If you are opposed to the enterprise of the resettling of Jews in the West Bank, ambivalent on the matter, or even an uninterested news consumer, the version of events of Friday, July 24, that you probably have absorbed since then has gone through a process of extreme distillation and ideological refinement.
One news site informed its readers that “Israeli settlers entered a Palestinian village.” Then, it added, residents of an outpost community “came out to repel the settlers.” After that, according to the same news source, one of the Arab villagers “snatched a settler’s weapon and opened fire.”
The background framing included additional information to wit: “Armed settlers had trespassed, [which is] consistent with the common strategy of ‘initiating friction.’”
Blame has been apportioned; Jewish guilt has been declared.
Reactions to the incident
At 1:40 p.m. on the day of the incident, only five hours or so after the shootings, Ksenia Svetlova posted on X/Twitter.
A decade ago, Svetlova was a member of the Knesset for the Zionist Union (an alliance of the Labor Party and Tzipi Livni’s Hatnua). Currently, she is an associate fellow at Chatham House in London, where former prime minister Ehud Barak memorably declared on March 27, 2023, that some members of Israel’s government were “lunatic racists on the extreme Right.”
In her tweet, Svetlova reversed the narrative, as if it were Arabs who had illegally entered a Jewish settlement.
She then returned to relative reality, highlighting the narrative of settler violence. According to Svetlova, the hike in which Israeli settlers entered a Palestinian region was in Area A (yet the road they were walking on was actually in Area B), and they entered the village (but in actuality, the Arabs came out).
Despite the video evidence she posted, Svetlova, as did others, ignored the fact that the hikers, as well as the IDF soldiers who arrived, and Capt. (res.) Benayahu Mellet, who was ordered to join in, all fired numerous shots in the air for over a minute, intentionally trying not to harm any of the Arabs.
Another, Dror Etkes of Kerem Navot, which is an anti-occupation NGO that “monitors and researches Israeli land policy in the West Bank,” also posted about the incident on Twitter.
He had a narrative that claimed the incident was in fact over, except that the “settlers” then arrived. Etkes’s perspective can be demonstrated by a later X post, from July 28, in which he called the head of the IDF Central Command “settler IDF apartheid General [Avi] Bluth.”
The military’s investigation into the incident was published on August 5. It was not withheld from the public, just as an investigation into another sensitive incident that occurred in November 2024, when two soldiers were killed in southern Lebanon while investigating a historical site, was published. The IDF found that Mellet acted with “extreme heroism” and defined the Arabs involved as “terrorists.”
The participants insisted they were not properly in the village. True, the report found that security authorities had not approved the outing, but the Shomron Brigade did receive preliminary but very unclear information about it several hours beforehand, and that the Arab residents were those who initiated contact, confronting the hikers.
Hiking or a provocation?
I will not second-guess the act of unstrapping one’s rifle from one’s body, which seemingly led to the weapon being snatched, or even if it was wise to get so close to the rioters, even pushing and shoving them. Other points need to be addressed, nevertheless.
Walking through the Land of Israel should not be considered a crime, nor a provocation, and certainly not an act that permits local Arabs to throw stones at the hikers or to seek to do them violent injury.
I myself experienced a similar situation back in 1989, in the pre-Oslo Accords period. We were nowhere near a village but rather deep in a wadi, which provided an advantage to the stone throwers. Our presence was enough to have them initiate violence. We were not in a grove of olive trees, in a field of barley, or trudging through someone’s backyard. We were Jews.
We were doing nothing more than what president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and his wife, Rachel Yanait, had done before World War I – we were walking throughout the country.
Hikes were also part of the early Yishuv school system, and Israeli writer, lecturer, and geographer Zev Vilnay made a living leading them.
Further, the Palmach marched across Samaria and through the Judean Desert and made sure to visit Hebron in the early 1940s, at a time when the British banned entry to non-residents.
Exploring the land was, and continues to be, a natural Jewish act, in the spirit of: “Arise, walk through the land, the length of it and the breadth of it” (Genesis 13:17).
Yes, some Jewish residents beyond the Green Line are or can be violent. However, the “settler violence” campaign is a travesty of the facts and the context.
Worse, it is intended to cover up the numerous acts of Arab violence and terror, and the seriousness of the damage done and intended. Friday’s hike participants were not a bunch of vigilante hooligans.
A third lesson from the incident is that objective news seems not to be of any interest anymore.
Yasmin Levy of Haaretz, for instance, was quite convinced, as her July 26 TV review column suggested, that “in the name of Jewish supremacy,” Israeli TV distorted this latest West Bank violence.
If you clicked on Arutz Sheva or the Srugim website, however, you would see a very different picture.
Israeli politicians and public figures have the right to criticize and oppose policies. What we are witnessing, though, is a campaign, still on the fringes, of justifying Arab “resistance” to “colonialist occupation” while downgrading Arab terror.
From the Democrats Party chair Yair Golan’s words that “Israel is a state that kills children for a hobby,” radical elements are now mourning a sheikh who grabbed a gun from a Jew who was using it to shove him away to then murder that Jew and shoot at a soldier. Even members of Golan’s party protested his description of the attack on the hikers as a “terror act.”
Hiking is a non-threatening endeavor and should not be thought of otherwise. It should not be considered a crime punishable by death.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.