Jewish provocations

"This has never happened, and here it is, happening yet again"

Last week, Arab arsonists set multiple fires across Judea and Samaria, attempting to burn out Jewish farms, hilltops and settlements. They do this every week of every dry season. What made last week different was, first of all, that they successfully burned most of Havat Gilad, a legal settlement of around 100 families. Until now, Palestinian arson has been successfully contained by an informal local network of Jewish volunteers, hundreds of whom show up to fight every fire with hand tools. At Havat Gilad, the fire spread quickly and violently enough that it was not contained before it engulfed much of the town. This is not the first Jewish town severely damaged by Arab arson-for instance, Mevo Modiim was burned down in 2019-but it’s the first settlement.

Havat Gilad today

The second difference is that attacks are now used as part of a combined arms approach, where Arabs ambush Jewish responders to the fires they set. Itamar Cohen was stabbed and severely wounded as he was responding to an Arab arson by Elon Moreh last week. A Jewish shepherd was ambushed by Arabs from Jalud and beaten unconscious after the Arabs had set a fire by Esh Kodesh as a decoy. An off duty soldier on leave in Har Hevron was attacked by a gang of Arabs, beaten unconscious and had his weapon stolen.

Most outrageously, a group of Israeli hikers were attacked by dozens of Arabs by the village of Tal, near Havat Gilad last Friday morning; when IDF soldiers and Jews from the nearby settlement responded and attempted to push the Arabs back with less than lethal means, one of the civilian emergency response team members was physically incapacitated, after which the Arabs took his rifle, shot him with it and used it to murder his partner Bnayahu Melet, along with the IDF officer in charge. The hikers were not a group of hilltop youths raiding the village; they had coordinated the hike with the IDF in advance,. Tal is a terrorist village, which has been producing murderers for decades.

The context to this wave of terror is as follows: approximately six months ago, the senior leadership of the IDF in charge of the West Bank let it be known that it intends to fight “Jewish terror” as a priority. This manifested in a wave of demolitions of Jewish farms and hilltops, combined with administrative distancing orders (administrative arrests of Israeli citizens having been banned by Defense Minister Katz.)

Soldiers and civilian responders under the military’s aegis were given to understand that opening fire would be treated as a serious incident with potential serious consequences. This is why the soldiers and emergency response team in the incident above did not disperse the Arabs attacking the hikers with stones with gunfire, but rather attempted to push them away, exposing themselves to lethal danger. The Arabs are very sensitive to the military climate, probing constantly, and have responded to the military’s timidity by growing bolder. Their latest successes have also encouraged them-they are calling for more arson and murder on social media. In short, the climate is reminiscent to the leadup to the October 7th attacks, when Gazan provocations were met with a weak response by the IDF, or of the posture of the Israeli security forces during the leadup to the 2021 Arab pogroms across Israel, when a weak senior leadership paralyzed the police and kept them from responding to Arabs openly displaying and using firearms, burning synagogues and assaulting Jews.

The response to the violence by the left has been to blame the hikers and the settlers. For instance, here’s the head of Israel’s foremost leftist party, retired general Yair Golan responding to the murder of Bnayahu Melet:

Here’s how normal leftists are presenting the incident:

In general, the leftists are correct. It is a provocation for Jews to hike past Arab villages in the Shomron, and the Arabs can’t help but attack them. It is also a provocation for Jews to live in the Shomron, and the Arabs can’t help but try to burn their towns. It’s a provocation for Jews to walk in the park in Beer Sheva, or in the Negev, or the Galil, and certainly to walk past any Arab communities there.

