Houses under siege. Water and electricity cut. Families with children afraid to leave their homes because they fear that if they step outside, they could be beaten, attacked, or worse.
Cars are torched. Homes are hit with Molotov cocktails. Farmers picking olives or grazing sheep are assaulted. Innocent people driving along roads have stones hurled at their vehicles.
And the forces responsible for enforcing the law? Too often, the military and police arrive, look around, try to separate the sides if a confrontation has already begun, and then leave.
In Israel, we have developed a convenient term for all of this: “Nationalistic crime.”
It is a wonderfully vague and laundered phrase. It sounds serious enough to suggest that something bad has happened, but sanitized enough to avoid saying what really happened. In other words, it is a crime, and somehow something nationalistic was involved.
But there is another simpler word for what is happening in parts of the West Bank, and we should not be afraid to use it. On the contrary, we have an obligation to use it. It is “terrorism.”
This should not be complicated. Imagine for a moment that the story was reversed. Imagine Palestinians surrounding an Israeli community in Judea and Samaria and preventing families from leaving their homes. Imagine them cutting the electricity and water, throwing stones at Israeli cars, attacking farmers in their fields or hurling Molotov cocktails at Jewish homes.
Would anyone in Israel hesitate for a second before calling them terrorists? Of course not.
There would be breaking news on television screens. The incident itself would be over in minutes since the whole place would be swarming with special forces. Arrests would follow. We would be told, correctly, that terrorism cannot be tolerated, and that those responsible must be hunted down and brought to justice.
So why, when Jews do the same thing to Palestinians, do we suddenly struggle with the vocabulary?
Terrorism is not determined by the religion or nationality of the person who carries it out. It is determined by the act. When violence is deliberately directed against civilians in pursuit of an ideological or nationalist goal – which is the case in the West Bank – we need to be capable of calling it what it is.
This does not mean settlers are terrorists, and it is for this reason that I cannot stand a term that is often used, “settler violence,” since it makes it seem as though all residents of communities in Judea and Samaria were somehow guilty. They are not. The people carrying out acts of violence are a small minority operating on the margins of Israeli society, and the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria want nothing to do with this violence and oppose it.
But some of that minority are terrorists, and there should be no shame in acknowledging this. Because as long as Israel refuses to identify the problem, it will never be able to seriously fight it. If we cannot say what something is, how can we develop the tools, policies, and determination needed to stop it?
What has happened over the last week and a half in the Palestinian village of Kusra demonstrates the problem perfectly.
The story might never have attracted international attention had one of the homes not belonged to a Palestinian-American from Ohio.
Loui Ridi returned from the United States to protect his family’s home and raised a large American flag above it, hoping perhaps that an American flag would provide the protection that Israeli law enforcement had failed to provide.
This helped turn Kusra into an international story. And it drew an extraordinary response from US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, who called the Israelis responsible for the siege what Israeli officials seem incapable of calling them: terrorists.
Israel should be paying more attention
Think about Huckabee for a moment. He is not a diplomat suspected of being hostile toward Israel or the settlement movement. Quite the opposite. Huckabee has been one of the most outspoken American supporters of Israel for decades. He has spoken repeatedly about the Jewish connection to Judea and Samaria as biblical, historical, and God-given.
If Huckabee is looking at what Israelis are doing to Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and calling it terrorism, Israel should be paying attention.
Instead, there is silence. No condemnation from the prime minister and no politician standing before the cameras and declaring that anyone who terrorizes Palestinian civilians will be arrested and prosecuted.
Israelis tend to underestimate how stories like Kusra are seen overseas. Yes, the perpetrators are few, and yes, the overwhelming majority of Israelis would never behave this way and do not support it.
But that argument only goes so far. Because when the violence continues; when arrests are not made, and charges are not brought; and then the perpetrators return again and again with impunity and no consequences, the distinction between a fringe phenomenon and something tolerated or even sanctioned by the state begins to blur.
Critics overseas increasingly claim that this violence is state-sanctioned. Israelis understandably reject that accusation since it is true that no one in government is giving orders instructing Jewish extremists to attack Palestinian civilians.
But when authorities know that the violence is taking place and consistently fail to stop it; when enforcement tools are weakened rather than strengthened, and when political leaders refuse to even condemn the perpetrators, it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss this claim.
Take Defense Minister Israel Katz, for example. When he became defense minister, he ordered the IDF to stop using administrative detention against Jewish extremists in Judea and Samaria.
Administrative detention is a harsh and problematic measure, and while no democracy should use it casually, it is an effective tool which continues to be used regularly against Palestinians.
Katz simply decided that it would no longer be used against Jews. The message is unmistakable: the perpetrator’s identity determines how the act is defined.
Now, with violence escalating and pressure growing from Washington, Katz’s answer is to claim that the police need to take responsibility for law enforcement against Israeli civilians in the West Bank. In other words, this is not his problem.
But it is the defense minister’s problem. It is also the national security minister’s problem and the prime minister’s problem. Ultimately, it is all of Israel’s problem.
Again, this is a minority, and the perpetrators come from the margins of Israeli society. But here is the problem with making that defense: if a violent minority is not confronted, arrested, and prosecuted, eventually the world, with some justification, concludes that the majority – or at least the government representing it – is willing to tolerate what the minority is doing.
Israel is already fighting an increasingly difficult battle over its legitimacy and standing in the world. Israelis encounter growing hostility and protests overseas, and European governments are again considering imposing sanctions on the state. Friends of Israel are finding it harder to defend the country.
It is tempting, as many people do, to dismiss all of this as antisemitism, anti-Zionism, or the latest manifestation of the world’s double standard toward Israel. And sometimes that is what it is. But that argument can only carry weight when Israel can look its friends in the eye and say that it is doing everything possible to uphold its own laws and values.
Right now, when it comes to Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, it cannot say that. If Israel wants the world to believe that this violence is not state-sanctioned, there is a very simple way to prove it.
Stop it.
The writer is a co-founder of the MEAD Forum, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, and former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. His latest book (with Amir Bohbot), While Israel Slept, is a bestseller in the United States.