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When Settlers Attack: Understanding Settler Violence against Palestinian Civilians
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Video and Edited
Transcript
Mr. Yousef Munayyer
Transcript No. 336 (15 September 2010)
Mr. Yousef Munayyer
Transcript No. 336 (15 September 2010)
15 September 2010
The Palestine Center
Washington, D.C.
Mr. Yousef Munayyer:
Today’s event is on settler violence. The event is called “When Settlers Attack.” And I just want to give you a little background about this before we go in to the slide show presentation. This a personal issue for me because I had a very good friend who succumbed to injuries by an attack by a settler when he was 14. He ended up dying years later from liver failure because of operations at the age of 22 earlier this year. And so it is something that I have always been aware of and paid very close attention to.
Earlier this year in the summer there was a point in time where the Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak was here in the United States. Some of you might remember on that very day that he was here, rockets were launched by groups in Gaza that weren’t Hamas groups, but the official government line was “we are holding Hamas responsible for whatever anyone does coming out of Gaza.” And he took full advantage of that event to make clear that Hamas is responsible for what happens inside the territory that they control. At the very same time, there was news about several settler attacks going on in the West Bank. I thought it was very interesting that while the Israelis hold the government in Gaza responsible for violence coming from Gaza, there is very little discussion about the responsibility of the Israeli government for violence perpetuated by settlers against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, which, as you probably know, Israel is obligated under international law to protect the civilians in the territories which it occupies.
So, at that point I decided to launch a project to look at what sort of settler violence and attacks took place since the end of the Gaza War and to look at the way that it had been covered. I wanted to look to see if there had been coverage of settler attacks compared to rockets that had been launched and how the narrative was playing out in the media and whether or not the proper parties were being held accountable using the same standard. Obviously, that was not the case. But in the course of this research, what became evident was that settler violence is such a significant issue, that is really deserves an analysis on its own, an event on its own to highlight exactly what is going on in the West Bank, how it’s happening, when it’s happening, where it’s happening. And with a team here at the Palestine Center we began a coding project to look at this data seriously, the results of which I am going to display here today.
In looking at this data, we covered the period from January 2009 to August 30, 2001. So this goes up to just the last month. These dates were essentially the ones that we chose to look at for a couple of reasons. One, because of time constraints, we really wanted to produce something that we could talk about soon. And also because we wanted to look at this time frame post-Gaza War to have a comparison. The results have been so interesting and I have found them so useful in trying to understand this phenomenon, that this is going to be a project that we continue to expand to look at settler violence over a number of years continuing into the future and going back much earlier than 2009 for as long as we have data available. So into the future, keep your eyes and ears open about more events and updates about settler violence as the data becomes available.
It’s coded from daily reports from the Negotiation Support Unit of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]. These are daily site reports that are actually quite detailed and offer up a lot of information on settler violence as well as a number of other infractions of Israeli obligations and violations of international law throughout the West Bank and Gaza. We focus specifically on settler violence for this project. The information that we took from here included the date of the attack, the village that was attacked or the location in case it wasn’t necessarily a village, what type of attack, what tactics were employed, what settlement the attack was launched from or what settlement the settlers were from if we had that information, and whether or not there were casualties and any other details that were available.
And, of course, I want to thank the interns who played a really important role in helping us get all this data together. They did an immense amount of work in putting the numbers together here. I’m very grateful to them.
So, what is it that we are looking to understand here? First, we want to understand who is it that is attacking? What types of attacks are taking place? How does this vary over space and time? Who is the victim of these attacks? What and where are the victims of these attacks? And ultimately if there is anything we can do about it.
So, who is attacking? Our data shows that settlers from two-thirds of all the settlements in the West Bank, over this period of time (unless otherwise stated, the data in here is from the period January 2009 to 2010), have been involved in attacks on Palestinian civilians. These include different types of settlements: those that are religious, orthodox, secular and mixed. It includes them to varying degrees. Of the 1,000 plus events during this time period, we have information on the settlement of origin for 279 of these events. So, what settlements are these? These are the most dangerous settlements here. You can see which ones they are here. These seven settlements alone account for 50 percent of all attacks where the settlement of origin is known. So it is pretty clear where much of this violence is originating from. And when we look at it by settlement character it’s the religious settlements that are, again with the settlements that we know origin, it is the religious settlement by far, followed by mixed, and then secular settlement, that are perpetuating these attacks.
