Some settlers have become full-fledged terrorists. Their acts are anti-Jewish

In the heady weeks after the astounding Six-Day War, the most successful and eventually the most Pyrrhic of Israel’s wars, my 28-year-old father, Amos Oz, published a prophetic warning. If Israel does not negotiate peace with its neighbours and return the occupied West Bank and Gaza, he said, both its security and its morality are doomed.

“The shorter the occupation, the better for us,” he wrote. “Because even an imposed occupation is destructive. Even an enlightened and humane and liberal occupation is an occupation. I fear for the quality of the seeds we sow in the near future in the hearts of the occupied. More than that, I fear for the seed that is being sown in the heart of the occupiers. And the first signs are already recognisable now, on the fringes of society.”

I don’t normally open my opinion articles with a quote from my late father; sometimes I send him a note of recognition in a later paragraph, signalling that I, like most other members of Israel’s diminished and beleaguered peace camp, still see him as an indispensable witness and analyst of the slippery slope that turned the young, struggling State of the Jews into a regional superpower ruled by an extreme right government with emerging neo-fascist fringes.

But now that the fringes have become a thuggish mainstream, killing and robbing Palestinians in the West Bank and attacking pro-democracy protesters on Israel’s central streets, pampered by the Netanyahu government and protected by willing soldiers and police, it’s time to acknowledge the prophet. No wonder the passage I have quoted from his groundbreaking opinion article “The Defence Minister and the Living Space” of August 1967 has become viral on the left and liberal social media.

Settler gangs terrorising their Palestinian neighbours is not a new phenomenon, but it has cascaded in recent months and peaked under the smoke of the Iran war. At least four Palestinian civilians have been shot dead, others injured, and many beaten up. Israeli peace activists and volunteers exercising what is now called “protective presence” in the attacked community have been assaulted and hospitalised, including elderly men and women. Homes are burnt down, sometimes with a family indoors who barely escaped death. Cars are ignited, and cattle – mainly sheep – are robbed and led to Jewish settlements or left in their sheds and pastures with their throats slit. The attacked communities are mainly small villages and shepherd’s homesteads, and several of those have already packed their meagre belongings and left.

Settler gangs terrorising their Palestinian neighbours is not a new phenomenon, but it has cascaded in recent months and peaked under the smoke of the Iran war

The major political and community leaders of the settler movement have yet to raise their voices against this travesty. Right-wing media is still bellowing against the “vicious attack [of the mainstream media] against the Hilltop Youth”.

The army is either late to show up, or stands by in total indifference, or helps and encourages the Jewish gangsters. Hate-driven and boorish young soldiers assaulted a CNN crew a few days ago; the IDF hastened to assure the world that “this is not our spirit” – a cynical lie from the highest military echelons.

With an air force successfully pounding Iran without losing a single aircraft and an intelligence corps able to infiltrate Tehran’s digital traffic systems to spy on Iranian leaders, the Israeli military is suddenly at a loss when it comes to what Netanyahu still insists are “70 teenagers from broken homes”. In fact, the settler-terrorists are estimated at 5000 men, including well-known “hilltop” settlers and local gangs who were documented in the act. They don’t even hide their faces anymore. And many of them have arrived at recent scenes of plunder on new off-road vehicles gifted by the Israeli government, courtesy of coalition members Bezalel Smotrich and Orit Strook.

The monster masquerading as Judaism on the hilltops of Samaria and Judaea is an enemy to every Jew in the world

Israeli police, except for a few brave outposts, have become servants to Itamar Ben Gvir. It held anti-Netanyahu protesters for 40 days in prison for burning the contents of garbage bins on Jerusalem’s streets, but settlers suspected of murder – even filmed at the act – are detained for a few hours and sent home.

Those beating up Israeli peace activists in the West Bank are not even detained. Why would they be if Tel Aviv policemen and policewomen are pushing, beating and cursing demonstrators old enough to be their grandparents on the streets of Tel Aviv?

I will not mince my words about the underlying rationale. Netanyahu’s government is happily outsourcing the job of West Bank ethnic cleansing to the settler militias it has already armed, publicly embraced, and secretly whispered into their ears, “Go forth and kick them all out.”

When I write that the present government and its hardcore base are conducting a hostile takeover of Israel, some of my critics from the left argue that Israel is already taken over and morally obliterated, losing its right to exist along the way. I don’t think so. Otherwise, I would have joined the thickening crowds of haters or lamenters. Instead, using my best judgment of the current Israeli situation, I am still on the civic barricades, fighting to replace the government, repeal the anti-democratic legislation, overhaul the police, force the IDF to obey its own moral code, and punish the brazen pushers of fakes and racism on social media. And, above all, restart the Israeli education system.

Those of you indifferent to the fate of Israel should still be worried by the hostile takeover of Judaism at large. Three millennia after the prophet Nathan reproached King David for metaphorically robbing a poor man of his only sheep, some of their would-be descendants are robbing the lambs of the West Bank’s poorest, breaking half of the Ten Commandments (if you are secular) or all of them (if you believe in the Jewish God).

The monster masquerading as Judaism on the hilltops of Samaria and Judaea is an enemy to every Jew in the world.

We still have our Nathans, though, even across the war-ravaged Israeli society. Thousands of liberal and peace-seeking Israelis are crying out. Braver ones went out to demonstrate. This activity now comes with a price tag. Due to the Iran war and the daily barrage of missiles, Israel is currently under emergency law prohibiting any assembly of more than 50 people. The cost of disobedience depends on your chosen assembly: police will rough-handle you if you are a pro-peace demonstrator but forgive you if you are an ultra-Orthodox shul student or wedding guest. You can feel some seismic unrest within the religious-nationalist society, too. A group of moderate settlers from Gush Etzion are loudly condemning their Jewish peers’ violence. A respected rabbi who lives on the Israeli side of the Green Line visited and comforted an attacked Palestinian community, then published a resounding reproach against their tormentors.

It’s far from enough, but the prophet Nathan was an unpopular voice, too.

Following the CNN incident and the global backfire, Netanyahu and his cronies might make a Machiavellian adjustment by ordering the army to sort out the “70 teenagers” mess. With maddening slowness, the battered legal and juridical system might even charge some of the settler-terrorists and bring them to court. These pathetic excuses for a genuine rule of law are a cynical band-aid.

The coming elections, if on time and unrigged, are our last chance to cut down the settler-terrorist monstrosity and start healing Israel from within. Only then can Israeli moderates hope to inspire and embolden Palestinian moderates. These are not easy tasks, but we still have the stamina, the hope, and the inspiring words of our prophets.