Earlier today I wrote about Israel's failure over several years to prevent religious nuts' attacks on Palestinian kids going to school in the West Bank. Well, it's starting to be a journalistic trend.
Four years ago the Washington Post did this short piece on a 44-year-old Washington-area woman who was volunteering with the Christian Peacemakers Teams in the West Bank escorting Palestinian schoolchildren when radical settlers fell on her with bat and chain and broke her arm. Last summer, Joel Gulledge, a Chicago-based volunteer with Christian Peacemakers, was set upon by radical settlers in the Hebron Hills; that piece first ran in a Mississippi newspaper, I am told. Then the Chicago Tribune ran a short piece on the Gulledge attack a few weeks ago. The Associated Press had
an article a few days ago about settler attacks and having seen the amazing AP photo of a Jewish skinhead that accompanied the article, today's Jerusalem Post editorial–you can see the picture at that link– has taken up the issue, "Herzl v Hobbes":
Bank than settler radicals. [emphasis Weiss's; I think that no group could better undermine Jewish identity] In a world predisposed to see all of Judea
and Samaria, and east Jerusalem, as Palestinian; at a time when our
government, such as it is, remains incapable of articulating where our
boundaries should be drawn – Israel can ill afford settlers behaving
badly.
Gene Roberts, the minister's boy from North Carolina who became a great editor in New York and Philly,
used to say that great stories don't break, they ooze. The violent
culture of the Jewish religious settlers on the West Bank is one of
those stories. It could change the American
paradigm of Israel, and maybe change our policy too. About time. Somebody call Foxman!
