While all eyes were focused upon Israel’s remarkable campaign against one of the most malign regimes on Earth, closer to home, gangs of Jewish extremists were rampaging through Arab villages, provoking a confrontation that yesterday led to the deaths of three Palestinians.
The juxtaposition was sobering. On the one hand, Israel’s war against Iran was entirely justified, clinically executed, and to the great benefit of the region and the world, whatever the naysayers may claim. On the other hand, a bunch of fringe lunatics took the law into their own hands and used the most low-tech weaponry possible to terrorise their Arab neighbours, exacerbating tensions and feeding the cycle of blood and tears.
The two are hardly comparable. The attack on Iran was of historic consequences and changed the fate of the world, let alone the Middle East. The aggravation by Israeli thugs, meanwhile, part of a cycle of revenge upon revenge, took place on an entirely different scale. It is also easily eclipsed by Arab terrorism both in terms of savagery and extent.
Nonetheless, it is a worrying indication of the growth of radicalism in some parts of Israeli society. In recent years, the rise of violence perpetrated by Jewish fanatics has formed a parallel story to the war in Gaza.
From one point of view, it is nothing new; I remember reporting from the region as extremists interfered with Arab olive harvests and intimidated local people back in 2014.
Since October 7, however, and the ascension of far-Right politicians to the coalition government, the unrest has dramatically increased, with tit-for-tat attacks having a deleterious effect on people’s daily lives.
One episode that particularly cut through came in February 2023, several months before the Hamas atrocities, when hundreds of extremists charged through Huwara and other villages, leaving one dead, 100 injured and property in flames.
It is only to be expected that the bloodshed unleashed by Hamas on October 7 would ramp up tensions in all the usual flashpoints. When the Huwara rampage took place, it was a response to the murder of two Jews from nearby Har Bracha earlier that day. If that was the climate before the Hamas invasion, it was only destined to get worse.
That reporting trip I made in 2014 has remained lodged in my mind as a window into the deep complexity and variety of Jews living cheek-by-jowl with Palestinians to the west of the Jordan River. Some towns, like Hebron, were tinderboxes, with terror cells on the Arab side and chauvinist Jews throwing their weight around on the other.
But in other areas, a degree of coexistence could be seen. I remember filming in the Rami Levi supermarket at the Gush Etzion junction as Jewish and Muslim shoppers rubbed shoulders quite happily. Many local Arabs found work in the nearby Jewish communities, enjoying much higher wages than they would otherwise receive.
To be sure, many attacks have been mounted at the junction, but the cordiality allowed a small note of hope. The subsequent spiral of violence threatens to wreck even these modest glimmers.
Of course, the Jewish communities beyond the Green Line are not the fundamental reason for the conflict. If that was the case, how is it possible to explain the Six-Day War, in which Arab armies massed to destroy Israel before a single Israeli boot had fallen on that contested territory?
The weaponisation of “international law” to undermine Israel's legitimacy is particularly active in this most controversial of topics.
But if the “occupation” was to blame, how would it be possible to explain the genocidal attacks on 1948, spurred on by cries of “murder the Jews” over the wireless by the Nazi propagandist Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini? The Arab forces made no secret of their intentions back then, any more than they do today. That was before Israel meaningfully existed.
The secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, said in advance of the 1948 invasion: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” That statement could easily have been made by Yahya Sinwar, 75 years later. Like its forebears, Hamas doesn’t care which part of their historic homeland the Jews live in. It just wants them dead.
Moreover, the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas, may be less bloodcurdling in his rhetoric, but will be remembered as the man who turned down an offer of a state that satisfied 100 per cent of his demands by Ehud Olmert in 2008. His problem wasn’t with the Jewish communities in his backyard. His problem is with the Jewish state, whatever its borders.
All this being said, decency demands that Jews stand against the extremists in our midst. Quite apart from the suffering they cause to their victims, they are corrosive to the soul of the state. In 1911, Ze’ev Jabotinsky famously wrote: “As one of the first conditions of equality, we demand the right to have our own villains, exactly as other people have them.” Well, these are our villains.
Ironically, they make us more like other nations rather than less like them; the double standards faced by Jews is inevitably an expression of the oldest hatred, and there is no reason why the Jews should always be so much better than the rest. We have become, as Jabotinsky envisioned, “a people as all other peoples”, with our own sinners as well as our own saints.
Nonetheless, villains they are, and they must be treated accordingly. “We all, Jews and Zionists of all persuasions, want the best success to Palestine Arabs,” Jabotinsky wrote. “We do not want to remove a single Arab from both the Left Bank and the Right Bank of the Jordan. We want them to thrive economically and culturally.
“We envisage the Hebrew Palestine regime in the following manner: Most of the citizens will be Hebrews, but the rights of Arab citizens will not only be assured, but will also be realised.”
They may be small in number, but the rampaging thugs of modern times are emblematic of a worrying far-Right drift away from Jabotinsky’s vision. They must be condemned wholeheartedly – but without exaggerating either the scale of their violence or its significance to the conflict.
For sure, their behaviour is morally deplorable and damaging to peace. But jihadism and Arab rejectionism are the true enemies that squat at the heart of this conflict and menace both Israel and the West. While we put our house in order, we must not lose sight of that fact.
