( Middle East Monitor ) – If Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, can find excuses for the hilltop youth’s colonial violence, how much more is the concept of settler-colonial presence as a form of violence normalised?
During a meeting called by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir described the hilltop youth as “sweet boys” forced into adulthood through administrative detention. In February this year, the Shin Bet’s Chief, Ronen Bar, blamed setter violence in the Occupied West Bank on the hilltop youth. “The settler community in Judea and Samaria are super normative and law-abiding,” Bar had stated, while acknowledging that “a very small percentage of hilltop youth that are harming the whole settler enterprise.”
Ben-Gvir and Bar may be at odds, but not in terms of promoting impunity for colonial violence. The question is – what is considered as extremism in a settler-colonial framework which is already extremist in its foundations, when considering the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian towns and villages for Israel’s establishment?
The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), for example, was revealed to have been recruiting the hilltop youth into a military unit called Desert Frontier, purportedly to “rehabilitate” the settlers into soldiers. Yet the IDF’s origins can be traced back to the Zionist paramilitary gangs that terrorised and massacred Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba and before. Presumably, the institutionalisation of violence allows the IDF to distinguish between its violence and that of the hilltop youth….
https://www.juancole.com/2023/07/officials-promoting-impunity.html
After the truth-shower 