There comes a point when explanations become excuses. Israel has reached that point with Jewish violence in the West Bank.
We can understand the anger. We can understand the frustration. We can understand the fear and fury produced by years of Palestinian terrorism, incitement and attacks against Israelis. But understanding is not absolution.
When civilians are terrorized in their homes, when water and electricity are cut, cars torched, homes attacked with Molotov cocktails, farmers assaulted and stones hurled at motorists, there is a word for it. If Palestinians were doing these things to Jews, Israel would use that word without hesitation: terrorism.
The identity of the perpetrator does not change the character of the crime. Terror deliberately inflicted on civilians for ideological or nationalist purposes does not become “nationalistic crime” because the attacker is Jewish.
Nor does this indict the hundreds of thousands of Israelis living in Judea and Samaria. The perpetrators are a small minority, and prominent settler leaders have condemned them. But that makes the government’s failure to confront them even less defensible.
What happened in Qusra should shame Israel. Palestinian families were effectively besieged while extremists repeatedly returned. The IDF is examining why it took so long to remove them. And U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee — hardly an enemy of Israel or the settlement movement — has called those responsible “Israeli terrorists.”
Israel should not need an American ambassador to say what its own leaders will not. More troubling, the failure to act corrodes something fundamental. Israel rightly insists that no grievance, occupation, humiliation or historical injustice licenses attacks on civilians. It cannot maintain that principle abroad and abandon it when the perpetrators are Jews. That double standard is morally indefensible.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces elections in October. His political calculations are obvious. His coalition depends heavily on politicians and voters for whom confronting violent Jewish extremists carries political risk. In a close election, every constituency matters. But that is precisely why this is a test of leadership.
Leadership is not discovering which moral principle can safely survive the next poll. It is drawing a line when doing so may cost something. Netanyahu should say, clearly and unmistakably, that anyone who attacks innocent Palestinians will face the full force of Israeli law — and then ensure that police, military and prosecutors follow through.
There are moments when politics must end. This is one of them. Jewish terrorism is not merely a public relations problem or ammunition for Israel’s enemies. It stains Israel’s claim to be a state governed by law and Jewish values. It is a chillul Hashem — a desecration of the moral tradition in whose name some extremists pretend to act.
Every failure to arrest, prosecute and punish those responsible deepens that stain. Silence begins to look like tolerance. Tolerance begins to resemble complicity. Israel cannot credibly demand that the world distinguish terrorists from the people they claim to represent while refusing to confront terrorists within its own camp.
No excuses. No euphemisms. No political calculations. Those who terrorize innocent Palestinians must be stopped, arrested and prosecuted. Call it what it is. And end it.