Escalation in settlers violence
testimony catalog number: 91432
area: West bank
period: 2010 - 2011
At the situation assessments you had, was there any discussion of changes in violent activity by Jews or settlers?area: West bank
period: 2010 - 2011
They talked about an escalation, definitely an escalation. I remember
that when I first started the job, it wasn’t even an issue to deal with.
It took time before the army realized that this was an issue and
happening a lot.
What did it consist of?
Cutting down olive trees, ‘price tag’ settler actions in the form of
graffiti, setting mosques on fire, events we hear about in the media.
Also lots of incidents where settlers threw stones at soldiers and stuff
like that, or gathered around houses that were being evacuated. Most of
the time I served there was during the ‘freeze’.
The settlement freeze.
There was no construction taking place. It’s funny to say “there was no
construction” – officially, there was no construction taking place, so
it was less of an issue.
What do you mean, “officially there was no construction taking place”?
What we know is that (the official decision) is one thing and reality on
the ground is something completely different. The figures on the
construction freeze were very specific: this many orders have been
issued, this many people did or did not evacuate their houses. You get
these figures ‘as is’, usually from the DCO, and I can’t tell you how
credible they are. Another thing is how we counted the Palestinians who
were killed or wounded by settlers. For a long, time we counted them one
against the other. We’d count every (Israeli) civilian wounded by
Palestinians, and every Palestinian wounded by settlers. At some point,
the numbers rose, it was a specific period with more settler violence
and more wounded Palestinians. As soon as those figures rose, they
decided that we’d stop counting each Palestinian wounded by settler
violence or shooting; the army’s not involved in that, and what has it
got to do with the army. So the resulting picture was not exactly equal.
But the army controls things on the ground, it’s important for the army to know what’s going on.
The idea was that when the numbers of wounded are presented, I want to
know what the army is involved in. To be fair, it should be pointed out
that this statistic was presented weekly. The log specified “four
Palestinians killed by shooting during suspect arrest procedures, and
another four wounded by settler violence”. But on the level of
statistics presented twice or once a year or in total, they’d subtract
that figure from the total tally of wounded people.
