They Beat and They Stole

“Man gets used to everything, the scoundrel.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

The Banality of Settler Violence

There is something almost flattering in calling these men “extremists.” The word gives them ideological stature. It places them inside a historical drama and invites us to search for theology, nationalism, trauma and political conviction before looking at what they actually did. But sometimes a man with a stick is simply a man beating another man. Sometimes people carrying property out of somebody else’s home are not performing history. They are suspected of stealing.

Perhaps the first thing we should take away from settler violence is its grandeur. Strip away the hilltops, the flags, the biblical vocabulary and the language of national destiny. Look first at the verbs. They beat, take, burn, threaten and sometimes kill. Criminal law has known these verbs for a very long time.

I write this as a Jew, not as an activist visiting from London who can spend several days in the West Bank and return home with a finished theory of Israel. I need no instruction in Jewish vulnerability. Our history has supplied enough, and October 7 supplied another unbearable lesson. But the experience of having been victims cannot become a device that makes it difficult to recognize a Jew as a perpetrator. Memory that recognizes only our suffering eventually stops functioning as moral memory and begins functioning as immunity.

Recent events in the West Bank make the problem painfully mundane. In Masafer Yatta, men identified in reports as settlers were filmed apparently removing property from a Palestinian home and driving away on an ATV. The Times of Israel noted that the vehicle appeared identical to ATVs previously supplied by the state to residents of illegal Israeli outposts. That does not establish that this particular vehicle came from that program, and it should not be presented as established fact. Yet we do not need to solve the provenance of the vehicle before noticing what the recording appears to show: people carrying someone else’s possessions out of his home.

In Jannatah near Bethlehem, settlers attacked Israeli activists and AFP journalists. People were beaten, vehicles were damaged and several required medical treatment. Video showed soldiers present during part of the violence, yet none of the attackers was detained at the scene. In one recording, a soldier can be seen holding the camera of a journalist documenting the events and ordering him away. We do not need to speculate about the soldiers’ intentions. The relevant questions are simpler: who could intervene, who was being attacked, who became the immediate object of state authority and who was allowed to leave?

Another case is more disturbing still. A Palestinian woman from Khillet al-Farra went to Israeli police to report that settlers had set fire to her home. She was herself detained on suspicion of making a false report and harming regional security, even though the possibility of arson had not yet been definitively excluded. Whatever the eventual finding, something important had already happened: a person entered the institutional field as a possible victim and was rapidly reclassified as a suspect.

This is where asymmetry of accountability can begin. Not at sentencing and not even at prosecution, but earlier, at the threshold where the state decides whom it recognizes as a plausible perpetrator. The important question is therefore not merely who is eventually punished. It is who needs to do very little before becoming a suspect, and who can apparently do quite a lot before becoming one.

This question follows directly from “When a Jew Kills,” but it is not the same question. There I was interested in the moral difficulty that appears when a Jew, historically imagined primarily as the threatened victim, becomes the perpetrator of violence. Here the problem is deliberately less elevated. A Jew does not have to kill. He can steal, beat someone, torch a car or destroy property. None of these acts becomes morally or legally sophisticated because the perpetrator is Jewish.

This is why I increasingly distrust the grandeur hidden inside the phrase “settler extremism.” Ideology may explain the selection of the victim. It does not ennoble the act. There is nothing metaphysically Jewish about stealing, and an incendiary device does not burn with a more complicated flame because the person throwing it believes God promised him the land. Auschwitz does not alter the ownership of somebody else’s house. October 7 does not transform the beating of a Palestinian uninvolved in October 7 into something other than a beating.

And no, this is not “picking on Israel.” Apparently criticism of Israeli institutions now requires the verbal equivalent of a pharmaceutical warning label. Question police conduct and explain that you do not hate Israel. Ask why an attacker was not detained and prepare to reaffirm Israel’s right to exist. Ask why a Palestinian reporting suspected arson ended up in detention and someone will eventually ask whether you are demonizing the Jewish state.

But these are accusations directed at Israel precisely because Israel is a state. Not at “the Jews,” not at some mystical collective extending from Tel Aviv to Brooklyn, Warsaw and Buenos Aires, but at a state with police, soldiers, prosecutors, courts, ministries, budgets and coercive power. Israel cannot demand recognition as a sovereign state and then treat scrutiny of how sovereignty is exercised as a form of desecration.

Israel does not need my indulgence because it is Jewish. Indulgence would be considerably more insulting. It would mean assuming that ordinary standards of public responsibility are somehow too much to expect because Jewish history is uniquely painful and Israel’s security threats are uniquely serious. Those threats are real. So is the law.

I am therefore not asking that Jewish offenders be treated more harshly. I am asking for something more modest and, apparently, more difficult: do not treat them specially. If a Palestinian throws a stone, the machinery of security does not usually require a seminar on historical trauma before deciding that he may represent a threat. Why should complexity suddenly become indispensable when the suspected perpetrator is Jewish?

“Settler violence” is a useful sociological category, but it can become a very comfortable semantic shelter. Settler violence is a phenomenon. Phenomena can be discussed at cabinet meetings, mapped by intelligence agencies, condemned by generals and incorporated into assessments of regional instability. A man hitting another man with a stick is more concrete. He is an identifiable person performing an identifiable act against another identifiable person.

The political problem begins not because the thug becomes an important historical actor, but because politics can change the conditions under which an ordinary thug operates. A politician is not automatically responsible for every assault committed by someone whose politics he shares. But if political power is used to protect offenders, obstruct enforcement, provide resources or create a reasonable expectation of reduced consequences, the problem no longer ends with the hand holding the stick.

The distinction must remain exact. The man who delivers the blow is responsible for the blow. A politician may bear a different responsibility if he helps make that man safer from consequences. These forms of responsibility are not identical, but neither should the second disappear simply because the first is easier to photograph.

This is why warnings from Israeli security officials matter. When parts of Israel’s own security establishment warn that settler violence risks wider escalation and that political or local support can make enforcement more difficult, the issue can no longer be dismissed as the invention of foreign activists hostile to Israel. The problem has entered the state’s own description of its enforcement environment.

Perhaps this is what should finally be stripped from these men: the glamour of extremism, the romance of the frontier and the borrowed dignity of Jewish history. A common criminal protected by powerful people is considerably less impressive than a warrior for national destiny. He may also be considerably closer to what the evidence actually shows.

So begin with the verb. He hit someone. He took something. He burned something. He destroyed something. Then identify the person who performed the act and examine the evidence. Only after that comes the genuinely political question: who gave him reason to believe that he could do what another person could not?

There is nothing exceptional about Jews being capable of ordinary human cruelty. That should not be a scandalous proposition. The scandal begins when ordinary wrongdoing requires extraordinary language before a state can recognize it, and when people performing ordinary crimes acquire political protectors prepared to make ordinary accountability unusually difficult.

Remove the flag, the hilltop, the Bible and the biography of persecution from the police file for a moment, and what remains may be embarrassingly banal: a man with a stick, another man on the ground, somebody carrying away property that is not his, somebody setting fire to what belongs to another.

None of this is grand. None of it deserves grandeur.

The harder question is why anyone in power thinks such people deserve protection.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig