Shoot Palestinians, not settlers: Israeli general exposes double standard

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich holds a map that shows the E1 settlement project that would essentially end hopes of a Palestinian state in the Israeli-occupied West Bank [File: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP]

“This is nothing,” Orly Noy, editor of the Hebrew-language Local Call, told Al Jazeera, describing a process where Israel’s far-right has increasingly taken over the country’s institutions.

A few years earlier, Noy explained, “[ex-soldier organisation] Breaking the Silence ran a report showing that Israeli soldiers in Area C [the part of the West Bank under full Israeli administration] were unaware that part of their job was to protect Palestinians from settler violence. They were completely unaware. That was years ago, before October 7, before the [Gaza] genocide. People in Israel could live with it then; they really don’t care now.”

Prejudice as policy

In March, Israel passed legislation that allows for the death penalty – but only for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

A month earlier, Israel again earned worldwide condemnation after it introduced legislation ushering in what several countries described as the “de facto annexation” of the occupied territory, further entrenching a system by which the lives of Palestinians and Israeli settlers are governed by separate legal regimes: one for those who have lived there for generations and one for the Israelis who claim a biblical right to the territory.

“This isn’t new,” Yair Dvir, from the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, told Al Jazeera, “These are the policies that have underpinned Israel’s apartheid for years. What’s new is that statements like this have become everyday comments for politicians, military leaders and those in the media.

“The feeling is that the international community is not stopping Israel, the US is backing it, so there is no longer any reason to hide the policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing – on the contrary, it is something that leaders today are proud of.”

Wafa Jazar, 42, sits for a portrait, holding the clothes that her 14-year-old son, Ahmad Jazar, was wearing when he was shot by Israeli soldiers, at their home in the West Bank village of Sebastia during 2025 [File: Leo Correa/AP Photo]

The human cost of racism

Those policies appear to be escalating still further under cover of the US-Israel war on Iran.

According to figures compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 12 Palestinians have been killed in settler attacks in the West Bank since February 28 – the date of Israel and the US’s first strikes on Iran – with hundreds of others injured and forced from their homes.

In contrast, the same office recorded 10 Palestinians killed by settlers across the whole of 2025. The Israeli military killed at least 226 Palestinians during the same period.

Contacted by phone, Aida Touma-Sliman, a member of parliament representing the left-wing Hadash party, described a visit earlier this week to the village of Duma, near Nablus in the occupied West Bank. The village was the site of a 2015 settler attack that killed three Palestinians, including 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh, who was burned alive.

“I visited Duma after the attack 11 years ago, and I visited it this week,” she said, “Both times, I felt the same sense of hopelessness and an understanding that nobody was there to defend them and they would face these settlers alone.”

While ending the occupation of the West Bank altogether was the ultimate hope for its people, for now, their best chances lay in the forthcoming Israeli elections, Touma-Sliman added.

‘The only hope I have, and it’s a slight one, is that, in the elections later this year, we will finally vote these fascists out from government and perhaps begin cleaning up all of the mess they’ve made.”