This past week was packed with headlines chasing one another in rapid succession. We saw the Supreme Court waving a white flag in view of Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s aggressive pressure (and Tali MP Gottlieb’s shouting), we witnessed the helplessness of Netanyahu’s judges in front of the defendant and his lawyer (to which Trump’s pardon request from President Herzog and Herzog’s mild response were added), we witnessed the military prosecution fall apart, and were not surprised by the Histadrut’s ((the labor federation)) transformation into a branch of the ruling Likud party crime organization. And yes, there was another headline: ”settlers attacked soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces."

Violent settler attacks in the occupied West Bank against Palestinian residents and against Israeli and foreign human rights activists who come to assist them are old news that recurs week after week. Such incidents rarely receive attention even though they have intensified, reaching their peak during the olive harvest that began in mid-October and is now ending. According to Haaretz, citing IDF data, two attacks were reported every day throughout October, and more than four per day between November 4–10, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Last week, however, developments occurred that drew the attention of editors in the popular media. Masked settlers from an illegal outpost, heading toward olive groves in Burin and Beita on Saturday, assaulted Israeli harvesters with clubs and hurled heavy stones that seriously injured two Israelis. The incident near the village of Beita generated the headline: “We’ve reached the moment when settlers are trying to kill Jews”, quoting one of the injured victims, Oded Yedaya.

On Tuesday, dozens of settlers raided tents in the village of Deir A-Sharaf and a nearby Bedouin encampment not far from Nablus. After soldiers dispersed the attackers and arrested several of them, the attackers—some still masked—moved to the Deir Sharaf industrial zone, where they set fire to trucks and buildings, including a dairy plant. There, too, they assaulted uniformed soldiers. This escalation generated the headline: “Brigade commanders demand that the Chief of Staff reinstate the detention orders cancelled by Defence Minister Katz.”

“My company commander reported to me that around 40 masked men were moving toward him and preparing to attack,” said the Samaria Brigade commander on Channel 12’s nightly news. “I began chasing the suspects, and during the pursuit I saw them torching vehicles near the factory and throwing stones at property and local residents.”

This incident jolted the IDF from its indifference—or more precisely, from its tacit support for the settler rampage that has driven 60 Palestinian communities off their lands since October 7. As long as settlers attacked local Palestinian residents, army commanders remained silent, despite their clear obligation under international law to protect the population of the occupied territory.

The Central Command chief, Maj. Gen. Avi Blot, who had ignored repeated calls to protect the assaulted Palestinian communities, was shaken by an event he had not anticipated—though it was entirely predictable. “A reality in which an anarchist fringe youth engages in violence against innocents and against security forces is intolerable and extremely serious, and must be dealt with harshly,” he said. In response to his remarks, those same “youths” burned a mosque in Deir Istiya and sprayed graffiti on its walls reading “Muhammad is a pig” and “Not afraid of Avi Blot.”

Indeed, Defense Minister Katz’s decision to forbid the use of administrative detention orders against Jewish terrorists—a decision he announced upon taking office - diminishes the army’s and police’s ability to confront Jewish terror. Yet the IDF and the Judea and Samaria police—working full-time to serve the convicted criminal Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir—could have done far more. Instead, they do nothing to curb violence by settlers (most of them in illegal outposts) against Palestinian communities and human rights activists. In many cases, soldiers actively assist the rioters, as evidenced by the frequent arrests of Palestinian residents and of Israeli and international activists, while none of the attackers are detained. And even when someone is arrested—as in the case of Yinon Levi, who shot and killed Awada Alin in his village Umm al-Khair in South Hebron—the court mobilized in support of ethnic cleansing and released him to house arrest after just one day.

Contrary to Maj. Gen. Blot’s claim that this is the work of an “anarchist fringe youth,” these are not a handful of wayward youngsters fueled by messianic zeal. The masked attackers are emissaries of settlement leaders systematically working to cleanse Area C. Today this is no longer a secret, as Ministers Smotrich and Strook fund illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank, establishing outposts adjacent to Palestinian villages. They do so through various tactics, and money flows—by formal and informal channels—into ethnic-cleansing operations.

“This is their method. They want to expel the Palestinians and take control of the land. They mostly harass small villages until the residents are forced to flee. They want all of Beita and all the olive groves to be theirs because ‘God gave it to us.’ In their eyes, they have a license to beat and kill. This time it wasn’t far from that,” said Oded Yedaya in an interview with Haaretz.

Settler terror has intensified since October 7, and its perpetrators are not afraid to kill. Palestinians experience this daily—it’s nothing new to them. Dozens of adults and children have been shot dead in the West Bank, many by the army, without anyone being held accountable. Now, it seems, Israeli left-wing and so-called “anarchist” activists have also become targets—at this stage only for the masked attackers.

Given this reality, the Israeli public is unmoved, and the media dutifully ignores what is happening in the West Bank, because anything related to the occupation risks angering and alienating their audience—television viewers and readers of the popular press. Only when soldiers were attacked did it become a news item, even though the IDF is complicit—both actively and through its passivity—in Jewish violence in the territories.

The critical question therefore arises: why do the defenders of democracy, those fighting the judicial coup and calling for the removal of Netanyahu’s malicious government, ignore the fact that the occupation is the root cause—the mother that gave birth to the judicial coup? As long as they ignore the occupation and the Palestinian issue—which is just as much the Israeli issue—their state, the only homeland they have, will slide downhill without brakes and become a fully fledged racist and fascist state.