To fully understand the report from the West Bank above, consider what Helena Cobban reported from Washington today, from an Israeli lawyer, Michael Sfard (speaking at the New America Foundation and co-sponsored by Americans for Peace Now), saying that there's method to the settlers' madness. Cobban:
Sfard also argued that much of the violence that the settlers deploy against the civilian Palestinian indigenes of the West Bank has a clear political goal– "and therefore, it qualifies as terrorism."
He said,
In the past year there’s been a big change in the way settler violence is carried out. It’s not a secret that there’s a correlation between the rate of violence and the settlers feeling the political winds blowing against them. So today, the settler violence we're seeing is not just a spontaneous thing; it’s being planned much more than before.
Now there is some kind of leadership coordinating this effort to build up the tension whenever there’s a decision to dismantle an outpost or whatever.
There’s a clear plan: when the army is sent to dismantle an outpost in the north then groups of settlers in the south will make a swarm and go and burn fields in the south, and that diverts the security forces.
They are spreading terror to get political gains, and this is the very definition of terrorism.
We saw this already in Hebron. An action like this sometimes prevent the government from achieving its immediate objective—but it also has a deterrent effect on the government.
Not all the settlers are involved in these actions,of course, but a portion of them are.
