Jit: Another instance of settler violence! Let’s think about this a bit.
As far as I can gather, the incident in the Arab town of Jit on August 15 is a case meriting unequivocal condemnation.
It is different from the case of Givat Ronen the previous week, in which boys threw rocks at a car driving wildly in their streets out of fear of terrorist infiltration. I can rationalize their behaviour even if I do not condone it.
On the other hand, we all know that these same boys would have been proclaimed heroes had the driver and passengers in the car been armed with assault weapons and had there been pro-Hamas paraphernalia in the trunk. Instead, there were four Bedouin women and a toddler in the car who gave the improbable story of having been lost.
I do not believe for a moment that they came by accident and I showed why I think they came by design – perhaps, as Elchanan Groner suggested, to test Jewish community vigilance (and therefore vulnerability or not to terror attacks).
This does not mean I agree with the boys’ behaviour, stoning the car and later torching it. The settlement’s Rapid Counterterrorism Response Team is tasked with dealing with such situations and nobody should be torching a car. It does not mean I do not understand that they wanted to get rid of the threat as quickly as possible. I do.
Images of Oct 7th come quickly and easily to mind. But that cannot be an excuse for illegal behaviours unless there is a clear and present danger.
Jit is different.
In this case, dozens of armed Jews entered the town to terrorize its residents. They burned more than one house from which the occupants had to flee, set cars on fire, threw rocks, and more.
Jit (in black circle) is located on oft-travelled roads: Hwys 60 and 55. The junction of the two is marked by a “X”.
Arabs frequently throw rocks at passing cars and endanger the lives of Jews driving through the nearby junction. A resident in a nearby community, whose wife had to drive past Jit to work told me that the IDF increases their presence at the junction only after an incident, such as when Raziel Shevach was murdered there, and then removes their presence soon after. If this is the nature of security the Jews living in Judea-Samaria can expect, it leaves much to be desired, to put it mildly.
War
For Judea-Samaria, the war has been going on for decades. We get a hint of what residents of Judea-Samaria experience in the February 2024 article in JNS:
Between Oct. 7 and Jan. 15, Rescuers Without Borders first responders recorded more than 2,600 attacks targeting Israeli civilians and soldiers, including 760 cases of rock-throwing, 551 fire bombings, 12 attempted or successful stabbings and nine vehicular assaults.
Among the report’s findings was … 127 instances of gunfire … over the past three months. By comparison, in all of 2022, Hatzalah recorded just under 100 shooting attacks. [emphasis added]
This stands in stark contrast to the impression in mainstream and social media that Jewish settler violence is ‘the plague’ without any mention of Palestinian Arab attacks against Jews. Reported or not, violence and threats of violence against Jews is the reality of life in Judea-Samaria and I will be reporting on these in future.
I have not seen statistics for terror attacks between February and now, but there are constant notifications in Israeli news outlets of the capture of terrorists and the foiling of multiple attacks in various stages of preparation.
Nor have I have been able to discover if any terrorist activity took place shortly before the attack on Jit five days ago.
Regardless, a law-abiding society cannot allow its citizens such vigilante behaviours.
It reminded me of something that happened decades ago in the United States:
A mother decided that no jail sentence was long enough to provide justice for the murder of her 7-year-old daughter by the 35-year-old previously convicted child molester. She took a loaded gun to the full courtroom and shot him dead. She got six years in prison and aroused much debate around her vigilantism. Many expressed understanding of her actions. Nobody said she should not have been charged and found guilty. And her act did not seem to lead to a spike in copycat revenge killings on the part of enraged family members of murder/rape victims.
I thought of this as I considered what happened in Jit.
Criminal Neglect
We know that dangerous Iranian weaponry is reaching home-grown Palestinian Arab terrorists via the porous Jordanian border and that there are secret munitions factories in the Palestinian Authority. And we know that Palestinian Arabs are highly motivated to attack Jews in Judea-Samaria and within the Green Line (remember the premature ignition of explosives in Tel Aviv two days ago that killed only the terrorist who had hoped to murder a large number of Jews).
Israel’s security forces need to adopt a post-Oct 7th mentality to prevent future vigilante attacks by Jews who are left to fend for themselves. Judea-Samaria is no less a battle front than the Gaza Envelope and the border with Lebanon.
In battle, you do not leave citizens, armed or not, to fend for themselves. When you do, they take the law into their own hands. I do not condone that. But neither do I condone the neglect we are seeing on the part of our leadership with regard to the half a million citizens living in Judea-Samaria. It has to change. And to change fast!
reasonable