, without any restrictions besides "not to harass the family of the victim".

At the time when we visited the village, he was already back to terrorise the community once again — holding the same gun which killed Hathaleen. 

In fact, following the killing of Hathaleen, the Israeli army arrested many young men of the village for a few days with no reason, just to release them a few days later.

Israel also refused to release Awda’s dead body to allow the family to mourn him properly according to the Bedouin tradition and to bring him to burial.

The Israeli authorities kept Hathaleen's body for 12 long days, during which the community experienced a prolonged trauma and psychological torture. This only added more pain to the community already in shock and mourning. More injustice.

As most men of the village were under arrest during this time, the women of the village launched a hunger strike, demanding the return of Hathaleen's body.

Israel finally accepted, but the army blocked the roads to the village so not to allow Israeli and international activists to arrive to the funeral. 

Mind-boggling impunity

In the neighbouring village of al-Tuwani, in the same region of Masafer Yatta, the house of Basel al-Adra, the Oscar-winning director of the documentary film ‘No Other Land’, is a dynamic hub of Israeli and international solidarity activists.

Israeli activists babysit his nine-month-old daughter while Basel talks to foreign delegations.

These activists practice ‘protective presence’, as they call it, protecting the Palestinian communities from settlers’ violence. But as one veteran Israeli activist tells me bitterly, their presence there is no longer protecting anyone. The settlers attack them as well. 

Indeed, one week later, settlers attack a village nearby, hitting people with metal pipes. One of the Israeli activists I met at Basel’s house, a young girl called Ta’ir, is injured. A friend shows me her photo on his cell phone, with blood all over her face. The settlers also broke her arm.

They also attacked the Israeli activists’ car, smashing the car windows and cutting the wheels.

Needless to say the obvious — there were no arrests of any Israeli settler involved in the attack. This is routine.  

The level of impunity and injustice you see in the West Bank is just mind-boggling and unbelievable. Settler violence in the West Bank is not only getting worse by the day. It is now done by daylight, with absolutely no consequences whatsoever by the Israeli authorities.

Hence, the settlers become even more violent, their attacks more frequent. And more dangerous.

What is behind this Israeli policy of total impunity? What is the aim? What are the objectives? For the many Palestinians I talked to during these ten days in the West Bank, the answer is clear: They want us to let go. They try to break our spirit. That we lose hope. They want us to leave. 

According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 41 Palestinian communities were forcibly transferred since October 2023, mainly due to settlers’ violence.

The current EU policy of sanctions against a handful of Individual violent settlers is totally ineffective: the fact of the matter is that these extremist settlers are not deterred by the international sanctions against them.

The issue here is not the individual settlers but rather the Israeli regime’s lack of any meaningful action to protect the Palestinian civilians under its control, to prevent the settler violence and to bring violent settlers to justice.

An effective EU policy to seriously tackle this issue needs to acknowledge that settler violence is state violence, enabled and tolerated by the Israeli regime’s policy of complete impunity.

A meaningful EU policy should put effective pressure on the Israeli government, not on individuals.

Anything less than that is yet more symbolic and rhetorical gestures that do not have any real impact on the situation on the ground.

The visit was organised by of the Center for Jewish Non-Violence that brings Jewish activists to the West Bank.  

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