Mayor of Efrat Dovi Shefler has it backward when it comes to the relationship between settler violence and sovereignty, and he’s the first one who should know it. Last week, Shefler made a proposal that he presumed would be unsavory to those who “have made the fight against settler violence their rallying cry” – to support the application of Jewish sovereignty to Judea and Samaria.
On the contrary. It is those who make sovereignty their rallying cry that should be leading the fight against settler violence. And it is Shefler’s own experience, and his failure to take effective action against violent Jewish activities in his own backyard, that perfectly demonstrates this.
Taking a stand against settler violence
I am part of a group of Shefler’s constituents who have been rallying in the past months against Jewish violence and urging our mayor to do what is in his power to combat it. (I do not speak for the group, but from within it.) All of us are settlers – we are certainly not a group “seeking to attack the settlement movement.” Some of us have lived in Efrat since its founding, and among us there are those who support Jewish sovereignty in Judea and Samaria no less than the mayor.
None of this prevents us from raising our voices against the violent actions of what are admittedly a small number of Jewish criminals. We are particularly disturbed by the acts of violence that have come from residents of the Eitam Farm, an area designated and approved for the future expansion of Efrat, and from Kochav Yehuda, an illegal outpost supported by the leadership of Eitam. This behavior, ranging from intimidation and threats to property damage and bodily harm to both Palestinians and Jewish activists, has created an environment of terror and fear.
A Jewish psychoanalyst who has visited and treated residents of Khirbet Al-Nahla reported how horrified he and his colleagues have been to hear of the “ongoing, abusive ordeal that these people are undergoing through no fault of their own, primarily at the hands of people from the Eitam Farm.” Khirbet Al-Nahla is a community five minutes from my home, composed of families who lived there before my own neighborhood was built, and who had previously enjoyed good relations with Efrat and its residents.
Efrat is enabling violence
In our conversations with Shefler, he did not deny that violence takes place. In fact, he explicitly condemned it, seeing it first and foremost as a moral problem, and additionally, as something that hurts Efrat’s advancement in multiple ways. But when we asked him to use his power and leverage to remove the people supporting and encouraging this violence from the farm, his reply was that since these people are the ones who ensure that the lands of Eitam are protected and not encroached on by illegal Arab construction, he is not willing to risk endangering the future building needs of Efrat by expelling them.
In other words, what prevents effective treatment of violence is not a problem of capacity but a question of priorities. There is a way. There is no will. In Shefler’s eyes, what Efrat gains from the actions of this group outweighs the price we need to pay for turning a blind eye and enabling their violence.
And this is precisely what is happening on a national scale. It is not that the police and the army fundamentally lack the power or the authority to effectively stop a “handful of extremists,” such that applying sovereignty would then enable them to do so, as Shefler argues in his article. The army has the responsibility, as the current sovereign in the territory, to protect Palestinians and enable them to live their lives. The police have the responsibility to deter and prevent Israelis from committing crimes, and to ensure that those who do are brought to justice.
Their failure to fulfill their responsibilities is mandated from on high, by ministers who use their powers to ensure that lawlessness wins out over the law. They do this, because, like Shefler, they see the gains and the effectiveness of vigilante behavior where legal actions have failed. The facts on the ground created by the “dirty hands” of Jewish violence paved the way for the “settlement revolution” of which Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is so proud.
All these gains must be seen for what they are – the success of settlement at the expense of sovereignty. Israel’s failure to meet its obligations as a sovereign power cannot serve as an argument to give it greater obligations over more territory and more people. Therefore, if Shefler really wants to make a compelling argument for more sovereignty, he’d do well to stop reaping the benefits of its failure, and start doing all in his power to ensure that Israeli law is upheld in his own backyard.
The writer is a research fellow and educator at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and the co-founder and director of Yanshoof, an organization dedicated to advancing moral limits on Israel's arms sales.