Labor MK: Knesset panel on West Bank civil rights activists a ‘smokescreen’ for settler violence

Tensions flare in a hearing of the Knesset subcommittee for the West Bank over alleged violence by civil rights campaigners and pro-Palestinian activists, whom the panel describes as “anarchists” and “extremist left-wing activists.”

Hard-right Likud MK Ariel Kallner describes these activists as “extreme antisemites who support terrorism.”

Ultranationalist MK Limor Son Har-Melech of the Otzma Yehudit party accuses them of “aggression against the IDF, against soldiers, against settlers” and of damaging property and “blackening the name of Israel around the world” and engaging in a global campaign of delegitimization against Israel.

Meanwhile, left-wing Labor MK Gilad Kariv denounces the hearing itself, pointing out that National Security Committee has not sent a representative to the subcommittee and charging that the panel was a “smokescreen” to “obscure extremist settler violence.”

“The purpose of this hearing is to turn the reality in the territory upside down, and blur the real phenomenon which is that extremist elements, who are a minority of the settlers in Judea and Samaria, have shaken off the yoke of Israeli law,” says Kariv.

“If there is a phenomenon that needs to be dealt with aside from the terror against Israeli citizens, it is the violence of these marginal elements,” says Kariv, adding that such violent activists have received backing from “people in this house.”

There has been substantial documentation of rising settler violence in recent months following the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel. The attacks have included alleged killings. The vast majority of cases go unprosecuted, according to rights groups.

Accusations against civil rights activists are far rarer and less extreme.

Labor MK Gilad Kariv and Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har Melech in a less than friendly exchange of words in the Knesset hearing on “anarchists” – civil rights campaigners and pro-Palestinian activists – in the West Bank. pic.twitter.com/gOl9h9YHIi

— Jeremy Sharon (@jeremysharon) March 12, 2024