What We Have Done to Our Children
The seeds of future conflict already live in Middle Eastern youth. That's on us.
Today I want to talk about a recent documentary that explores settler violence in the West Bank, in large part as it is carried out by an extremist youth cult supported and goaded on by older adults and the IDF.
But to talk about this ugly example of indoctrination for the purposes of military escalation by other means, there’s another event that should come first.
Last week in Be’er Sheva, a community in southern Israel, an incident occurred that might easily have been lost to coverage of the nation’s expanding war in Lebanon. In a local school, a 12-year-old Bedouin girl—an Arab-Israeli citizen—was suspended after a mass of Jewish students flew into a confrontational rage over a comment she made in a seventh-grade class discussion about the war. As Haaretz reported,
“The students started saying to me: ‘Our soldiers aren't murderers,’ even though I hadn’t said that.” She added: “And others cursed me. They asked me if I supported Palestine. I told them that I don’t, and that I[’m] only in favor of small children in Gaza returning to their homes.”
The 12-year-old had already been accused this school year of supporting Hamas because of her hijab, but a fuller round of harassment started at the end of class last week—from personal threats of “your village should be burned down”, to students chanting an extremist refrain that’s become popular in recent years (sung at marches in the Old City, while attacking Palestinian villages, and at ultra-Orthodox weddings): “May your village burn”. (This chant is so extreme, mind you, that IDF pulled the performance of Kobi Peretz back in March, when he wanted to sing it for soldiers.)
While the student was initially caught in the middle of that angry throng, with no help from her original teacher, another eventually intervened to take her to the principal, for her parents to pick up and take home. The rest of the students then celebrated this girl’s removal with more chanting and patriotic singing for the better part of an hour. One retroactively claimed that she’d said horrific things about a relative killed on October 7—something that the girl denied when interviewed, saying that she was new to the school and didn’t have that kind of connection to other students (i.e., didn’t know them well enough to know who had or hadn’t lost people on October 7).
The Education Ministry then confirmed that she was going to be suspended for her behaviour, which it described as “engag[ing] in incitement against IDF soldiers, and harsh invectives toward students who lost first-degree relatives during the events of October 7 and in the war” (based on that retroactive claim by another student), and also, to prevent further tension between students. The 12-year-old and other Arab-Israeli students have stayed away from the school ever since.
Now, a story like this is painful whichever way it’s read, but it’s also painful because it’s read in different ways at all.
One of the easiest ways to read this situation is the obvious one: that the Jewish-Israeli children were filled with ethnic hatred stirred up by war, and knew that school officials would side with them when they harassed minorities in their vicinity, the same way that extremist settlers in the West Bank can usually trust that they’ll have an IDF escort watching over them when they enter Palestinian villages to terrorize, torch, destroy, and otherwise drive out the local residents (as seen in the video today).
Conversely, for people committed to spinning everything that happens in the region in the best possible light for Israel—either out of direct support for Netanyahu’s war, or out of fear that antisemitic retaliation might affect their loved ones if they don’t keep the media focus elsewhere—this story must be buried or maybe even flipped, to blame the 12-year-old girl (as some parents have) for participating in the first place in a class discussion specifically about students’ feelings on the war.
But why buried? Why flipped?
Why is there so much political anxiety about what happens among children?
Simple: because of what’s already been normalized in the broader media context, when it comes to the consequences of talking about children who parrot hate at all.
In practice, then, both narratives miss an important point:
Even though there were very clear abusers in this incident (along with the teachers who let it happen), all of these school-aged children are victims. All of them.
But it’s difficult to talk about the extent to which children across the board have been victimized by this war, because warmongers have been working hard to make sure that the rest of the world does not treat Palestinians as people whose lives have value, or even as people it is acceptable to call Palestinians. (Do you remember the initial flurry of propaganda trying to erase the very name from discussion, among right-wing extremists last fall? Do you remember how many Westerners were trained to believe that simply saying the name was equivalent to supporting Hamas and Islamic Jihad?)
Every time in the last year that someone could point to a Palestinian child saying or doing something hateful, it was deemed fair game for media spin, to serve the broader propagandist argument that there are no civilians in Gaza, and therefore the death counts don’t really matter. “Yes, yes, it’s a shame that children are dying,” ran the hate-mongering from day one, “But don’t you know that some private institutions have students dressing up as Hamas? Don’t you know that even little children in Arab countries are sometimes raised to hate Israel?”
This act of dehumanization—the tacit argument that if a child is indoctrinated to hate, they deserve to die—was painful to witness for two reasons: one, because such warmongers were explicitly teaching people that Palestinian/Muslim/Arab deaths didn’t matter (and many Westerners went along with it so easily); and two, because—whether or not the warmongers realized or cared—they were also teaching people that any child’s death could cease to matter if they were caught parroting hate as well.
