Bennett’s proposed rehabilitation of settler-terrorists is a deceptive sleight of hand

In a move that is far from benevolent, Israel’s Minister of Education Naftali Bennett has declared the launch of programmes “to try to rehabilitate the hundreds of ‘hilltop youth’”, which is his euphemism for terrorist Jewish settlers. Linked intrinsically to the deadly Duma arson attack committed by settlers last year, Bennett has exhibited an example of the kind of blatant manipulation inherent within the Zionist state as regards pedagogy, education and terror.

Recently, right-wing Jews were seen celebrating the Duma attack at a wedding. The video clip sparked international outrage, yet for Bennett it provided him with an ideal opportunity to give out misleading statistics in order to promote an equally misleading image of Israeli society. According to the Times of Israel, he claimed that the number of extremists “is in the single figures, the people around it are in the tens, and I would say the sympathisers would be in the hundreds, but only hundreds.”

The convenience of discussing a single terror attack may give rise to such figures, although their accuracy is debatable. However, settler terror attacks, which are not limited to murder, affect Palestinians on a daily basis; Duma was not an isolated incident. Given Israel’s dependency upon settlers to complete its colonial project, it is unlikely that Bennett’s assumption will generate any sense of validity. Generalising the settler terror attacks by referring to “this very radical ideology”, Bennett stated, “We also have to act on the education side to get to these kids who sympathise with the ideology.”

Naftali Bennett is aligned politically to the settler movement and has expressed pride at having killed Palestinians; he expresses repugnant opinions about settler supremacy and Palestinian political subjugation on a regular basis. To put it bluntly, Israel’s education minister has the opportunity to integrate the kind of impunity he enjoys into the state education system, thus consolidating the military narrative that goes beyond orientalist stereotypes and seeks the dehumanisation, dispossession and displacement of Palestinians. The insistence which forms the premise of Bennett’s weak argument is that “neither Israel nor the settlers were the culprit” in the arson terror attack. Conveniently, Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s rhetoric of incitement has been eliminated from the wider narrative.

Given the power wielded by Israel over its institutions, it is a farce to even entertain the thought that any alleged rehabilitation programme can undo decades of fabricated, hostile indoctrination which has provided not only an extension of colonial ideology, but also reinforced the perverted perspectives of the complicit settler population.

Unsurprisingly, the context of state-sanctioned terror against the Palestinian population was also overlooked by Bennett. Incitement at state level, violent incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque and government authorisation for sniper fire and extrajudicial killings all benefit the settlers; they should all be considered as a form of terrorism that is in line with the Zionist ideology for “Greater Israel”, a concept that is rationalised in the Israeli education system by displacing blame upon the victims.

Bennett’s ambiguous rehabilitation programmes are a concrete manifestation of such displacement by the state of Israel as well as a deceptive sleight of hand. The underlying, twisted premise in his worldview is that, since neither Israel nor the settlers can be considered as culprits, the blame gets projected indirectly upon the Palestinian victims. Rather than the state assuming responsibility for its role in condoning settler terror, Israel has, this time through the veneer of education, unleashed a variant of traumatisation that has become an integral part of the settler-terrorists’ hypothetical disengagement from the outcomes and consequences of their illegal actions.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.