Israel Must Purge the Bloodguilt of Settler Violence

We are in the midst of one of the most violent periods in the West Bank since the region was captured by Israel in 1967.¹ Since Hamas’s horrific attacks on October 7, 2023, over 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank; more than 240 of them were children.² Sixty-two villages have been entirely uprooted, forcibly displacing 4,635 people. Settlers harass communities, assaulting residents, destroying property, and committing murder.³ There has sadly been a long history of settler attacks on Palestinians over the decades of occupation.⁴ In the last few years, the number and intensity of the crimes has skyrocketed. 

This violence has drawn rightful condemnation from Jews across the political and religious spectrum,^5,6 even from those who rarely if ever criticize the State of Israel or Israeli Jews.⁷ In their statement, the Union for Reform Judaism affirmed core Jewish principles, saying, “Palestinian families and communities must be protected, and the perpetrators of settler violence must be held accountable through prompt investigations, timely prosecutions, and appropriate punishment.”⁸ A group of leading settler rabbis even made the rare move of very gently condemning “negative actions, which are sometimes undertaken by individuals whose intentions may be desirable but whose deeds are not, or, G!d forbid, by those who exploit the important and precious settlement enterprise for improper and illegitimate motives.”⁹ This statement is illustrative of the core ethical sentiment of many of the statements cited above, that those perpetrating the violence are a small, radical minority, acting as rogue elements in an otherwise acceptable system.

In Devarim, the Torah prescribes a somewhat puzzling ritual for resolving cases where a person’s body is found and the killer is unknown (and therefore unpunished). Essentially, we are given a ritual structure for dealing with an unsolved murder case. When a person’s body is found and their killer is not known, the political authorities are commanded to measure the distance to nearby cities and towns. The elders of the community physically closest to the victim are required to take a cow to a spring, break its neck, and wash their hands in the water. Once they have completed this ritual they declare: “Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. Absolve, O G!d, Your people Israel whom You redeemed, and do not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among Your people Israel…”¹⁰ The Torah concludes the passage by telling us that this ritual and declaration causes G!d to forgive the leaders of their bloodguilt, absolving them of their moral and legal responsibility for this murder that took place closest to where they hold communal power.

While these verses are bursting with meaning, I want to focus on a few particular details. First, the Torah requires such an accounting for a single unsolved murder – any single, unsolved murder. To leave such a crime in the land that Hashem is giving to us without some kind of reckoning is so unthinkable that the Torah pre-emptively commands a mitzvah to resolve such a case to the best of our ability. Secondly, the political leadership of the nearest community to the murder are immediately implicated, even though none of them individually are suspected of being the murderer themselves. They must perform this ritual, the Eglah Arufah, to purge themselves of the cloud of bloodguilt for this killing.

Even the most seemingly straightforward aspects of this ritual contain layers of meaning and possibility. The Talmud Yerushalmi sees two possible interpretations of the elders’ declaration, each of which offers differing political valences to the ritual as a whole. One reading is championed by the sages of Babylonia and the other by sages of the Land of Israel.¹¹ The sages of Babylonia read the elders’ declaration as centering on the murder victim. They affirm that they did not leave them unaccompanied and thus in a vulnerable position or let them leave the community without sufficient food and water. For the Babylonian rabbis, this ritual is about affirming that the nearest community is meeting its most basic social welfare obligations, with the bloodguilt only being cleared away when the political leadership of that community publicly swears that they provided a sufficient safety net. The rabbis in the Land of Israel read the verse completely differently – as a public declaration that they, the leaders of the nearest community, carried out legal justice correctly. They affirm that they did not have access to the murderer and let him get away or bungle (intentionally or not) his legal proceedings, allowing him to escape justice. According to these rabbis, the bloodguilt is only cleansed by a public and ritual affirmation that the leaders of the political community did everything they could to solve and prosecute murders in their community. Both readings emphasize that the Eglah Arufah demands accountability of the closest political leadership, obligating them to take responsibility for this killing. 

Sadly, the West Bank is awash in unprosecuted crimes committed against Palestinians, including dozens of murders for which no one has been charged, let alone convicted or punished, by Israeli authorities just this year alone. After the murder of Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen, his murderer Yinon Levi was free to torment Awdah’s community and continue to try and dismantle their lives the very same week.¹² Yinon was detained by police for only one night and later released after a three day house arrest, and since then, he has returned again and again to hound the community by filming them and wandering in the village’s vicinity, including while settlers cut-off Umm al-Kheir’s electricity and water supplies. Months later, Israeli prosecutors announced their intention to charge Yinon with reckless manslaughter. However, a year later, he has still not been indicted.¹³ A 2025 report by the human rights organization Yesh Din found that, since 2005, only 3% of investigation files opened following ideologically motivated offenses Israelis committed against Palestinians in the West Bank and monitored by Yesh Din led to full or partial convictions.¹⁴ The state is not even honoring its most basic commitments to due process and justice. 

