Violent Israeli Settlers Are Starting to Resemble the KKK
How is it that this new antisemitism enjoys the support and backing of the Jewish state?
by Michael Sfard. 10 February 2022. Haaretz
At the end of June 2018, Yousef Azzeh, a Palestinian from the Tel Rumeida neighborhood in Hebron, went out for his daily training session. Azzeh, who was 22 at the time, was considered one of the promising soccer players in Palestine and had even played on the national youth team. In international matches, he wore the number 18 on his jersey.
Because there are no training facilities for Palestinians in occupied Hebron, Azzeh did his daily two-hour workout on the street. The practices included running with weights attached to his arms and legs, a series of power exercises, pushups, sit-ups and then sprints without weights.
Israeli soldiers posted in Hebron knew the soccer player from Tel Rumeida, and some of them, he told me, encouraged him while he trained. Nonetheless, the attempt to create normalcy in the most abnormal place in the world was doomed to failure, and on that early summer day, the training session went awry. A group of young Jews from the settlement in the city showed up, and as Azzeh ran on the other side of the street, they shouted curses at him and took his weights, which he had left on the ground, and threw them into a garbage bin.
Noticing what was afoot, Azzeh shouted to them to return his property and called out to a nearby soldier to intervene. Within seconds the event escalated. One of the settlers shouted to Azzeh that the street belongs to the Jews and that he should go and do his training elsewhere. Someone threw a stone, which struck him in the ankle and injured him. A third settler hit him with pepper spray. The father of the latter, hearing the shouts from the street, rushed to the scene, cocked his rifle and aimed it at Azzeh. A Palestinian woman who tried to document the event was pummeled and her mobile phone was smashed; one of the Jewish youths pulled the hijab off her head.
A year after that event, I was sitting in a Tel Aviv café, going over the drafts of appeals my intern had written against decisions made by the West Bank police (called the Samaria and Judea district in Hebrew). As the legal adviser to the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, my law firm has for many years represented Palestinians who have been harmed by settler violence, as a service the organization provides to victims of such abuse.
We have dealt with many hundreds of cases over the years. The statistics related to the handling by police of complaints from Palestinians are depressing. Over the course of a decade and a half, consistently each year, 92 percent of the complaints were closed without any indictments. Of these, in eight of 10 cases, the closure was carried out in circumstances attesting to an investigative failure. The failures relate to basic police work: not taking evidence from eyewitnesses and getting their statements, accepting suspects’ alibis without verifying them, chronic failure to search suspects’ homes, disinclination to make even the slightest effort to locate suspects even when identifying details exist, careless documentation of the scene and a total absence of police lineups. One really does not need to be Sherlock Holmes in order to understand the importance of such investigative actions.
In cases where a supplemental investigation is still potentially possible, we file an appeal in the hope that someone in the law-enforcement system will actually care. In their legalistic, usually dry, language, the hundreds of appeals that we have submitted over the years are an infuriating archive of humiliating violence and brutal racism that encounter a wall of systemic indifference on the part of the authorities. And now, in Tel Aviv, the dissonance between the contents of the appeals I was reading, and the cheerful, trendy atmosphere in the café could not have been more extreme.
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Among the drafts of the appeals that popped up on my laptop screen was that of the closure of Yousef Azzeh’s complaint. Typically, the police officers who arrived on the scene arrested Azzeh, not his assailants. He was questioned on suspicion of assaulting the settlers – who were not questioned at all. His complaint about their violence and the theft of his weights was totally ignored. As I read the file – including the testimony of the “suspect,” the statement of the soldier, who with rare honesty stated that the Israelis had fomented the provocation and instigated the violence, and the report of the police officer who came to the scene and saw that Azzeh had indeed been wounded in the leg (though the photograph he took was mysteriously missing from the file) – I had a growing feeling that I’d already heard this name: Yousef Azzeh. That this wasn’t the first time I’d represented him. Yousef Azzeh, Yousef Azzeh – of course! Little Yousef. His name emerged from the cells in the rear of my brain, cut through the hundreds of Palestinians whose stories I had encountered across the years, and positioned itself in the forefront of my awareness. I remembered: Yesh Din and I had handled a case involving him 14 years earlier.
Here is how the synergy in the work of the dispossession and judaization of the West Bank is achieved: Israel does what it can in an orderly, official and open manner, and lawless settlers fill in the gaps.
Electrocuted, disabled
Hisham Azzeh opened the door with a broad smile. It was beyond me how someone in his situation could still be smiling. From a distance, the Azzeh family’s home, perched on the slope of a hill, looked quite pretty. A detached stone house set in a garden, of a design with which many Jerusalem and Hebron residences are blessed. But close up, the grimness sets in. The grapevine that surrounds the house like a fence looked dry and lifeless. It took me a minute to understand the reason for this: Someone had sawed off all the trunks connecting it to the earth. It hung in the air around the house like a ghostly presence. Above the garden, between the slope of the hill and the house’s roof, the family had stretched a plastic sheet that blocked out the sky. On the sheet were piles of garbage and used diapers, which, Hisham said, had been thrown there by his settler-neighbors who lived at the top of the hill. The plastic sheet was intended to prevent the refuse from landing in the garden.
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