I Saw it in Palestine

For all my Nerds out there: "When Settlers Attack" Israeli Authorities do Nothing

This is an amazing statistical analysis of the patterns of settler attacks. If you ever wanted to understand when and where these attacks are taking place, this is the article to read. Those of my readers who aren't statistically minded may find this boring as all get out, but I was fascinated. But if you can't get through the article, here's what I think you should take away from it: "Fifty percent of these attacks are perpetuated by settlers in only seven settlements. So again, we know where a majority of this is coming from and if you could crack down on those seven areas then you’d immediate illuminated 50 percent of these attacks or at least a significant portion. So despite the fact that it’s a simple fix, it is nonetheless not happening."

Yousef Munayyer of the Palestine Center explains more:

What this means is that it is really a failure of Israeli policing and Israeli security that these settler attacks are taking place. We can’t do much about the ideology of these settlers, in fact they shouldn’t be in the West Bank to begin with and if we had a way to change that we probably would do that but that doesn’t seem to be changing right away. The reality is that it is the Israelis, both police and IDF [Israel Defense Force], that have a responsibility for policing these territories and that is clearly not happening. And you would think that with a majority of these cases really being in only seven places, from a policing point of view, this is not a difficult thing to crack down on. You know where it is located, you know where it is concentrated, and you know the vulnerable areas there is no shortage of information about this why aren’t more security resources being dedicated to protecting Palestinians in this area? If you not allowing the Palestinians security forces to do it, as they are not in areas B and C, then you can’t simply leave them vulnerable to Israeli settler violence. And often what we are seeing is as – and this has been caught on video and in pictures in the past – as settlers are attacking Palestinians there is a visible IDF presence not doing anything and in a number of these cases where we see injuries inflicted are injuries inflicted by IDF personnel who arrive on the scene to break up clashes between settlers and Palestinians that have been initiated by settlers on Palestinian territory. So not only is the IDF and Israeli police playing a role to protect settlers which are attacking Palestinians, they are, in a way, actively encouraging it by providing a security for these settlers as they continue to perpetuate attacks against Palestinian civilians.