Over 1,000 Palestinians from 15 rural communities in West Bank have abandoned their villages since October 7 amid alleged attacks by settlers and IDF reservists
www.timesofisrael.com
I don't want to derail the thread about this nonsense, but because it's constantly being forcibly brought to the public attention by all kind of interested parties, I'm going to briefly address the issue.
First, proportions. Or rather complete lack thereof, given the real magnitude and severity of the issue. We are talking about order of hundred "extremists" - usually very young men in late teens/early twenties - out of nearly half a million Israelis living the West Bank. Vast majority of what they do constitute petty vandalism, occasionally major vandalism and violent confrontations with local Palestinians of various intensity (more about this below), rarely bordering on- and ultimately indistinguishable from actual
terrorism.
There is a dedicated Shabak department, whose whole job is dealing with Jewish extremists, using pretty much the same methods as against the Palestinian (administrative arrests, "enhanced interrogation" etc). The amount of effort and resources Shabak puts into dealing with them is mind-bogglingly disproportionate to the actual damage they do, mostly due to the international obsession with them. Just to illustrate the point - every time there is any kind of "unrest" involving settlers, there will be a phone call from the US state department with official enquiry about the issue.
The purpose of the obsessive dealing with the "settlers violence" is public perception engineering by interested parties in two main ways: neutralizing the severity/centrality of the Palestinian terrorism as "an obstacle for peace" by establishing an appearance of equivalency between both sides; creating public pressure on the Western governments to sanction Israel in various ways. The people behind this are various Palestinian/Western/local "human rights" NGOs, sponsored by EU, Arabs and individuals like Soros, working in coordination with media (everybody from Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya to CNN/BBC/etc, including local leftie news sites like Haaretz) and using Israeli court system for this kind of lawfare (one of the main motives for the recent judicial reform by Israel right).
One of the most popular themes in this kind of coverage is a "forcible displacement of Palestinian population by settlers", which sounds dramatic and horrible enough to warrant a special kind of attention from all the involved international actors (EU, US etc). In reality, the "displaced Palestinian population" in virtually all the cases (I'm not familiar with any exceptions) are Bedouins, who invade public or private lands for grazing or camping, or both. Bedouins are pastoral nomads, for whom the whole notion of land ownership basically comes down to whatever land they can capture, without being challenged by force. State of Israel is usually extremely reluctant to challenge them (even including enforcing actual court decisions), because then it's "
Israel is forcibly displacing the Palestinian population" - a whole other level of international scandal. So the state de-facto leaves it to the "settler extremists" to enforce its own laws... There is a lot to elaborate about all this, but for now this will suffice.