Givat Ronen Attack: Did it happen as reported?

On Friday, 9 August, there was a serious incident in Givat Ronen, a hilltop outpost near the ancient city of Shechem, a city that the Arabs call Nablus (the Romans rebuilt it and called it Neopolis and Arabic has no “p”). Mirroring the existence of different names in Arabic and Hebrew for places in the ancient Israelite homeland, just about every story that comes out of the region has the Arab version that is immediately picked up by the press here and, therefore, internationally, versus a possible explanation that emerges upon investigation that must be taken into account if one is to consider oneself an independently thinking human being. Taken into account, I say, not swallowed hook, line, and sinker. Unlike the original reports, I am not telling you what conclusions you must draw; I am asking you to think about it.

A case in point: you hopefully already know not to pay attention to Hamas’ claims of the huge numbers of innocent women and children supposedly killed in IDF targetted attacks on Hamas sites before there is reasonable time to know that. If you are patient and wait until the IDF will have had the time to investigate the results of their attack, you will read reports of the actual numbers of terrorists killed and of uninvolved civilians unfortunately also killed. The difference between the two versions can be astounding. Unfortunately, the Hamas version generally dominates the narrative from the moment of its inception and forever after if you follow what world leaders say about the Gaza war and what peoples around the world shout out in the social media. Even after even the UN claims that Hamas figures are not to be trusted.

It is no different when there is violence ascribed to Jews in Judea-Samaria, a region more easily recognized by the international audience as “the West Bank,” the name given to the region by the Jordanian occupiers in 1948.

What happened at Givat Ronen last Friday?

I am going to show you: (1) the knee-jerk reaction to the incident; (2) my initial thoughts and questions about the incident; and (3) what was found upon investigation by one journalist.

(1) The knee-jerk reaction

First, let us look at the headlines that appeared in the English language Israeli press in the order in which they appear on Google search results for news for Givat Ronen:

Times of Israel: Settlers assault Arab Israelis, torch car after they accidentally enter W. Bank outpost

Jerusalem Post: Extremist settlers attack Israeli-Arab women, children in West Bank

Haaretz: Four Arab Israeli Women Attacked by Settlers After They Mistakenly Entered a West Bank Outpost

Ynetnews: Israeli-Arabs mistakenly enter West Bank settlement, get vehicle set on fire

Israel National News: Arabs attacked after accidentally entering Samaria outpost

You can easily tell the single rightwing-oriented news site here; it is the only one to refer to the area in which Givat Ronen is situated as Samaria. In spite of that difference, are they all telling the same story of what took place?

The TOI snippet tells it all: Four women and toddler pelted with rocks after making wrong turn; they say one attacker put a gun to the child’s head; they fled on foot to reach safety with soldiers

(Note — in this case the Arabs ran to IDF soldiers for safety. In all other stories about settler violence, the claim is made that the soldiers either do nothing or support the violent settlers. In your future reading, keep in mind that that the Arabs in this story ran to IDF soldiers for safety.)

The Arabs who were attacked are Bedouin from the Israeli city of Rahat that is located next to Beer Sheva in the Negev. They were reportedly on their way to Nablus but say they got lost. After they got out of the car, the settlers burned it.

ערביות ישראליות טעו בדרך – והותקפו בידי מתנחלים: רכבן הוצת ונרגם באבנים, הן נמלטו ופונו לקבלת טיפול רפואי בבית החולים

הכתבה המלאה | https://t.co/kUwMWFGd6S pic.twitter.com/3xBv0KRGGU

— החדשות – N12 (@N12News) August 9, 2024

(2) The first thing I wondered about upon hearing about this

The first thing I did when I read about this incident was to look at the map. I wondered about the normal route to take if they were driving from Rahat to Nablus. Google maps directs us to drive north on Hwy 6 to Hwy 557, and then to drive straight from there to the destination. The X on the map shows where the women apparently got lost.

To get lost in that area means that they left Hwy 6 long before the more natural turn-off. Perhaps they intended to take a shorter route by not having to approach Nablus from the north. However, it is far from certain that this would take less time as the roads in the area south of Nablus are windy, narrower, and go through remote areas such as farmland and small Arab and Jewish settlements.

Let us say they crossed over, at some point, to Hwy 60 that travels the height of Judea-Samaria, approaching Nablus from the south. Here, Google maps suggests staying on Hwy 60 and doing the entire route on a well maintained and wide road. So the question is, why did they turn right onto Hwy 555? Just because it looks shorter?

OK. It looks shorter physically, but is not necessarily quicker to drive. In any case, once they were on Hwy 555, why did they leave the highway and go up into the hills on a road to the left that is likely much smaller, possibly just a dirt road and, in any case, likely poorly maintained with potholes. I have travelled around Judea-Samaria, going to settlements close to main roads and going to a few hilltop outposts. The latter are often hard, and sometimes impossible, to drive to in a regular car.