So, what types of events are we seeing? What type of attacks are we seeing? These are the top five event types. Trespassing, stone throwing, physical assault, destruction of property, and arson are the top five event types. I want to explain these top five and then we will go into them some more after that.
Obviously all settlers are on Palestinian territory, but trespassing is actually entering into Palestinian property, privately owned Palestinian property, from settlement territory. Now, we only know the settlement of origin for the settlers involved in these types of events in only eight percent of cases. That is because more often than not, events of trespassing are seen by Palestinian civilians, reported, and the settlers then disperse and runaway once they realize that people have seen them. So what trespassing may have led to, we don’t really know, but we know that these often turn into other types of event sis they are not noticed. And because of course these trespassing events are suck that the settlers so disappear when they realize that they have been noticed is the reason why we only have settlement of origin for eight percent of these events.
Stone throwing is also very typical. Stone throwing at civilians, at cars or at property is a large chunk of these settler attacks. Assault, which is person-to-person physical attacks – this is specifically bodily harm caused by another individual. So an attack on somebody’s property is not assault; this is directly person to person harm: beating people up. Then we have destruction of property which is damage to homes, vandalism, cars, and olive trees. We have seen a significant number of cases where groves of olive trees have been uprooted and of course olive trees are a very important part of the agricultural economy for Palestinians; they are the livelihood for tens of thousands of Palestinians in villages. So it is significant damage both to their property and to their lives. And finally arson which rounds off the top five and arson as everyone knows is setting fire to somebody else’s property or structures or fields.
So these top five events makes up nearly 70 percent of all the different instances that we are seeing in the data for this period. The other 30 percent of events is split between abduction, harassment, land or house seizure, open fire or basically shooting at people, raids, theft, vehicular assault.
Now that we know what types of events are happening, the next question is where are they happening? The West Bank, as many of you know, is divided up into Areas A, B, and C by the Oslo Accords that governs basically security jurisdiction in the different territories. Area A as you see in dark black here on this map is really densely populated Palestinian areas, where Palestinians have security control. Of course, this is subject to Israeli security so while Palestinians have a security presence there, if the Israelis decide that they want to raid a Palestinian city, they can do that anytime they want. In Area B, Palestinians have civil control and Israelis have security control, so it’s really the Israelis in Area B that are responsible for the security and the peacekeeping. And in Area C, it’s full Israeli security control and all of the settlements are located in Area C.
With regard to these different areas, how do these events line up? Here you will see in this reddish orange color percent of events by area. You can see that in Area B and Area C is where most of these events are taking place. In Area A you don’t have as many events despite the fact that the majority of the Palestinian population is there. So this tells us that the settlers know the territories of jurisdiction and where that line is. Even though we do see some events here in Area A, the vast majority of them are in B and C. Of course, the majority of the land in the West Bank is in Area C and a good chunk of the Palestinian population is in Area B. So, when you look at this chart it gives you kind of an interesting idea about where these attacks are taking place regarding jurisdiction and it shows you that the people perpetrating these attacks know where the lines are drawn. They often use the fact that security jurisdiction is going to be on their side and we will get into a discussion about the role of the IDF and Israeli police in facilitating if not supporting these events. And because of that, we see this kind of skewed distribution. Even though the targets- Palestinian population, Palestinian homes and so on- are really in Area A, the majority of the attacks are elsewhere.
If we break these down to another level, these are attacks by governorate. You can see next to them, population and the settler population as well. So here are some really interesting things. For example, the majority of the settler population is in the governorate of Jerusalem, but we are seeing a lot more attacks in Hebron, where we have a much smaller settler population in comparison. So this tells us that it is not simply the presence of settlers in a particular area that is correlating with these attacks, but rather the types of settlements and particular settlements which have been aggressive and violent against Palestinian targets in different areas. I will continue talking about this at the governorate level because it shows some other interesting things as well.
Here are events by Palestinian governorate. In the data that we looked at, and this is pretty consistent over previous years as well, Hebron continues to be the place where we have more settler attacks and settler violence than other places. There are signs that this is changing, but I will get into that towards the end. Hebron is followed by Nablus and then Qalqilya and the inner governorates and then the outer governorates at the end.
