A Palestinian man who should be harvesting his olives is in…

About two decades ago I met a teenager from Palestine who was brought to the United States via a charity for medical treatment after he was shot by an Israeli settler in the West Bank.

Despite great efforts to save this beautiful young man, the bullets which fragmented inside his body did long term damage to his spine and organs and he would ultimate die a few years later. It was crushing.

I came to realize at the time that Israeli settler violence is one of the least understood and yet most common forms of violence Palestinians are subjected to on a regular basis and I wanted to shed light on it.

I worked to create a database of Israeli settler violence, tabulating over 3,700 instances from 2004 to 2011 and producing an analysis on it that can be found here for those interested in the details. Here are some of the main takeaways....
https://t.co/djziDlTYIw

While Hebron had long been the epicenter of violent settler activity, the years I studied showed an extension of settler terror networks and a spread to the northern part of the West Bank with Yitzhar and Bracha taking center stage.

Attacks on Palestinians took different forms and were basically constant. Arson, stoning, destruction of property, physical beatings, shootings. In 2011, we saw 2.6 instances per day.

The more one looked at the data, the more clear patterns emerged. Olive harvest season, for example, was the annual and predictable peak in Israeli settler terror.

It comes as no surprise that this elder Palestinian was attacked in this season. He planted those trees 20 years ago, right around when the young man I told you about was shot. This has happened on and on every year since.

The patterns are temporal but also geographic. To understand the linkage between settler attacks and "price tag" threats, I looked at time-series data that controlled for Israeli government actions against settlers.

See sometimes violent settlers do this thing where they exact a price against Palestinians if the Israeli government prevents them from building in a certain spot or if a court decision goes against them.

I found a statistically significant correlation between Israeli government executions of actions against settlers and settler violence against Palestinians. It is basically like clockwork.

What this means is that while we don't necessarily know all the details ahead of time, we can basically predict when there is a highly increased threat of a settler attack against Palestinians.

For example, on July 31, 2015 Israeli settler terrorists carried out one of the worst attacks against a Palestinian family by firebombing a home in the village of Duma, killing two young parents, their infant and maiming a third child.

The climate was so ripe for an attack based on what we knew from the data that I had tweeted this in the 48 hours prior to the Duma attack.

https://t.co/e7EzASr2D4

Likely will be an uptick in Israeli settler violence if Supreme Court decision on Drainof buildings carried out.
— (((YousefMunayyer))) (@YousefMunayyer) July 29, 2015

While the data tells us when to expect elevated threats. It also makes clear where the threats are emanating from. We know which settlements are the most violent and which Palestinian villages are most vulnerable.

A key reason for the geographic vulnerability of certain Palestinian locales is the jurisdictional breakdown of the Oslo Accords. In some areas, there is Palestinian security, in others, indeed most, there is not. In these spaces, the Israeli military is in charge.

Knowing this, Israeli settlers have free reign in these spaces. The Israeli military is required to protect them from Palestinians even as the settlers attack them.

The point of all of this is to say that Israeli settler violence is eminently preventable. The Israeli government has the tools to prevent it. But instead, it actively facilitates it, allowing violent settlers to be the tip of the spear against Palestinians on a constant basis.

The elderly Palestinian man in the video is one of many faces of the Palestinian victims of settler violence that takes place on a regular basis and it is fully enabled by Israeli policy we American tax payers subsidize to the tune of billions of dollars a year. It must stop.

A Palestinian man who should be harvesting his olives is instead reeling from another act of Israeli settler terrorism. This story is all too common.....a thread.

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