What then would the Torah have our elders do in this case of uninvestigated, unprosecuted, or unsolved Palestinian murders? Should our leaders break the necks of hundreds of cows by every wadi in the West Bank and make a declaration of communal innocence we know to be false? 

Our sages faced the very same challenge in the first century, and the Mishnah goes on to tell us their response: “From the time when murderers proliferated, the ritual of the Eglah Arufah was nullified.”¹⁵ In other words, as part of a longer narrative of moral and spiritual decline,¹⁶ the Mishnah tells us that once there were too many murders, the ritual stopped being performed. Rabbi Menachem haMeiri (13th century Catalonia) explains in his commentary on the Gemara that the ritual was abolished because murder was widespread and the identity of many killers was known, but nothing was done.¹⁷ The Eglah Arufah is only ethically comprehensible in a context where murder is a rare tragedy, and communal leadership takes solving it incredibly seriously. Without those conditions present, it wouldn’t make sense for elders to declare “it’s not our fault and we did everything we could!” Thus, the ritual was nullified.

Not only are violent attacks and even murders of Palestinians in the West Bank by Israelis not rare, sadly actions that can only reasonably be described as pogroms have been occurring with greater and greater frequency. Even more disturbing is the seemingly endless footage of Israeli soldiers at best standing by doing nothing to intervene or at worst participating actively in the terror.¹⁸ Since October 7, the military has armed and uniformed thousands of settlers through “regional defense” units and settlement “emergency response teams,” and despite extensive documentation of their attacks on Palestinians, not a single indictment has been filed against a settler-soldier in these units. This collaboration takes more than one form: Sometimes soldiers stand by while settlers attack, sometimes settlers act under the cover of a uniform the army gave them, and sometimes soldiers themselves are the ones pulling the trigger.¹⁹ Of the 56 Palestinians killed in the West Bank this year, 12 were killed by settlers. Forty-two were killed by soldiers, including 11 children.²⁰ (In the remaining two deaths, the killer has not been identified.) 

For the last several weeks, when I look at my own children, I cannot help but think about Sam Abu Haikal. Sam was seven months old, just a few months older than my youngest daughter, when an IDF soldier opened fire on the car his father was driving in Hebron. The soldier claimed the car was accelerating towards him, which video evidence clearly contradicts. A bullet hit Sam in the face, killing him, and shrapnel hit his mother, leaving her in critical condition.²¹ I often hear about extreme settler violence, or fringe violence, when acts like these occur. How can we see settler violence as fringe when the army itself is guilty, and the state refuses to prosecute? After his son’s killing, Sam’s father, Fahd Abu Haikal, described the IDF’s conduct: 

After seeing the injuries, the soldiers withdrew from the scene without offering any assistance or doing anything about it…We were shot with intent to kill; the soldier who shot us was on the front left side [of the vehicle]…After the incident, the soldiers confiscated the security camera footage from the area, but no one has contacted us about investigating the crime.²² 

For its part, the IDF said that it “regrets any harm caused to uninvolved individuals.”²³ How can a system that constantly fails to stop crimes before they happen or to punish perpetrators after the crime is committed be said to have malfunctioned? If Sam’s murderer and the many more like him are not punished, and the exact conditions that lead to this moral catastrophe are maintained for decades, how can his murder possibly be understood as a mistake? 

As nightmarish as it is to acknowledge, we must accept that this is the system working as intended. 

While the rabbis of nearby settler communities may decry “exploit[ing] the important and precious settlement enterprise for improper and illegitimate motives” as the cause of settler violence, it is in fact the settlement enterprise itself – a project of the Israeli government – which demands the violent removal of Palestinians from their homes. By maintaining the system of military rule over Palestinians in the West Bank by Israelis, with the openly declared state goal²⁴ of ethnically cleansing their communities and replacing them with Jewish Israeli ones, the only possible outcomes are obvious. This is the fundamental link between settlement expansion alongside checkpoints, home demolitions, settler pogroms, and ultimately murder. 

