• 'The moment may have arrived when settlers are trying to kill Jews. We've been saying for a long time that it would come to this,’ Yedaya says

ISTANBUL

Violence by illegal Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank may have reached a point where “settlers are trying to kill Jews,” a Jewish political activist said after surviving a life-threatening attack.

Oded Yedaya, a 76-year-old Jewish artist, photographer, educator, and political activist, was critically injured when an illegal Israeli settler deliberately threw a large stone at his head during a protest in the occupied West Bank in early November.

As Yedaya was trying to capture a “proper shot” of the stone throwing by illegal settlers, one stone hit him on the cheek, carving a five-centimeter-deep wound under his eye and fracturing the bone.

Photos showing his face, body, and clothes soaked in blood quickly went viral on social media.

“Just as we sacrifice our bodies in protest, so I sacrificed my privacy for whatever could help and shock. From the first, I allowed anybody who wanted to take my picture. You can never know what might help these poor Palestinians,” Yedaya told Haaretz newspaper.

Recalling the moment of the attack, he said for sure the settler “aimed for my head deliberately.”

"The first stone hit my butt, but then he threw again, saw that he'd hit me, and ran off. He was hooded, so I don't know who he was.” Yedaya’s wife, Ronit, also said the settler intended to kill her husband.

“If the stone had hit him just a little higher, or from behind, it would have killed him,” she said.

“But yes—definitely—the moment may have arrived when settlers are trying to kill Jews. We've been saying for a long time that it would come to this,” Yedaya said.

Palestinian aid

After the attack, Palestinians took the Jewish activist to a clinic in Beita town in the northern West Bank, from where he was later taken to Israeli Beilinson Hospital in the central Petah Tikva district.

“I was bleeding the entire time. It only stopped once they stitched me up,” he said.

Now, Yedaya has difficulty eating and standing up. Doctors say he may even need surgery.

As a devoted participant in the West Bank protests for over 20 years, this was not the first time that Yedaya was injured by a settler while documenting and photographing the demonstrations.

This time, he was an easy target for predatory settlers.

Yedaya, through his art, seeks to shed light on the decades-long Israeli occupation and settler violence against Palestinians. He had four exhibitions on West Bank protest photography.

Stop settler violence

Before being admitted to the School of Visual Arts in New York, Yedaya served as the second-in-command for Yonatan Netanyahu, the brother of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in 1973. The premier was also a close friend of his during his military service.

Now, he calls on his friend and comrade, both in the media and on the ground, to act against the settler violence that he himself had suffered.

“The situation has deteriorated badly in the past couple of years. The number of outposts has grown, and settlers have essentially been given a license to use violence; the army intervenes less and less. They have ATVs and can enter any Palestinian home,” he said.

“They believe they have permission to beat and kill,” even Israelis and Jews who confront them, he said. “This time, they came close.”
Yedaya believes that the latest escalation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip may lead to a solution.

“But we must fight for this to happen,” he said. “It's a pity that so much suffering should be visited on so many people."

Since October 2023, the Jewish activist has set aside a day in the week to sleep in a Palestinian home.

“In the middle of the night, you're woken because someone is trying to expel the Palestinians—then I immediately call the police, and that prevents a certain amount of harassment,” he said.

“All the settlements must be removed except for the blocs that were already agreed on by (former Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert and by the Geneva Initiative. And the crimes must stop. We are committing crimes over which black flags are being waved,” he said.

According to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, illegal Israeli settlers have carried out more than 7,000 attacks against Palestinians and their property in the West Bank since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023.

More than 1,073 Palestinians have since been killed, and 10,700 others injured in attacks by the army and illegal settlers, Palestinian figures showed.

In a landmark opinion last July, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.