Jewish settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron apparently have found a new location for expansion of Jewish settlement in the city: an IDF base.

An Israeli Channel 10 report, translated by Ha’aretz, shows residential caravans complete with backyard playgrounds set up inside an Israeli military base. In the video, little girls can be seen slipping in and out of the base.

Meanwhile, Ha’aretz has an editorial slamming the government’s lax treatment of settler scofflaws:

The generations come and go - settlers, lawbreakers, yeshiva students, soldiers who guard them and get treated contemptuously, teachers drawing salaries from taxpayers, settlers’ sons and grandchildren who do whatever they like. And some of them constitute an infrastructure for Jewish terrorism in the territories. Palestinian generations, meanwhile, also come and go as the settlers, their children and grandchildren rampage and plunder unhindered in a state that has seemingly given up…

Evacuating a mobile home gives the right-wing activists a chance to exercise their forces. The extremist yeshiva students gather by means of a communications network, they block roads, beat up passing Palestinians, snatch soldiers’ weapons, burn orchards and plantations and throw stones - faced by defeatist, helpless defense forces.

This absurd spectacle is everyday routine in the West Bank - one in which illegal yeshivas, operating in illegal settlements, whose teachers’ wages are paid by the state, halt studies to enable their students to engage in illegal activity. No Israeli government has even tried to deal with the settlers’ violence.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof engages in a debate about Israel with readers who take issue with his call for the U.S. to give Israel “tough love” — which, as he outlines it, would include such things as U.S. insistence on a 100 percent West Bank settlement freeze.

In the back-and-forth with readers, Kristof says the West Bank security fence should not be built on Palestinian land, indicated that Jews don’t necessarily have a right to live in Hebron, notes that more Palestinian minors have been killed by Israelis in recent years than vice versa and suggests that Israel has not done all it can to secure its long term future by negotiating with its Arab neighbors.

His arguments leave more than a few holes (e.g. there’s a difference between civilian victims of terrorism and bystanders killed in counterterrorist operations), but you can point them out if you’d like by commenting below or responding to Kristof on his blog or Facebook page.

A recent poll commissioned by Peace Now showed that 73 percent of Israelis have not visited any settlements in the last five years. Peace Now’s reaction? Bus more Israelis to West Bank settlements.

In other news from the wild West Bank, a Ha’aretz editorial calls on the Israeli government to do more to ensure the rule of law in the territory — particularly when it comes to violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians.

After the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem handed out more than 100 cameras to Palestinians in the West Bank to document their harassment by Israelis, it didn’t take long for the investment to pay off. This month, Muna Nawajaa of Khirbet Susiya recorded an attack by masked men, believed to be Israeli Jews, beating members of her family with clubs.

The video of the incident, which took place in the South Hebron hills, prompted Israeli police to take action. Three suspects from the nearby Jewish town of Susiya already have been arrested. Tuesday’s New York Times carries a feature on the June 8 incident and its aftermath.

While the project, called “Shooting Back,” is a good way to root out the thugs among Israeli Jews who live in the West Bank, it shouldn’t be limited to the West Bank — or Israel, for that matter.

Imagine if this project were expanded throughout the Middle East. Just as Israel has taken action against this thuggish and criminal activity, authorities from Riyadh to Cairo would take action against thugs in their societies who target Arab innocents.

There’s just one problem: Nobody’s interested in how people in those places are beaten, murdered and maimed — and, in some cases, the persecution is carried out by their own governments. B’Tselem, or at least the United Nations, would do well to protect those innocents as well.

Last week the Forward published an editorial calling for Israel to implement a settlement freeze:

Whatever the status of Jerusalem, outlying West Bank communities such as Ariel and Betar Illit are settlements by anybody’s lights, including Israel’s. The new construction announced there last month is a direct slap at the Road Map and its author, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made clear in her angry remarks in Jordan just after the new construction was announced.

It’s important to acknowledge that the question of new Israeli construction in the West Bank is not a matter of intrinsic right and wrong, of moral vs. immoral behavior. Violating the Road Map agreement by building new apartment blocks can hardly be compared with violating it by bombarding Israeli towns and deliberately killing and maiming civilians. Israelis are not wrong to question the international outcry that greets every new West Bank housing start.

At this moment in history, however, new construction in the settlements, whatever its moral valence, is foolish and self-destructive. Israel’s political and defense leaders see their country’s survival as dependent on separating from the Palestinians by withdrawing from the West Bank. …
Jerusalem maintains that the Palestinians must honor their Road Map commitment to stop incitement and break up terrorist gangs before Israel needs to begin acting on its commitments. The way things look now, though, that may be backward. Israel needs to help Abbas win back control by first honoring its own commitments.

This week, in an article at FrontPageMagazine.com, P. David Hornik fires back, listing what he describes as inaccuracies and rejecting the Forward’s overall premise:

The Forward warns darkly of “a spurt of new construction . . . under way in Israeli settlements in the West Bank”—actually bids for about 2,000 apartments about half of which will be in Jerusalem—and says this “development should be alarming to anyone who cares about Israel’s welfare.” What should really be alarming to anyone who cares about Israel’s welfare is that there are still Jews who think Israel can win peace by making Judea, Samaria, and part of Jerusalem off limits to Jews. …

[I]t all gets down to that root of all evils — those “settlements” — and Israel doesn’t even have a right to demand an end to incitement and terrorism without first stopping its own diabolical “natural growth” in places like Ariel, Betar Illit, and Jerusalem. The Forward stays faithful to all the self-negating axioms of the Left that, in the form of the Oslo process, got Israel surrounded by terrorist gangs in the first place. It can’t give up the idea that Israel brings terrorism upon itself and could still appease its way into its enemies’ hearts.