This also varies by attack type, which is really interesting. So when we look at trespassing here, the same kind of distribution holds for the most part where we have Nablus and Hebron with clearly more instances of trespassing than others. But when we look for example at stone throwing, we notice an increase in stone throwing in Qalqilya. There are reasons for this that I will get to later in the presentation. When we look at assault, it is by far dominant in Hebron where you have settler basically living on top of Palestinian in the middle of the city of Hebron where most of these person to person assault events are taking place. After that, you have a fair number of assaults going on in Nablus which is second and Jerusalem where you have similar situations where settlers and Palestinians are living together in densely populated areas creating the opportunities for these person to person attacks. Destruction of property, likewise, has a similar distribution being dominated by Nablus first, and then Hebron. But when you look at arson for example, the vast majority of these events are happening in Nablus and not in Hebron. And then they are followed by Qalqilya. So, settlements in different areas, and we will talk about this at a smaller level as we go on, are choosing different tactics to attack Palestinian civilians with in different places. And looking at the evolution of that over time shows you that, for example- this is not included here but I can tell you from the data- the numbers in 2009 and 2010 for Qalqilya show a significant increase in the number of arms attacks. This tells us that the use of these tactics, in this case arson, is spreading across space as settlements are seeing that they are successful in using these tactics. And settlements nearby are noticing this and are beginning to employ the same sorts of tactics.
Now that we have looked at it at the governorate level, what are the targets that are being attacked is the next question? These are the most attacked targets in this case villages or neighborhoods. The village of Burin by far is the most attacked village followed by a neighboring village Iraq Burin and others in Hebron and Qalqilya. I’m going to go into these for the most part one by one to show you where they are situated, what types of attacks they are facing, and which settlements are really the cause of risk for these particular targets.
The first one I want to show you is Beit Sahhur. In our data it had been attacked 13 times over the period that we looked at. It is located in the governorate of Bethlehem and the area in dark blue that you see, this is the actual densely populated area, the area in this lighter color blue is Area A, this is Area B, and this is Area C. We see a lot of these events happening in areas where you have this situation where Areas A, B, and C are slim and close together so that settlers can perpetuate attacks quickly enough and get out of the way so that they can get back into a security jurisdiction where they won’t necessarily be held accountable for anything that they are doing. The attacks that we see facing the village of Beit Sahhur come from an evacuated outpost of Ush Gharb, which was right here. This has been declared a closed military zone by the Israelis. But what is happening is that settlers continue to come back to this outpost to create living spaces and then use it as a launching pad for attacks on the neighboring village of Beit Sahhur.
Burin, which is the next village that I want to talk about, as you noticed in the beginning has the largest number of attacks in the period that we are talking about, which was 40 in this case over the past year and eight months. It is clearly in Area B, as you can see here, so it’s really exposed in terms of security jurisdiction from all areas. It is quite vulnerable. It is surrounded on both sides by two of the most violent Israeli settlements in the West Bank. This is Nablus up here just give you an idea of what area we are talking about. At this village, we have seen a significant amount of arson, stone throwing, and destruction of property. In fact, when we look at the numbers for arson, Burin takes a very disproportionate number of these attacks. And so it is facing attacks from both directions, from Bracha and Yizhar. I want to just draw your attention to something that is really interesting. If you look at the settlement of Yizhar, it really sits around a ring of Palestinian villages, all of them in exposed areas from Awarta all the way around. And it has, when you look at the distribution, launched attacks against every single one of these villages. The same goes for Bracha. This settlement of Yizhar, the Rabbi there, the one who is in charge of the Yeshiva and the spiritual leader of the community is a disciple of Rabbi Cook, who is sort of the father of ideological religious Zionism into the West Bank. They are continuing that sort of tradition. You may have also heard recently that he is the one that authored the book legitimizing under Jewish religious law the killing of non-Jews in the West Bank. So these are the types of people we are dealing with in this area. And the number of settlements that are involved in the largest number of attacks, all of them can trace their ideological origins back through either Rabbi Cook or Gush Enumin or Meir Kahane. As they way, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
In this case here we are looking at the village of Halhul, which is just north of Hebron. This is Hebron down here. About ten different attacks have been perpetuated against this village. You can see that this village touches Areas A, B, and C. It has a number of roads going through it, roads which, you may know, are often segregated where Israelis are able to travel basically where they want and Palestinians are not. So we have seen a number of attacks in this particular settlement in and around the road system. These include assault as well as vehicular assault. Around the road systems, we see a lot things were you have drive by attacks-attacks perpetuated by the settlers in cars- or if you have Palestinians in cars, you see a number of attacks on Palestinian cars driving through gauntlets of violence. So the settlement here, which is responsible for attacks, is in the north: Karmei Tzur.