Palestinians in the West Bank have no meaningful way to hold accountable the Jewish Israeli soldiers, settlers, and politicians making decisions and taking actions that shape their lives and livelihoods. That status quo is unacceptable. Thorough, impartial investigations and legal consequences for settler violence would be an important starting point. That said, it is not enough on its own. A system where the perpetrators are responsible for investigating and prosecuting themselves is ultimately unworkable and unjust. Only unwinding the structure of oppression as a whole, by ending the occupation and guaranteeing the self-determination, civil and human rights, and dignity of Palestinians can possibly resolve these injustices. 

As Jews we must ask ourselves, what can we say and do that will allow us to look Fahd Abu Haikal in the face, let alone G!d? When our sages saw that the process for addressing communal guilt and responsibility was not working as the ethical goal it should be, they nullified its performance. Rather than facilitate a farcical ritual, they refused to allow political leadership to claim innocence in a system of injustice those leaders themselves perpetuated. How will our words and actions not be as nullified as the Eglah Arufah? The problem is systemic and requires systemic solutions. 

I ask that you join me in shifting our communal conversation. Together we can move the North American Jewish community’s discourse from a focus on the crimes of individual radical settlers, to the violence of the occupation and settlement projects as a whole. If you are looking for concrete next steps for learning more and bringing these conversations to your schools and shuls, take a look at our resource for Israel and Palestine educators. Each of us holds tremendous power – the moral power of the Torah’s convictions, the power of our deep and abiding relationships to our Israeli friends and family, and the power to represent Judaism to the wider world. 

It is a tragedy that first century murders multiplied to such a degree that the sages felt forced to abolish the Eglah Arufah. Rather than let our tools of ethical outcry and ritual cleansing become hollow symbols, eventually to be abandoned, we have the power to change our society and refill them with meaning. Now is the moment to change our narrative and change our world.

NOTES

1.  Adam Raz, “We Were Ordered to Kill: The 1967 Nakba That Israelis Don’t Know About,” Haaretz, June 4, 2026, ‘We Were Ordered to Kill’: The 1967 Nakba That Israelis Don’t Know About – Israel Security’ 
2.  As of July 22, 2026.
3. B’Tselem, “Settler Violence Updates” https://www.btselem.org/settler_violence_updates_list
4. IDF Probing 15 Cases of Soldiers Ignoring Settler Attacks on Palestinians – Haaretz
5. Reform Movement Statement on Increased West Bank Settler Violence
6. Violence against Palestinians betrays the Torah | Kenneth Brander | The Times of Israel
7. AJC Statement on Increasing Violence in the West Bank
8. Reform Movement Statement on Increased West Bank Settler Violence
9. Rabbi Elikim Levanon et al., “קריאת רבני השומרון” (Call of the Rabbis of Samaria), statement issued 8 Av 5786 (July/August 2026)
10. Devarim 21:1-8
11. Yerushalmi Sotah 9:6
12. Sahar Vardi and Basel Adra, “The Killer of Awdah Hathaleen Roams Free in His Village,” +972 Magazine, August 5, 2025, https://www.972mag.com/awdah-hathaleen-umm-al-khair-hunger-strike/
13. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2026/06/israel-west-bank-ethnic-cleansing 
14. Yesh Din, Data Sheet: Law Enforcement on Israeli Civilians in the West Bank, 2005–2024 (Tel Aviv: Yesh Din, 2025), LAW ENFORCEMENT ON ISRAELI CIVILIANS IN THE WEST BANK (SETTLER VIOLENCE) 
15. Mishnah Sotah 9:9
16. Mishnah Sotah 9:9-15
17. Beis haBechirah on Sotah 47a
18. Settlers in Uniform: Violence Against Palestinians by Israelis in Military Uniforms – Yesh Din
19. Ibid
20.  https://statistics.btselem.org/en/all-fatalities/by-date-of-incident?section=overall&tab=overview
21. Mahmoud Illean, Samy Magdy, and Sam Mednick, “7-Month-Old Baby Killed After Israeli Troops Open Fire on a Car, Palestinian Health Officials Say,” PBS NewsHour, June 6, 2026, 7-month-old baby killed after Israeli troops open fire on a car, Palestinian health officials say | PBS News.
22. ‘Lives turned in a second’: Family of baby Sam, shot dead by Israel, grieve
23. Hebron shooting kills Palestinian baby; IDF says troops mistook car for threat
24. See Ben Gvir to Netanyahu: ‘We’re not waiting for Europe; sovereignty is an urgent need’ | Israel National News, Katz releases all settlers in administrative detention, ties it to Palestinians’ release | The Times of Israel , and ‘Erasing anything Palestinian: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of West Bank Bedouin and herding communities’ – Amnesty International for recent examples

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