MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
With so much of the world's attention focused on Gaza, violence in the occupied West Bank has escalated. Human rights groups say they have counted at least 1,000 attacks on Palestinians by extremist Israeli settlers there over the past year. At least a hundred people were killed or injured, with hundreds more driven from their homes. The director of the Israeli Security Agency has called it Jewish terror. NPR international affairs correspondent Jackie Northam has this report.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: Men load huge sacks of fresh, hand-picked olives on a conveyor belt at this tiny processing plant in the West Bank town of Jit. The olives will be crushed to create a light, fruity oil. The yield from this year's harvest season is much smaller than normal, as more than 500 olive trees in Jit will go unattended. Settlers from the nearby outpost of Gilad blocked Palestinians from accessing their trees, chopped down others and attacked the farmers. And then, in mid-August, this quiet town of 3,000 Palestinians erupted in violence.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED SETTLERS: (Yelling in Arabic).
NORTHAM: More than a hundred settlers from Gilad descended on Jit. In this video by AP, they can be seen torching homes and cars. They fired tear gas and beat residents. A Palestinian man was fatally shot. Nasser Sedda is the head of the village council of Jit.
NASSER SEDDA: (Speaking Arabic).
NORTHAM: He says the settlers arrived carrying buckets of stones, guns and knives. The military didn't show up for nearly an hour. Sedda says even then, they did nothing to stop the attack.
SEDDA: (Speaking Arabic).
NORTHAM: He says, "the attack created fear and panic in our hearts. We feel vulnerable, but this terrorism will not force us from our land." There's been a long history of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, says Ziv Stahl, director of Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group focusing on the occupied Palestinian territories. Stahl says that violence has sharply escalated since an ultra-right-wing government came to power in Israel in late 2022.
ZIV STAHL: Not only in the number of incidents that we document but also in the severity of the incidents and the number of participants.
NORTHAM: In August, Intelligence Chief Ronen Bar wrote a fiery letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warning of the, quote, "growing phenomenon of Jewish terrorism." That sparked a very public spat between Bar and Netanyahu's national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. He's a settler and was convicted for, among other things, inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. Ben-Gvir now has control of security forces in the West Bank. Stahl says the term Jewish terrorism is a loaded one in Israel.
STAHL: I think the word in the Israeli discourse - it's sometimes so childish. Sometimes, we prefer to avoid it, even though we use it sometimes.
NORTHAM: The term Jewish terrorism is being used more as the settler violence increases. Arie Perliger is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, specializing in violent extremism and Middle East conflicts. He says Israel's internal security service, Shin Bet, has a special unit focusing on Jewish terrorism.
ARIE PERLIGER: For them, it's very clear that this is a stream of Jewish terrorists that are motivated and are engaged in acts of violence to promote clear political goals.
NORTHAM: Perliger says the goals of the settlers involved in the violence are threefold. One is a rejection of Palestinian statehood or sovereignty in the West Bank. Two - to pressure Palestinians to leave their land. And, Perliger says, it's also part of a religious movement.
PERLIGER: That belief that Jews has the right to rule and control those territories. They believe that the actual settling of Jews in the West Bank, in those territories, is fulfilling God's will.
NORTHAM: There's been little pushback about the increased violence, says Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israeli analyst with the International Crisis Group. She says members of the government rarely condemn the attacks on West Bank villages because the focus has been on Gaza.
MAIRAV ZONSZEIN: When it comes specifically to the West Bank and settler violence, it's almost overshadowed by everything else that's happening, which I think is also part of the calculus here - that they can do more and more in the West Bank while everybody is looking elsewhere.
NORTHAM: Which, Zonszein says, has increased the sense of impunity. Only 3% of the cases brought against settlers end in conviction, according to the human rights group Yesh Din. Daniella Weiss, founder of the Jewish settlement movement Nachala - who believes that Jews own the land in the West Bank - denies the idea of Jewish terrorism. She says violent incidents are distorted by the media.
DANIELLA WEISS: If you see the whole picture, you see that Arabs attack Jews and Jews do not attack Arabs. It's a well-known thing. When there is a fight, we defend ourselves. We never initiate a terror act.
NORTHAM: Yoram Schweitzer is a terror specialist with the Institute of National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. He says the extremists are in a minority among the large Jewish population living in the West Bank but that the violence is tarnishing Israel's image in the world. Schweitzer says it's up to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop it but adds that Netanyahu needs the support of the hardline ministers to stay in power.
YORAM SCHWEITZER: The prime minister has his own political considerations why he's not knocking on the table and stopping it.
NORTHAM: The U.S., for its part, has leveled sanctions against some settlers for their actions. That's done little to curb the violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Jackie Northam, NPR News, Tel Aviv.
(SOUNDBITE OF KAKI KING'S "DOING THE WRONG THING") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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