The next one is the Homesh area. Homesh was another settlement that was evacuated, but again like the first settlement we talked about – the first outpost we talked about – settlers continue to come back to this area and launch attacks on the neighboring villages from here in different directions. So in this area, we’ve see 20 different attacks perpetuated during this period. This is in Nablus.
Huwarra, which is again in that very dangerous area south of Nablus which I had mentioned earlier where you see Yizhar and Bracha here, has been the locale of 17 different attacks. It’s this area right here. Anyone who’s traveled into Nablus will tell you that you are going to have to go through this dangerous area here which is where the checkpoint is that leads you into Nablus – the famous Huwarra checkpoint. Again, you can see that attacks are perpetuated against Huwarra from a number of different directions.
In Qalqilya, we have the village of Immatin which has been subject[ed] to 12 different attacks. You can see that the distribution of this is really across space. There is no one area that you can say Palestinian villagers are really safe. Here we have from an evacuated settlement of Havat Gilad attacks on Immatin. Havat Gilad has been responsible for a number of different attacks. The person who is the mayor – who set up that outpost – is Moshe Zar, which some of you may remember from the Jewish Underground in the 1980s and was involved in a plot – which thankfully didn’t transpire – to destroy the Dome of the Rock. [He] was in fact involved in other plots and assassination attempts against Palestinian mayors, which left among others in serious condition including the mayor of Nablus at that time, who today suffers from that attack being a double amputee. Again, these are the types of settlements and people that we are talking about perpetuating these types of attacks.
Iraq Burin is again in that same neighborhood. Over here, [the] same two settlements [are] involved in this activity and [Iraq Burin] has been the victim of 26 different attacks, second most only to its neighboring village right here in Burin. So this is really a hotbed for settler violence.
In Jit, another Palestinian city, another 20 attacks happened here. This Palestinian village is completely within Area C, right along a road and surrounded by Israeli settlements. It is really in a very dangerous position – exposed position – as you can see. Again, the source of risk for this village is Havat Gilad which I just mentioned to you earlier, which is involved in attacks on Immatin, Balata, Sarra, Attel and so on.
Here in the Hebron governorate [is] Khirbet Safa which has been attacked 21 different times. You can see where it straddles Area C and basically straddles the settlement of Kfar Etzion, and it’s Bat Ayin that is responsible for the majority of attacks here including arson and open fire and that sort of thing. You may have heard of these settlers from Bat Ayin who’ve been responsible for a group called the Bat Ayin Group, which in early 2000s – 2002, 2003 – was also involved in a series of attempted Jewish terrorist attacks, which included, thankfully a foiled attack right in front of an Arab young girls’ school in Abu Tor. That was 2002. That network as far as we know so far has been broken up, but attacks from this settlement continue against Palestinian villages.
I’m just going to show you one more from the top list, which is Qaryut here, again in the Nablus area. Look at the way that it’s surrounded by Israeli settlements here it continues to face attacks from different directions. Both Eli and Shilo are responsible for these attacks. Arson, assault, destruction of property is notable.
Earlier I had mentioned attacks along roads and I wanted to show you the way this kind of breaks down with attacks around the road system. This is the main road from Nablus to Qalqilya. The numbers you are seeing in red are the number of attacks that have taken place in a particular area along that road. This is the road to down to Salfit. You have Ariel down here which is the major settlement in the northern part of the West Bank. You see this area where I was talking to you earlier about Yizhar and the surrounding settlements, how you see the number of attacks here. So, Palestinian villages located around this road system are particularly vulnerable. And we’ve seen that in a number of different places, but it is most significant here in the north. There are a couple of different roads in the south, including in the South Hebron hills around the settlement of Ma’on and also around Kfar Etzion between [the] Bethlehem and Hebron governorates that are also vulnerable. Not nearly as vulnerable as these settlements around this road system here.
