I recently read New York Times Op-Ed writer Nicholas Kristof’s column titled “The Human Stain” in which he wrote:
“Most Israeli settlers are not violent. But plenty are — even stoning American consular officials early this year — and they mostly get away with it because settlements are an arm of an expansive Israeli policy. {mprestriction ids="1,3"}The larger problem is not violent settlers, but the occupation.
“We planted 5,000 trees last year,” Mahmood Ahmed, a Palestinian farmer near Sinjil told me. “Settlers cut them all down with shears or uprooted them.”
“Israel has enormous security challenges, but it’s hard to see the threat posed by 69-year-old Abed al-Majeed, who has sent all 12 of his children to university. He told me he used to have 300 sheep grazing on family land in Qusra but that nearby settlers often attack him when he is on his own land; he rolled up his pant leg to show a scar where he said a settler shot him in 2013. Now he is down to 100 sheep.
“I can’t graze my sheep on my own land,” he said. “If I go there, settlers will beat me.”
“Elsewhere, I saw graffiti that said ‘Death to Arabs’ in Hebrew, heard Palestinians say that their olive trees had been poisoned or their tires slashed, and talked to an Arab family whose house was firebombed in the middle of the night, leaving the children traumatized.”
My understanding is that many of the Israeli settlers on the West Baank are Orthodox Jews. Perhaps they — and Netanyahu, who is allowing this treatment to exist — should start practicing what Judaism teaches, instead of looking the other way. Perhaps it’s time for Obama to put some pressure on Netanyahu to change his policy or figure out how to exist without the huge funding America provides him.{/mprestriction}
