‘I see it is as a duty, a mitzvah to use my body to protect these farmers’

Settlers are attacking ‘Rabbis for Human Rights’ for helping Palestinian farmers. But recent violence may spur the government to act, ELHANAN MILLER reports

DANIEL ROTH AND some 50 Jewish volunteers were just finishing their tree-planting activity with Palestinian olive farmers in the village of Burin in northern Samaria, when they noticed a group of young settlers, their faces covered with cloth, assembling on the hill above them.

The settlers ran down the hill, clubs and stones in hand, and began attacking the volunteers, many of them elderly. One attacker shattered the windows of a volunteer’s car with a rock and poured gasoline inside and over it, quickly setting it ablaze.

Roth, 40, until recently the Rabbis for Human Rights’ coordinator of activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, was filming the attack on his phone while trying to protect another volunteer. But then a stone was hurled at him, injuring his forearm and thumb.

“It started bleeding all over the place, but wasn’t broken,” he recalled in a phone interview with The Jewish Independent. “Other volunteers weren’t so lucky; they had bones broken, some were hospitalised. This is a trauma they’ll never forget.”

Attacks by extremist settlers on Jewish volunteers in the West, like the one which emerged from the illegal outpost of Givat Ronen on January 21, have increased in recent months.

According to data collected by Israeli watchdog Peace Now, physical altercations between settlers and Palestinians have increased by 150% in 2021 compared with 2019. Israeli human rights organisations and politicians on the left have long accused the government and IDF of inaction in the face of these attacks, and even of collusion in them.