By that heinous logic, though, the children in this school, chanting “May your village burn” at a Bedouin girl in their midst, were also making themselves legitimate targets. “Yes, yes, it’s a shame that children are dying—but don’t you know that some ultra-Orthodox institutions raise children to believe that all non-Jews will be subordinate to them when Torah prophecy is fulfilled? Don’t you know that even little children in Israel are sometimes raised to hate Arab peoples and their countries?”
And that is an unconscionable position to hold—for children anywhere.
It was unconscionable when people first drummed up excuses to sweep Palestinian children’s deaths under the rug.
It is unconscionable now, when people use similar excuses to sweep Lebanese and Syrian children’s deaths under the rug.
And it is unconscionable whenever people use similar excuses to sweep Jewish-Israeli children’s deaths under the rug.
Nevertheless, warmongers used this dehumanization tactic because they didn’t care about long-term consequences. They didn’t care if propagandist hatred spun in the moment against an enemy could then easily be used against “their own” down the line.
All that mattered was that the propaganda worked at the time, to make any potential allies hate whomever they hated, and support whatever military action they took next.
And yes, I’m fully aware that I have been considered a fence-sitter and an apologist for the audacity of saying that it is wrong across the board to dehumanize people.
But here’s the warmonger trick I’m fighting: warmongers love to look at what people say when they’re desperate, angry, hopeless, and trapped, and to use those beliefs to declare to the world, “See? They’re lost causes. There’s no peace possible. They hate us. It’s hopeless. We have no choice but to attack now and reduce it all to rubble.”
Meanwhile, consider how we act on a “bad day” in our more peaceful communities.
Consider how we forgive ourselves for our poor moods, and our uncharitable conduct toward one another, when we have food in our bellies, roofs over our heads, and no constant need to shelter from bombs at the slightest alarm.
Do we even come close to extending that same level of empathy to people who live in far greater states of physical distress and societal anxiety every single day?
And if not, why not?
What is our damage, that makes it so hard to see how damaged human beings are elsewhere—and so unwilling to recognize that people undergoing more extreme forms of distress are likely to manifest more extreme forms of derangement to match?
The recent documentary on Hilltop Youth
Two weeks ago, TRT World (a Turkish public broadcaster) dropped a documentary called Holy Redemption. It focuses mostly on an extremist group of Israeli settlers, a violent set of ultra-Orthodox Jews called the Hilltop Youth, and uses direct interviews with members proud to talk about their objectives and achievements. The film also highlights how the IDF has supported the actions of this group, and how a blend of IDF and settler security forces now operate under rule-sets all their own.
Very importantly, too, the documentary also centres Jewish lawyers and human rights advocates, along with Jewish people who served in the IDF and are ashamed of their actions there, or who grew up with right-wing perspectives on regional issues. These are people who wish to have their voices heard in contrast to the extremist settlers, and their presence here creates a fuller spectrum of Jewish points of view.
The Hilltop Youth cult has a history of horrific conduct in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), including the torching of a Palestinian home that killed the parents and an 18-month-old in 2015. This group then celebrated the burning of the toddler at a later wedding, and taunted the fact that Ali had been roasted “on a grill” while protesting outside courts where one of their own was tried and convicted of the deaths.
This extremist group also put out its own version of the “May your village burn” chant last year, in the wake of another series of village raids. That situation has a long backstory (as so many do in the region), but the core timeline is as follows—and gives a good sense of the scale of state and individual interactions at play in cult activities:
On February 22, 2023, Israeli military forces raided Nablus, in the West Bank, and killed 11 Palestinians, injuring around 100 others, in an operation against Lions’ Den and related Palestinian militant groups.
On February 26, 2023, a Palestinian man rammed his car into an Israeli settler vehicle that was moving through the Palestinian village of Huwwara, then shot and killed the two male occupants, 21 and 19 years old.
That same day, Netanyahu announced the death penalty for convicted terrorists, expressly noting that “[o]n this difficult day when two Israeli citizens were murdered in a Palestinian terrorist attack, there is nothing more symbolic than passing a death penalty law for terrorists.”
That evening, Israeli settlers descended on foot on Huwwara, torching buildings and related property under the watchful eye of the IDF, which followed and monitored the situation without helping the Palestinians trapped in their homes. Hundreds were injured in this and related attacks on nearby villages, one killed.
