The attacks in Hawara are acts of terrorism

The attack in Hawara, killing two Israelis by a Palestinian, was followed by unprecedented settler violence. They reacted with a kind of visceral violence, they were so brutal in a way that Israelis usually like to imagine Palestinians behaving.

The government likes to paint every crime against Jewish Israelis as a pogrom, but this time, the roles switched and Jewish settlers committed a pogrom against the Palestinian people. 

If you don’t take my word for it, sure, but the IDF Chief of Staff personally described the attacks in Hawara as a pogrom. 

I was astounded. 

He continued and said that what the settlers were doing counted as acts of terrorism. 

My jaw dropped. 

Never have I heard an Israeli official refer to anything a Jewish person was doing as a ‘pogrom’. 

It’s weird, I thought, that, the Israeli military’s chief of staff declaring settler violence as terrorism was happening in the first place. But to think that this is occurring while the most radical right-wing government in Israel’s history is heading the country is just absolutely ridiculous. 

But my daydreams of a just future for Israel were quickly brought down to their knees by reality. Declaring the attackers as ‘terrorists’ won’t accomplish anything related to justice, or progress. After the attacks, less than ten of these terrorists were arrested. 

But these people won’t receive the same punishment Palestinian terrorists would.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine hundreds of Palestinians attacking Jews and burning cars in a Jewish city and only 10 arrested? Unimaginable. The fate of these imaginary Palestinian terrorists would be death, and the demolishing of their homes, if they had any. That would be ‘our’ army’s automatic reaction. Burn their homes, and, in the hopeful words of a teacher of mine, ‘send their families to Gaza’. This may seem reasonable to some. A life for a life. 

But that won’t happen with our ten Jewish attackers. No, that would far too inhumane. In this case, the death penalty is out of the question. What about their families, and their careers?

So many questions and they’re all so different depending on the ethnicity of the attacker.

I actually wouldn’t be so surprised if I saw one of them receiving an award of some kind, handed to them personally by the Minister of Public Security. 

Because that’s the state we live in, ladies and gentlemen. Hundreds of hooligans and less, than ten percent of them, were arrested. 

But do you know who was arrested? The protesters in Tel Aviv. Forty of them at the time of writing. Beating, spraying, and galloping horses. 

It’s nice to be able to rely on Israeli enforcement to always make the right call. 

In the eyes of Public Security Minister Ben-Gvir, the real threat to our state is the people protesting autocracy, and not the ones mercilessly going to Palestinians’ homes and attacking them. With Israel arriving at a breaking point, we can’t rely on the government to save us. And even with Avi Maoz leaving his ministerial duties, the coalition is rock solid, they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. 

Things are worsening and there’s seemingly no one to stop it. 

My question is, how could a seventeen-year-old teen like myself feel even an ounce of hope?