Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 16.08.2026
In Tsarist Russia, the aristocratic government and the big capitalists organized pogroms against the Jews to incite class animosity away from them and directed it against the Jews. They used the so-called “Black hundreds”. The Bolshevik Party, together with workers from other streams, organized a united front to protect the Jews.
In Israel, the Democratic Party is about to win 10 seats, which is close to 400,000 people. This party claims to be the left in Israel. But unlike the Russian left, it does not organize any defense against the pogroms against the Palestinians by the Zionist settlers in the West Bank. On the contrary, their leaders gut response is to blame the Palestinians when they oppose the settler terror that behind it is the Zionist government and army.
Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz:
“Ma’aruf Hanani is a Palestinian police officer and a 43-year-old farmer, a father of three. On Thursday, July 23, he was on a weekend break from the police course he is attending in Jericho. In the morning, he went to Nablus to buy medicine for the three thoroughbred horses he raises as a hobby, and then returned to his spacious home. Together with his partner in the fields, Firas Shahin, 55, the two were sitting on the balcony, where a pleasant breeze was blowing this week, when suddenly they saw white smoke rising from their fields. The two share 55 dunams of wheat fields. They hurried down towards their fields.
It was one day before the attack on Palestinian farmers in the village of Tal, in which four residents and two soldiers were killed. This proximity of dates cannot help but raise the suspicion that these are well-planned events by the settlers and not spontaneous outbursts. B ‘Tselem field researcher Salma Deb’i says that she is diagnosing an escalation trend. Lately, it seems that the settlers have been planning their attacks. When there is resistance from the residents, the army intervenes and the residents lose their land. There are already caravans in the village of Tel where the four residents were killed.”Democratic Party leaders condemned the Palestinians as terrorists in their initial response.
Ahmad Abu Siyam, 32, heads a group of 12 volunteers in Beit Furik who help residents in any way they can, in the absence of functioning government institutions in the town. He, too, received a report of the fire, rushed to call the fire department and take his group of volunteers down to the burning valley. The fire burned in several locations and none of them doubted that this was yet another malicious arson by the settlers, not the first and certainly not the last. Since the establishment of Derech Abraham Farm on 10 August 2025, there have been numerous cases of arson, theft, vandalism of water lines and agricultural equipment. Farmers can no longer access their lands, as usual in all the villages in the West Bank now.
A week before the latest incident, the farmers brought a combine harvester to their fields to harvest the wheat, after coordinating with the army, but the settlers did not allow them to harvest their crops and threatened to set the combine on fire, Hanani says. Soldiers then arrived at the site and declared it a closed military zone. When one of the soldiers realized that Hanani was an officer in the Palestinian police, he told him, “Let Abu Mazen harvest the wheat.” According to Hanani, the soldier threatened him with a rifle aimed at him, saying that if they did not leave immediately with the combine harvester, the army would call out the settlers. A few minutes later, an ATV with settlers arrived, and the owner of the combine pickup, who was afraid for his property, decided to retract it. The wheat has not been harvested since. When Hanani tried to explain that it was his land, the soldier replied: “You don’t have land here. This is the land of the State of Israel.”
In one of the houses near the farm, Arafat Nassara lives. He moved here with his family and his sheep after being forced to flee the terror of the settlers in his previous place of residence, in Khirbet Tana. Now the family members are afraid to leave their new home as well, and the residents of Beit Furik are holding night shifts to protect them and their property.
Back to the incident: According to Hanani and Abu Siyam’s testimonies, the residents began extinguishing efforts using fire bats and water buckets until the fire trucks arrived. According to them, the fire has engulfed about 270 dunams. They also called a tractor to come and create a buffer to isolate the fire, so that it would not spread further. A video documenting the fire and filmed at 10:33 a.m. shows the fire spreading rapidly due to the heat and wind.
Then, while several dozen residents were busy trying to put out the fire, according to testimonies in the village, five vehicles, including dozens of settlers, set out from the Abraham Road Farm, which reached the burning ground and began firing in the air and beating the residents, in order to drive them away from their fields. Some of the settlers were armed with rifles and pistols, others with clubs and hoes, and some were masked. The commotion was great, dozens of settlers mixed with each other, dozens of residents of the town. In the videos, many shouts and shots can be heard. Reports in the Israeli media on the day of the incident claimed that the settlers had come to put out fire on the land of the farm outpost, without referring to the Palestinian land and its owners. It was said by Israel that during the extinguishing efforts, one of the settlers was stabbed and “two terrorists were killed.”
However, conversations with B’Tselem’s field researcher and local residents yield a completely different version, and neither of them heard that anyone had been stabbed. The first Palestinian killed was Muhammad Malitat, 17, whose father had a plot of land there and had come with him to put out the fire in his field. He confronted one of the settlers and even knocked him to the ground. Hanani and Abu Siyam say that the settler (whom they identify by his first name) got to his feet and shot him with his M-16 from point-blank range in the neck, and after he fell down in a pool of blood, he continued to shoot him at close range to make sure he was killed. Why did you kill the child? The residents shouted.
The mutual confrontations intensified, of course. Hanani says that the settler with the mother of 16 also shot him in the abdomen. He did manage to escape, but he said the settler continued to shoot at him. Hamed Malitat, 43, was seriously wounded, and Mahmoud Hanani, 20, was killed by the gunfire. Mahmoud Hanani was first wounded in the leg and crawled wounded on the ground, and then, Ma’ruf Hanani recalls, one of the settlers shot and killed him as he crawled. Malilitat is still hospitalized this week at Rafidiya Hospital in Nablus.
Six soldiers have been on the ground since the beginning of the incident and they did not lift a finger to protect the residents, and now they are joined by another force that has arrived at the scene. Hanani says that as long as the soldiers saw that there was no danger to the settlers’ bodies , they did not intervene. They only did so when they saw the farmers attacking the settlers and then started shooting to drive them away. The entire incident was dispersed about 15 minutes later.
When Hanani tried to explain that it was his land, the soldier replied: “You don’t have land here. This is the land of the State of Israel.”
Ma’aruf Hanani ran about 150 meters away as the shooting at him continued. “I wanted to live,” he says now, with a smile. Eventually, he was put on a motorcycle with a serious wound in his abdomen, and then he was transferred to a private car that rushed him to the clinic in Beit Furik. After initial treatment, he was taken by ambulance along with the other wounded to Rafidiya Hospital. He was hospitalized for eight days and underwent a complex surgery that lasted more than four hours in his abdomen.
And here is the police’s version of what happened as reported to Haaretz this week: “Contrary to what was claimed in your letter, in accordance with the findings that arose on the ground when the forces arrived, the incident was defined by all the security agencies as a terror attack, since a number of Palestinians attacked and stabbed Israeli civilians with a knife, while they were working to extinguish the fire that broke out at the site, causing serious injury to one of them. The investigation of the case is still ongoing in the Terror Division of the Central Unit in the Judea and Samaria District.”
The Zionist Army Spokesperson said: “On July 23, a fire broke out near the settlement of Itamar in the Samaria Brigade. During the extinguishing efforts, two terrorists stabbed an Israeli civilian. Another civilian who was at the scene killed the two terrorists. Later, army forces conducted searches in the Beit Furik area and laid siege to it.”
Israel has no need to investigate what happened after the police and “all the security agencies” immediately determined that this was hostile terrorist activity.