On March 1, 2023, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, went one further, arguing that “[t]he Palestinian village of Huwwara should be wiped out. The state needs to do it and not private citizens.” This was after his comments online, amid the attacks themselves, that Israel should “hit cities of terror and its perpetrators, with tanks and helicopters, mercilessly, in a way that would convey that the owner of the house has gone mad”.
On March 6, 2023, Israeli settlers and military celebrated Purim with another raid of Huwwara: throwing rocks, vandalizing structures, dancing, and terrorizing locals, injuring dozens. IDF said it would investigate the behaviour of its men.
In the aftermath, the Hilltop Youth created a song overlaid on “Hanania”, a nostalgic piece by Hanan Ben-Ari, and shared it on their WhatsApp channel. This extremist version celebrates torching Huwwara and evicting old women and children. (Ben-Ari did not approve of the piece, calling it “inappropriate”.)
These actions were part of the broader “price tagging” campaign that Hilltop Youth, ranging from teens to young adults, have been carrying out in the West Bank for years—torching, vandalizing, and destroying property, and injuring and killing Palestinians in the region. When Smotrich spoke openly earlier this year about annexing the West Bank, a mission he feels must be hastened now that the world is increasingly asserting its support of a two-state solution and Palestinian state, it is extremist youth like this group in which he is ultimately putting his trust, to do what officials by law cannot.
And that brings us to our main point today, on this decidedly grim Monday Media Review, because the Hilltop Youth are not just a band of idle teens and young adults. They have thought leaders—including the extremist Daniella Weiss, one of the most public and outspoken faces of this ultra-Orthodox movement, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security—and it’s these adults, in much stronger positions of power, who have cultivated this group’s violent rhetoric all along. One member of the Hilltop Youth also grew up to become part of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), and from that role, Zvi Sukkot of the Religious Zionism Party hasn’t just been an advocate of settler violence; he was also recently an active protester of soldiers being investigated internally over the sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees.
As in any group of religious extremists, from any faith, indoctrination starts with older people eager to shape the minds and exploit the energies of youth. Any resulting violence can then be shrugged off as the actions of the young and impulsive, even though they were trained by people with tremendous reach, and taught to see their cause as righteous and necessary for the restoration of a truly Jewish nation-state.
Now, in noting the above, I do not mean to infantilize the young adults here, by stripping them of agency or responsibility over their actions, either. There is a significant difference in culpability held by the children in Be’er Sheva and the older teens and young adults in the Hilltop Youth cult—as there is a significant difference between younger and older people involved in any militant action against civilians.
But the vast majority of human violence in this region has been carried out through young bodies like these—and that’s incredibly important to keep in mind, when thinking about how to address the traumatic fallout of this brutal period in world history. Older men and women with designs upon the land keep sacrificing the hearts, minds, bodies, and decency of young people to further their objectives. At the same time, warmongers keep encouraging us to see at least some of these young lives as disposable in the process. If they’ve been indoctrinated, they’re not worth protecting. If they’ve been raised to hate, to hell with them, right? But if they’re serving our glorious cause, then at least their deaths for the mission will mean something, okay?
And yes, that rhetoric will eventually come to bite you in the rear, when your own children act just as hatefully as the people you need the world to believe are on a whole other level. But by then you might be too far gone—and our wars might be, too.
This is why I keep calling attention to what I refer to as “wartime derangement syndrome”: a mass psychosis that normalizes ways of thinking about and acting toward other humans that we would never tolerate during times of peace—and which we will probably be ashamed to realize that we perpetuated to the extent that we did, once this current of frenzy has passed and we can see through the tribalist haze again.
Can we do anything about wartime derangement now, though?
I think so, yes—but only if we refuse the games that warmongers love to play.
Only if we refuse let anyone trick us into thinking that our young people are ever disposable, or that their worth can only be measured by how “unsullied” their reputations are by the hatefulness of war and related ethno-religious attitudes.
This war and its precursor years of regional violence have poisoned the minds of children on every side. There are Jewish-Israeli children cheering at the thought of razing the homes of Arab children (Palestinian and otherwise), and there are Arab children (Palestinian and otherwise) who cheer at the thought of Israel burning, too.
And that serves the warmongers just fine, because it means that there are always freshly indoctrinated people ready to be called up to militant roles in this conflict.
That is our toxicity, our burden, and our responsibility to fix, wherever we can.
But we can only do so if we face up to the full scale of the problem. Every day in which this nightmare continues is another day in which the collective sickness of dehumanization grows among the children of our species: people who are not only going to inherit all our bitter wars, but also all the other global traumas we’ve been avoiding in service to the war machines of today.
There is no breaking this cycle of violence without first recognizing that the seeds for future conflict have already been planted in generations coming up.
Do we have the integrity required now to keep them from bearing fruit?
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML