Israeli ministers' silence on settler attacks targeting Palestinians is deafening - editorial

Israel is undergoing traumatic experiences and emotions are at a fever pitch.

A day after a fierce firefight between Israeli security forces and Palestinian gunmen in Jenin, two Palestinian terrorists killed four Israelis and wounded four more in an attack at a restaurant and gas station in Eli.

Nahman Shmuel, 17; Harel Masoud, 21; Elisha Antman, 18; and Ofer Feirman, 63, all simply going about their daily lives, were brutally gunned down. Their only crime? Being Israelis and Jews.

That stark reality and the increasing sense of helplessness that Israeli residents of the West Bank are increasingly becoming target practice for Palestinian terrorists, undoubtedly had something to do with the outrageous perversion of justice that took place following Shmuel’s funeral on Wednesday.

According to the ‘Post’s report, some 200 Israelis entered the Palestinian town of Turmus Ayya, north of Ramallah, and torched cars, crop fields and homes, ultimately destroying around 30 homes and 60 vehicles. There were also reports from the Palestinian Health Ministry of at least one Palestinian dead and several wounded in the attacks in Turmus Ayya and other surrounding villages.

The scene was reminiscent of what occurred in Huwara last February after a Palestinian shot and killed two Israeli brothers – Hillel and Yagel Yaniv, 22 and 20 respectively. That night, dozens of Israelis rampaged through the town, torching cars and homes, the results of which were filmed and reported internationally, overshadowing the murderous terrorism that had triggered it.

The image of Israelis as violent vigilantes was what stuck in the minds of the world, just as the awful reaction to last week’s Eli attack will overshadow the tragedy of the four terror victims and their families.

The common thread in both the Hurawa and Turmus Ayya disgraceful incidents carried out by these fringe groups of settlers, hilltop youth and agitators, is that they’re taking place under the seemingly indifferent eye of the Israeli government.

Religious Zionist Party MK Simcha Rothman was foolish enough to say it publicly on Thursday when he not only refused to condemn the rioters but intimated that they weren’t doing anything worse than the hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who have been amassing each weekend in protest of the judicial reforms that Rothman is leading the push for.

“Stop this posing immediately,” the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee chairman told Army Radio on Thursday. “As soon as you protest against the [judicial] reform, you are allowed to call for arms and be violent. But if you are protesting about the petty and small matter that four people were murdered, then it’s wrong?”

The wheel wasn't invented by Rothman

But Rothman isn’t inventing the wheel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, too, compared the Jewish rioters to the Druze protests which took place last week in the Golan over the construction of wind turbines.

“All Israeli citizens are required to respect the law. We will not accept riots, not in the Golan Heights and not in Judea and Samaria,” he said in a video statement condemning and equating both.

That echoes his statement after the Huwara rampage, in which he compared it to the anti-reform protests in Tel Aviv. “We will not accept lawbreakers and violence – not in Huwara, not in Tel Aviv, not anywhere,” Netanyahu said at the time.

This inability or unwillingness to acknowledge that there is a difference – a crushing moral difference – between civil protests and vigilante acts of retaliation targeting innocent civilians derives from Finance Minister and Minister in the Defense Ministry Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s inclusion in the current government.

It has opened the floodgates for those elements in the settlement community who think that they are the sheriff, judge and jury to take matters into their own hands, with no fear of retribution and only a nod and wink from the authorities who should be vigilant in the prevention, capture and punishment of these lawbreakers.

Rothman’s statements are deplorable and simply add more white noise of rhetoric that does nothing to deal with the grave problems Israel faces fighting terrorism and battling the fringes of the settlement community.

The silence of Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and other members of this government is deafening and loudly points to their moral bankruptcy.