So how does this look over time? What’s changing over time? One thing that I’ve noticed that I started to mention to you is that there seems to be a shift north in the violence. In the past we’ve seen a significant amount of violence in Hebron. Over the past couple of years of data which we’ve collected, we’ve seen a noticeable increase in the violence that’s taking place in Nablus and the northern governorates. In 2008, looking at OCHA numbers 42 percent of the events happened in Hebron. In 2009, we saw that number drop down to 29. And in 2010 the numbers really suggest that that is really inverting at this point, where Nablus is becoming the locale of the majority of the attacks, with Hebron in second and Ramallah and Qalqilya after that. So we are seeing a shift north in this violence and it’s important to note that these numbers in 2010 that show this increase in the north, do not yet show us the period of the olive harvest. Of course, we’ve coded up until the end of August of this year, and the olive harvest is in the fall. That’s significant because a lot of settlement attacks happen when Palestinian villagers are out in the field during the olive harvest, because a number of targets are then exposed to the settlers. And I will show you how that happens over time in a couple of slides.
We’ve noticed a significant increase in settler attacks over time. You can see a dramatic increase in events and also a significant increase in casualties over time. This is based on figures from 2006 to 2008 from UN OCHA. The next couple of years are the data that we collected. Again, we plan to go over the previous years as well to have a single data set covering all of this time, but it’s undeniable that there’s an increase in both attacks and casualties from the settlements.
Let me wrap up by going over the next set of slides which is really events over time. This chart, which is an illustration of events in the different governorates over the period that we covered: from the beginning of 2009 to the end of August 2010. The units that you see down here – 1 through 85 – are weeks. So basically what we’re looking at here is the number of events per week over this time. You can see where there are different areas where this violence spikes rather dramatically. The average during this entire period is about eleven [events]. In the points where this peaks significantly, one has to ask “What is behind that?” “What is behind the increased settler violence?” So what I will do is pose a number of different explanations for the different peaks that we see.
Starting in early April 2009, we see this significant increase here. After the right-wing coalition was formed in Israel, there was a significant amount of tit-for-tat violence between Palestinians and settlers in Hebron. If you look here you see Hebron is in green and that’s this section that you see here going all the way across. Here is the section we’re talking about. A significant amount of the attacks during this spike come from Hebron. And so we can see that a good deal of that happens in one place, but it’s also happening in a number of other places. What we’ve begun to see in late 2008 to 2009 is that more and more, settlers are responding to calls in different areas of the West Bank and acting violently in response to that.
So if we see for example, an outpost that’s evacuated in Hebron, it is no longer surprising to see violence from settlements in Nablus and Salfit and in other places in response to that. Settlers are acting in a network to exact a price against Palestinians in response to actions of the Israelis government against their desires to expand into the West Bank. And so, next I would direct your attention to these spikes here, which are in different points in June/July and September of 2009 individually these are all from different price tag events including the removal of certain outposts in different places and I can give you information about those in detail as well.
What we see after that is this spike right here and this is the period of the olive harvest. You can see one thing that is noticeable right away, is that in the past whereas much of the violence has been dominated by the green section which is Hebron, here we see a significant expansion in violence in the blue section which is Nablus. And so we can tell pretty clearly that this is violence related to Palestinians civilians being in the fields and the groves during the olive harvest season with a number of olives groves being located in the north and a lot less in the south. And so given that, the fact that we don’t have data yet for this year’s olive harvest we can expect pretty reasonably that that trend will continue and that governorates in the north will continue to see an increase in settler violence for the rest of 2010.
