Killing of Palestinian Highlights Divide in Israel

TEL AVIV—When a Jewish shepherd took his flock to graze near the Palestinian village of Burqa in the occupied West Bank on Friday, violence followed. A 19-year-old Palestinian was shot dead, and an Israeli settler accused of killing him was hospitalized with a head wound after being hit with a rock.

What came next showed how polarized Israel has become as tensions spiral between Israelis and Palestinians.

Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, a member of an ultranationalist party who oversees the country’s police force, said the injured Jewish man should be given a medal. “A Jew who defends himself and others from murder by Palestinians isn’t a murder suspect,” he tweeted.

Opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz, a former defense minister and military chief, countered that settlers are engaging in a form of “dangerous Jewish terrorism” that is diverting the country’s security resources and putting Israeli lives in danger. Support for killers is “a stain that will not be erased,” he said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government includes ultranationalist parties who support expanding Jewish sovereignty in the West Bank and have characterized instances of settler violence as self-defense.

That puts them at odds with parts of the Israeli security establishment who say the country needs to do more to head off a growing wave of violence from Jewish settlers or risk reprisals in cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

“There should be no doubt—these things are pushing people in the [West Bank] that aren’t involved in terrorism into terrorism,” Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in an interview Monday with news site Ynet.

The U.S. State Department took the unusual step of labeling the killing a “terror attack by Israeli extremist settlers,” and urged “full accountability and justice”—adding to tensions between the U.S. and Israel, whose ties are already strained over Netanyahu’s plans for a judicial overhaul.

Ultranationalists and settlers’ representatives in Netanyahu’s coalition have accused the military and other officials of siding with Palestinians, widening the divide between the bulwarks of the Israeli state and the direction of the current government, analysts said.

As settlers look to expand in the West Bank, violent encounters between Jewish settlers and Palestinians have been growing. In the first six months of this year, there been nearly as many incidents as in all of 2022, according to data from Israeli security agencies.

The United Nations says Israeli settlers have killed seven Palestinians this year, four of them people not involved in clashes. Last year, two people were killed.

Israelis, for their part, have been facing more Palestinian violence, including a shooting attack in Tel Aviv on Saturday night that left one Israeli municipal security official dead.

Members of the Religious Zionism and Jewish Power parties—many hailing from Israel’s West Bank settlements—form a critical bloc in Netanyahu’s new government, formed at the end of last year, and now control posts that oversee key elements of Israel’s presence there.

Shortly after the violence on Friday, Commanders for Israel’s Security, an umbrella group for hundreds of former senior Israeli security officials, put out a statement saying the settlers who commit attacks “are convinced they are above the law.”

Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic security agency Shin Bet, in a talk with senior Israeli officials at the end of July, warned that settler violence was fueling Palestinian attacks against Israelis. In response, several coalition members accused Bar of siding with Palestinians.

Netanyahu on Monday called Bar to tell him he supports the security establishment and the work it does to protect Israeli citizens. 

Ben-Gvir, who in 2007 was convicted of incitement to racism and support of a Jewish terrorist group, and who before entering politics often provided legal defense to settlers accused of crimes against Palestinians, is growing in influence as a defender of the settler movement.

“I really value and am grateful to this government, which is better than previous ones that came and destroyed this place,” said Yehuda Lieber, who lives in Oz Zion, a settler outpost near the Palestinian village where Friday’s incident took place. “I trust that Ben-Gvir will understand who the terrorist is and who fought to defend his life.”

Lieber said he and other settlers intend to settle as much empty land as they can in the West Bank, and see it as a race against Palestinians determined to do the same.

Rifki Mu’tan, uncle of Qusay Mu’tan, the 19-year-old Palestinian killed on Friday, said villagers were familiar with the shepherd who brought his sheep to graze near their homes and had accused him of trying to prevent them from accessing their own lands.

The villagers say the Oz Zion outpost is built on their private land, while an earlier settlement on Palestinian land in the area was evacuated in 2012 after a ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court.

Palestinian and Israeli rights groups say settlers often try to raise livestock in the West Bank to claim rights to vast areas of unsettled land. Mu’tan said the shepherd had previously threatened to burn their village, a tactic employed by settlers in other villages earlier this year. 

“They have always been threatening us with arson,” said another Burqa resident, Ahmad Abdelkarim.

As tensions build, political analysts here are turning their attention to how it could affect Israel’s relations with Arab nations and the U.S. government.

Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israel relations at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said the Biden administration’s rush to label Friday’s killing a terrorist attack reflects the growing frustration in Washington over Netanyahu’s inability or unwillingness to temper the growing violence.

“The fundamental question that the U.S. doesn’t have an answer to is whether he’s in control of his coalition or is his coalition in control of him,” said Gilboa.

—Fatima AbdulKarim and Ari Flanzraich contributed to this article.

Write to Dov Lieber at [email protected]