Pressuring Israel Works
After the October 7 pogroms, a small group of Jewish settlers seized the moment to unleash hell in the West Bank. In certain areas, they completed a process of land appropriation that had already accelerated since the rise of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government last December. Palestinians who had endured harassment for months were now expelled completely. (I wrote about one such village, Wadi al-Siq, in November.) Other Palestinians, such as the victims of an October 9 incident analyzed this week in The Washington Post, were shot dead, allegedly in acts of explicit “vengeance.”
But since October, hell has been brought temporarily to heel—and like all good news in the Middle East, violence in the West Bank, counted 64 Palestinians injured by settlers in the month after October 7. The number dropped to 20 in the next month and to nine in the month after that. Its database includes a single casualty in the first week of January, and not one Palestinian death attributed to settlers since November.