This is an interesting period right here, and I draw your attention that and this is why, this is where we have the announcement of the Israeli government of the settlement moratorium and so you can see the immediate reaction of settlers to that announcement. With a very short break – when I was looking at this data I thought ‘this doesn’t make any sense’, what is this? It turns out this is the eight days of Hanukah. And so in this period we see a pretty serious reaction to the announcement by the Israeli government that there is going to be a settlement moratorium and we can conclude that that motivates the violence. The one thing that is interesting about that is that as you look at this spike it has a number of different colors in it which tells you that this is going on at all the different governorates at the same time. So there are explanations that would say, you know, these are isolated incidents, they don’t have anything to do with each other, they don’t have anything to do with government policy, it’s just a couple of crazies, this lends a lot of evidence against that case. When you see it increasing at the same time, in different governorates, over time that are not connected to each other, that tells you that they are acting in relation to a macro effect instead of a micro effect. Clearly, in this case, it is the announcement of the settlement moratorium.
Here we see another spike; this is also another price-tag related spike, because of the evacuation- the announcement of a settler building the “Jonathan Pollard house’ in Jerusalem was not going to be built. And then we see these significant spikes here beginning with the Biden incident in March of 2010 and the significant, sort of, ramping up of rhetoric by the US government about the importance of a settlement moratorium and the problem with settlements and so on and you can see that that continues pretty significant right until we have this point here which is the meeting in July between Obama and Netanyahu where it was clearly understood that Obama was backtracking on his demand for a settlement freeze before negotiations. So the signal was sent and it seemed to be clearly understood that the settlement moratorium was not going to be a serious threat to settlements and they reacted accordingly.
So what are the main findings that way have from what we have seen so far. Well, a majority of events, 90 percent, take place in areas where Israeli has security jurisdictions under Oslo. What this means is that it is really a failure of Israeli policing and Israeli security that these settler attacks are taking place. We can’t do much about the ideology of these settlers, in fact they shouldn’t be in the West Bank to begin with and if we had a way to change that we probably would do that but that doesn’t seem to be changing right away. The reality is that it is the Israelis, both police and IDF [Israel Defense Force], that have a responsibility for policing these territories and that is clearly not happening. And you would think that with a majority of these cases really being in only seven places, from a policing point of view, this is not a difficult thing to crack down on. You know where it is located, you know where it is concentrated, and you know the vulnerable areas there is no shortage of information about this why aren’t more security resources being dedicated to protecting Palestinians in this area? If you not allowing the Palestinians security forces to do it, as they are not in areas B and C, then you can’t simply leave them vulnerable to Israeli settler violence. And often what we are seeing is as – and this has been caught on video and in pictures in the past - as settlers are attacking Palestinians there is a visible IDF presence not doing anything and in a number of these cases where we see injuries inflicted are injuries inflicted by IDF personnel who arrive on the scene to break up clashes between settlers and Palestinians that have been initiated by settlers on Palestinian territory. So not only is the IDF and Israeli police playing a role to protect settlers which are attacking Palestinians, they are, in a way, actively encouraging it by providing a security for these settlers as they continue to perpetuate attacks against Palestinian civilians.
Fifty percent of these attacks are perpetuated by settlers in only seven settlements. So again, we know where a majority of this is coming from and if you could crack down on those seven areas then you’d immediate illuminated 50 percent of these attacks or at least a significant portion. So despite the fact that it’s a simple fix, it is nonetheless not happening.
The most heavily effected governorates are, as we discussed, Nablus and Hebron and attacks in Hebron most often take place in the city and in Nablus we see them in villages a number of those of course are villages that are away from the city and isolated, particularly the ones around the settlements that I showed you.
Vulnerable villages are often adjacent to the main roads where – again all the main roads are in area C. So that sort of force field of Israeli protection, Israeli jurisdiction, provides a launching pad for these events. The main roads between Nablus, Qalqilya, and Salfit as I showed you continue to be this gauntlet of violence.
There is a remarkable increase in both events and casualties over the last several years, as we saw. And spikes are often motivated by Israeli action or perceived threat of action, against the presence of settlements. The average number of events per week increased 22 percent after the settlement freeze. Violence, and this is think is the most important part, is consistent systematic and happening in all governorates in 280 villages and locations across the west bank.
So it is clearly a phenomenon that is happening throughout the territories and unfortunately is one that we are not hearing very much about. I will conclude the presentation there and take whatever questions you may have that I can answer. Thank you.
Mr. Yousef Munayyer is the Executive Director of the Palestine Center.
This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speakers' views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.