It’s certainly a provocation for Jews to live in any of the moshavim, kibbutzim or cities established on lands from which Arabs fled in 1948, or on land which was confiscated from Arab villages. It is provocative for Jews to live in the Golan, whose Arab population was expelled in 1967, or in North Tel Aviv, which is built over the ruins of the village of Sheikh Muwannis, or in the Gaza Envelope, built on confiscated Arab land. This is much more provocative than hiking around Arab villages; if the hike provokes by implying the Jews’ desire to set up a permanent presence and dispossess the Arab residents, a fortiori the permanent presence of Jews on land from which Arab residents were dispossessed invokes a burning rage. So we can understand the events of October 7th from this perspective-the Gazans were provoked by the idyllic leftist kibbutzim enjoying the land taken from their grandparents by force.

But what is much more provocative than any of this is demonstrating uncertainty and weakness. The Arabs are excellent at bowing their heads before cohesive force and determination, or fleeing from it; two divisions of the Iraqi Army, armed with the best American weaponry, trained and equipped by the Americans for a decade, abandoned their tanks and helicopters and artillery, left Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city, and fled a few hundred Islamic State terrorists in pickup trucks, because they perceived the cohesion and determination of the former. The Arabs of Bir Zeit, the terrorist university, abandoned the area five minutes’ drive away when Tal Inon Dardik set up Kfar Tarfon there with a small handful of guys. The Arabs of Mughair, the most violent terrorist village in the Shomron before October 7th, have abandoned the areas outside of the village to small groups of hilltop youth. But it is unthinkable for the Arabs to submit to an enemy which is unsure of itself. The fact that neither the hikers nor the soldiers whom they pelted with rocks responded with fire, and that instead of shooting them, the civilian emergency responders attempted to push them back bodily, confirmed to the Arabs what they already knew: their enemy is weak and incohesive.

Here, you can see that the soldier is allowing himself to be surrounded by hostile Arabs, who are putting their hands on him and his weapon. He’s aware that this is a very bad situation. You can surmise the reason he’s not shooting for yourself.

The larger political context is the elections coming up in 3 months. The left is attempting to pivot against the Religious Zionists in general and the settlers specifically in order to split the coalition further. Provoking Arab violence through displays of weakness assures more Arab violence, which can then be spun to demonstrate that it is caused by the settlers’ presence (see above). This also provides a counter to the predictable gambit which the Religious Zionist parties will play, that is to say, the disproportionate share of the military burden carried by their constituents over the wars of the last three years. The left has been aware of this as a major image problem for itself; many voters from the center have served in miluim and are personally aware of the disproportionate contributions of the various sectors of Israeli society. The left’s response, appointing square jawed retired generals as leftist party frontmen to project a tough, militaristic image while vilifying the Religious Zionists as “death eaters” (truly a rhyme with Katznelson’s lament about raising an ignoramus generation) rings hollow. Hence, you had Haaretz articles like this one and this one, urging a change in strategy and increased humility. But if the left had been capable of these things, it would not have found itself out of power and resorting to increasingly desperate gambits to get back in. This is just the latest one: castrate the military on the ground, suppress the settlers, and then use the predictably ensuing outbreak of Arab violence for spin: “if not for those Messianic settler death eaters, we would have had peace long ago! Do you want your kids to be locked in a cycle of violence?”

My prediction is that this conflict management strategy will ultimately backfire on the Left, as usual and for the usual reasons; it requires plausible deniability, which precludes precise management. You can’t simultaneously provoke large scale proxy violence by suppressing the factors which restrain it and also control the ensuing wildfire. This is the lesson of Oslo, the Arab Spring, October 7th and the American civil rights movement. In Israel, every Arab outbreak of violence ultimately leads to a loss of popular support for the left which is perceived as enabling it. The big question is whether the big outbreak will happen before or after the elections.

PS A similar incident took place not far from Migdalim in 2017, with a gang of Arabs ambushing a group of Jewish hikers, disarming their escorts and terrorizing them. The IDF took an hour and a half to show up. Back then, Bibi was the Prime Minister, and the IDF was run by Gadi Eisenkot (currently the head of another leftist party,) assisted by Aviv Kohavi, who took over from Yair Golan and was IDF Chief of Staff during the 2021 pogroms. Draw your own conclusions.