What about the Palestinian farmers? What do you mean?

I know that there are fights over land in the South Hebron Hills. First, it wasn’t in our sector, so I was less involved with the whole thing about settlers poisoning sheep. I’m talking about the settlers from Maon. They just say, “This is my land!” and they throw out anyone who’s not Jewish, okay? The army doesn’t do anything about it.

The army doesn’t do anything public? I guess. I don’t have any proof, I just assume that the whole senior command staff in the sector knows that there’s a problem. But are you supposed to deal with it? Is there is a plan to deal with the problem? No, I don’t think there is. It’s like when I was in Hebron, the settlers are like the settlers in Hebron. They throw stones and shut down the casbah, and ruin the lives of the Palestinians living there, right? And does the army do anything?

No. Right. It’s the same thing here, the army doesn’t want confrontation . . . They took control of a house, a private home where the Muasi family lived. A Palestinian home, and Israelis just took control of it. It hadn’t been abandoned, right? They just threw the family out of the house. And what did the army do? Nothing . . . What about the Palestinian family? Why didn’t the army just throw them out? It’s not like we don’t have units that can go in there . . . How would the army deal with Palestinians who were holed up in a house with weapons? They’d take down the house on top of them with a bulldozer. It’s the same thing with all the settlers in the area. A settler does something wrong, and there’s no way to enforce the law. And the settlers know it, “So what, you’re a soldier, you can’t do anything. Go get the police.”

They say that to you? Yeah. They say, “Go get the police.” And you know, you already know the police there. So you call the police, and if you report someone who’s Jewish, the police won’t come. It’s the same even with Israeli Arabs, I got an answer from the police once, “We won’t come, release them.”