Just looking at the maps made me doubt that their presence at Givat Ronen was accidental, that it was because WAZE sent them the wrong way. But I needed to know more. I tried, unsuccessfully, to talk with someone from Givat Ronen.

(3) What was found upon investigation

The only article to talk about what might have been behind the incident was published by ynetnews yesterday. Otzma Yehudit MK, Limor Son Har-Melech defended the attack, saying it was probably related to espionage on the part of the Arabs. She erroneously said that they were not Israeli Arabs. This is an unfortunate mistake because it makes it easy for everyone to ignore that what she says about the spying might, in fact, be true (see below).

Elhanan Gruner, a journalist with contacts throughout Judea-Samaria posted what he discovered on Telegram and I present it to you, translating from the Hebrew and editing for length and clarity (sorry it is still kind-of long):

A few words about the event in Givat Ronen:

Summary: There was no lynching and you should know something about brothers of one of the Bedouin women.

A. For those who haven’t noticed, we are in a regional war, and there is daily threat of terrorist attacks throughout the country, especially in Judea and Samaria. For those who haven’t noticed, women are also involved in [committing] terrorist attacks and massacres, crimes, and certainly intelligence gathering and [providing] support for terrorism; some of them are also Bedouin (greetings from Haniyeh’s sister).

B. Givat Ronen, where dozens of families live, is a settlement very close to Nablus, and since the IDF has security problems (I won’t go into the issue publicly due to information security needs) dealing with them is built mainly on deterrence. A very likely scenario consists of terrorists entering the settlement by car.

C. The incident began as an intrusion into the settlement – a resident, who noticed a car with Arabs entering the settlement, reported it. The vehicle began driving wildly into one of the neighbourhoods (they claimed that they had gone the wrong way and were stressed).

D. The residents called the security forces and the settlement emergency squad, reporting that an Arab vehicle entered the settlement and was traveling quickly among the houses, its location currently unclear. Think about this for a moment: We are after October 7!

E. Boys who noticed the wildly driving car threw stones at it (I don’t know if they realized at this point that there were women and a child in the car). The vehicle came to a dead end road and the women got out of the vehicle and fled on foot towards the nearby reserve. At this stage, knowing that it was women and a child who were involved, members of the settlement emergency squad went back to their regular daily routines and left it to the army and police to find out the circumstances of the Arabs’ arrival at their settlement (Bedouin women from Rahat who arrive at Givat Ronen/Nablus Governorate is definitely worth checking into – see below).

F. I found out as much as I could (that’s why I’m only writing now). As far as I know, no one chased them on foot, beat them, lynched them, and certainly didn’t put a gun to the toddler’s head. It’s a scenario invented by Ayman Odeh [Hadash Party] and Gilad Karib [Democrats Party, formerly Labour]. According to my understanding, the bruises are at least mostly from running down the mountainside.

G. After the Arabs ran away, settlers set their car on fire.

So far the facts as far as I could find out.

It’s true, setting the vehicle on fire is illegal, and the photo is not good PR for the settlements in general. Givat Ronen experienced a terrorist infiltration not long ago, which miraculously ended with no casualties, and there was also theft of a herd in the past. Even if I don’t like violations of the law, and would prefer that the IDF carry out the necessary actions to ensure deterrence, I also know that deterrence is created when residents of Nablus and all the villages in the area know that those who enter a Jewish settlement are caught and their vehicles do not leave. These days, the loss of deterrence is equal to another massacre, God forbid.

Does this look good? No. Would I have preferred the event to end differently? Yes. But is it dangerous for the Jews when Arabs know that they can freely enter Givat Ronan? Very much so. So if these Bedouin women were, in fact, sent there to check the level of vigilance, then they found out that the settlers are vigilant. Maybe hypervigilant, but vigilant.

By the way, I found out that several brothers of one of the Bedouin women who was in the car (with her daughter) are criminals, some of them convicted of dealing in arms and drugs or suspected in shootings and involvement in the killings of policemen in Rahat. So what were they looking for in Givat Ronen or the Nablus area? If the Shin Bet and the police are already investigating, they should also investigate this dubious matter. There is quite a bit of arms and drug trafficking between Bedouin and Arabs from Judea-Samaria.

Thus, before you run at 200 km/h to join Ayman Odeh and Yariv Oppenheimer, you should remember that we don’t live in an air-conditioned laboratory in Switzerland but in the Middle East. And not everything is always nice or looks good. Not the bodies of children that the IDF bombed in Gaza and not the burned-out car of Bedouin women who entered the settlement on purpose/ by mistake (hope someone seriously checks).

While I think that Elhanan Gruner provided a logical explanation for what might have happened that day, a true investigation by the security forces whose job it is to investigate will hopefully elucidate the truth. Unfortunately, I doubt many people will ever see anything other than the initial knee-jerk blame-the-extremist-violent-settlers version.

In the meantime, I leave it to you to decide if either of these alternatives make sense to you or if you think it could be something entirely different. If you come up with a feasible enough possibility, let me know and I will try to investigate that or you could try it, yourself.