Jamal Kanj
In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian villages have become open fields for illegal Jewish settlers operating under the protection of the Israeli army. In recent weeks, organized Jewish mobs, some armed with rifles and sticks, others carrying torches, have unleashed violence across occupied Palestinian towns and villages. It is not only that Israeli soldiers stand providing cover for the illegal Jewish mobs, the army blocks Palestinian farmers from accessing their farms for the annual olive harvest.
The Jewish mob’s thuggery follows a clear pattern where settlers attack homes, burn olive groves, beat villagers and drive out farmers from their land. Multiple international eyewitness accounts and videos showed Jewish settlers descending from Jewish only colonies, escorted by soldiers firing tear-gas or live ammunition at Palestinians defending their farms. Meanwhile, Western media copies Israeli military euphemizing these attacks as “flash points” or “friction.”
Since October, the olive harvest season in Palestine, farmers were attacked at least 259 times by illegal Jewish settlers. When Palestinian civilians attempt to defend their villages, they are murdered or arrested. This includes American Palestinian citizens detained indefinitely or killed with no charges ever filed against the Jewish murderers. The violence has become so normalized government ministers openly praise the mobs as defenders of “the Land of Israel.” Jewish settlers now act as shock-troops in a slow-motion official annexation strategy, blurring the line between state and vigilante.
Under the watchful eyes of Israeli soldiers, Jewish mobs attack journalists filming the olive harvest. Refusing to intervene, the Israeli army fired steel plated rubber bullets and tear gas at the Palestinian farmers and international activists dispersing the olive pickers and empowering the Jewish mobs to cut and burn olive trees. In another arsonist attack, Zionist Youth on 13 November torched a Mosque, sprayed the walls with Jewish racist graffities, and set cars ablaze.
It is an open partnership between army and Jewish settlers under an apartheid occupation. A dual legal system where illegal Israeli Jewish settlers are governed by civilian courts, while Palestinians have little rights in military courts. The distinction is not administrative; it is what Jewish apartheid looks like.
Even the system in apartheid-era South Africa, brutal as it was, did not foster a parallel network of state-armed mobs acting with full impunity. The white regime enforced racist laws, but it did not ‘formally” organize armed white civilians attacking black townships and businesses.
According to Israeli and Palestinian human-rights groups, the Jewish impunity is systemic: 97 percent of complaints filed against Jewish vigilantes resulted in acquittals or closed without investigation. In contrast, in Israeli military courts, 96 percent of the cases against Palestinians lead to convictions. The White South African apartheid courts would have failed to reach this blatant level of racism.
Beyond direct mob violence, a parallel system of control is tightening the noose on Palestinian daily life. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, there are 877 checkpoints and roadblocks restricting the movement of 3.3 million Palestinians across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Checkpoints for the non-Jewish only natives, while the illegal Jewish settlers enjoy free movement on Israeli-only roads. These barriers are not for “security,” they operate as economic choke-points in a regime of systematic separation.
The economic and social cost for non-Jews is enormous. Trucks carrying perishable goods rot at checkpoints; workers lose entire shifts; ambulances sit in line. As one Palestinian described the ordeal simply: “time is being stolen from us.” The military checkpoints serve as a visible thread in a larger web of structural Jewish apartheid.
Caught between armed Jewish mobs and military rule, Palestinians find no refuge in their own leadership. The Palestinian Authority (PA), remains largely paralysed or unable to defend them. While the PA maintains security cooperation with the occupier, and silences dissent in the streets of Ramallah or Jennin, settlers torch olive groves a few miles away.
Internationally, Israel continues to face little consequence. The United States provides billions in aid while shielding it from accountability at the United Nations. The EU issues perfunctory statements of “concern,” while maintaining preferential trade with Israel and continues to do business with the very settlements they describe as illegal under international law. By importing goods produced in illegal Jewish-only colonies, the EU, UK, and US are directly enabling Israel’s racist mob culture.
These illegal colonies are bankrolled by an extensive network of Israel-first Zionist Americans, among them the Kushner family, and non-profits platforms, including several synagogues that openly host fundraising drives to finance the construction of Jewish-only homes on stolen Palestinian land.
This fusion of settler ideology and state power represents the logical endpoint of Israel’s occupation. The army’s policies ensure that every act of settler terror becomes yet another instrument in its overarching strategy. The apartheid wall, checkpoints, and military zones suffocate Palestinian life, while Jewish mobs terrorise their towns and villages.
To that end, the Jewish mob violence is not an aberration, but rather an inevitable outcome of a system built on Jewish supremacy and dispossession. As long as Western governments and media continue to ignore this silent Israeli war in the West Bank, as they did prior to 7 October in Gaza, Israel will persist in quietly sanctioning, arming and shielding the Jewish mobs.
Unlike in Gaza, there is no organized armed resistance to defend Palestinians in the West Bank, no declared war-zone, no pretext to hide behind. What Israel is doing exposes its cruelty in its rawest form. It is carried out in broad daylight against a defenseless people whose only crime is existing on their own land, refusing despair⎯where their mere survival has become an act of resistance. It is a 77-year-long, unprovoked, racist campaign of state-sanctioned Jewish-mob terror.
Source: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251117-state-sanctioned-jewish-mob-terror-in-the-west-bank/
