Following a meeting between state prosecutors and the police, it was decided on Thursday that charges cannot be filed against the “hilltop youth” arrested for clashing with Israeli soldiers in the West Bank last Shabbat.

The prosecution concluded that the evidence presented is insufficient to indict the teenagers and does not support the IDF battalion commander’s narrative of the incidents in question.

After the publication of a video from the time of the incident, the battalion commander was summoned to the police station for further testimony.

Following a consultation Wednesday night between a special investigation team and the Jerusalem district prosecutor’s office, it was decided that the two remaining teenagers in custody should be released.

The teens were represented by Attorney Daniel Shimshilashvili of the Ḥoneinu legal aid organization.

“Our claims, which we made from the very first day, were proven to be true,” Shimshilashvili said.

“I suggest that all those who accused and published false claims about the youth come and apologize to them for the great injustice done to them. These are good boys, most of whom are set to serve in the IDF.”

For much of the past week, Israel’s news cycle has been dominated by efforts to incite the public against the hilltop youth subculture.

This came following a series of incidents, including one last Friday night in which a 14-year-old Jew was shot by Israeli security forces.

The accounts of the incident provided by the soldiers and teenagers involved sharply contradicted.

The army claimed that the youths had attacked soldiers in order to resist an evacuation from what had become a closed military zone.

The teens, by contrast, said that the battalion commander initiated the violence, used unnecessary force, and repeatedly threatened to kill them. They also reported that security forces fired live ammunition in their direction and even arrested a medic for attempting to treat the boy who had been shot.

While both sides released videos to corroborate their claims, the IDF video was less convincing. Yet the local and foreign press had carefully framed the incidents as a phenomenon of “Jewish terrorists” violently targeting Israeli soldiers.

Public figures demanded harsh crackdowns on the entire hilltop youth subculture. Nearly every government minister and lawmaker across the spectrum condemned the teenagers and called for swift action against them.

Journalists spent the week arguing that these kids are a threat to the state – to the entire Zionist enterprise – and that they should be treated no different from Palestinian threats.

Even national-religious politicians, municipal leaders of West Bank Jewish communities, and rightist social media influencers had come out against the teenagers.

But given the fact that a 14-year-old boy was wounded by live gunfire, shouldn’t the primary instinct have been to scrutinize the army’s version of the incident more closely?

Why did everyone blindly accept the army’s narrative and rush to condemn the teenagers?

Are we concerned that questioning the IDF’s account of such incidents would open the door to us challenging its credibility on other fronts?

Or could it be that some have an interest in inciting Israeli society against the hilltop youth (or even West Bank Jews more broadly)?

We need to be honest with ourselves.

Had something similar happened to a youth at an anti-government protest on Kaplan street in Tel Aviv, we would justifiably see round-the-clock press coverage and the burden of proof would be on the security forces.

But when a Palestinian teenager is injured in comparable circumstances, the overwhelming majority of Israelis side with our soldiers and assume that the teen had it coming.

This is largely due to the fact that Palestinians are perceived by the overwhelming majority of Israeli society to be part of an enemy collective that threatens our existence. Whether right or wrong, the fact that Jews and Palestinians have been locked in conflict for over a century makes this understandable.

But when it comes to the hilltop youth, could it be argued that Israelis view – or are being conditioned to view – this group more similarly to Palestinians than to politically active Israeli teens in Tel Aviv?

If so, why?

We shouldn’t blindly accept the claims of the hilltop youth as true. We shouldn’t blindly accept the claims of the army as true. But the proper response to these incidents shouldn’t have been incitement against an entire subculture but rather calls for a professional investigation to uncover the truth.

The 14-year-old who had been shot was released from the hospital to his home on Thursday. The bullet that had been removed from his body was transferred to Israel’s military police, which has now opened an investigation into the actions of the battalion commander. But this is barely receiving a fraction of the media attention that had been given to the story when it was about “Jewish terrorists” attacking the IDF.

The way in which the incidents of the past week were approached by the army, the media, and political figures across the spectrum is dangerously irresponsible. It can only serve to increase tensions and further reinforce the image many members of this subculture have of themselves as an oppressed group in Israeli society.

In fact, one could be forgiven for suspecting that at least certain public figures are less concerned with calming tensions than with weaponizing the incidents to incite the Israeli public against the youth.

Are the ‘Hilltop Youth’ a Threat to Zionism?

It’s no secret that Israel’s dominant institutions often target and vilify the hilltop youth.

This romantic counterculture of idealistic teenagers living organic Jewish lives off the grid in the mountains where our people’s early history unfolded is often presented to the public as a prime example of society drifting too far from the values of the state’s Zionist founders.

When it comes to Israel’s broader cultural conflict between forces of Western liberalism and a resurgent ancient Jewish nationalism (for lack of a better term), our elites rarely miss an opportunity to use the hilltop youth as a caricature to delegitimize the entire camp seeking to move Israeli society in a more deeply Jewish direction.

These teenagers represent a Jewish national consciousness far deeper and more authentic to the region than Zionism was able to produce and they serve as a clear example of Israel’s more tribalist and traditional forces gaining strength at the expense of the state’s westernized ruling class.

Most Israelis, including the national-religious sector, are principally opposed to extra-legal Jewish violence – against Palestinians and even more so against our own soldiers. But it’s also important to understand that because these kids have a tenuous relationship with the state and the army, many see themselves as responsible for their own security and experience themselves as punching up when attacking Palestinians (especially when the attack is a response to Palestinian violence).

The hilltop youth isn’t a monolithic group.

Some are troubled thrill seekers engaging in a dangerous game of adventurism. Others are impatient idealists rushing to advance the Jewish liberation struggle beyond its stagnated Zionist stage. And others still simply seek to live as authentic a Jewish life as possible in the mountains where our early history took place.

It’s generally unwise to cause an ideological group to feel like a persecuted minority. The abusive behavior of Israeli security forces toward the hilltop youth will likely only harden and further radicalize Judean teenagers. Not only the extreme cases of youth being imprisoned without charges and “aggressively interrogated” but also the thousands of other examples of young people seeing themselves as living under a system in which they have no democratic protections.

Are these youth a threat to the Zionist vision of Israel as a liberal outpost of Western civilization? Probably. But societies evolve. And no matter how much the press demonizes them or how much our security forces try to intimidate or hurt them, the hilltop youth subculture is likely to continue growing.

Model for a Postcolonial Jewish Identity?

If we were to examine all of the different Jewish communities in Israel and in the Diaspora today, we could argue that the hardline national-religious sector in the Judea and Samaria regions – with all of its various flavors – is the group that most closely resembles precolonial Judean society prior to the Roman destruction of our civilization.

If we were to take this examination a step deeper, we could argue that the hilltop youth – the young West Bank Jews who herd livestock and farm the land and refuse to live according to modern nation-state or settler-colonial structures and attempt to take responsibility for their own security needs (with mixed results) – have built communities and a way of life that appears to be an almost caricaturish recreation of ancient Israelite society.

It’s important to note that the hilltop youth isn’t the only model for what a decolonized Jewish identity can look like. And the goal of Jewish decolonization work shouldn’t be to become romanticized caricatures of our precolonial ancestors.

But it’s nevertheless easy to argue that this subculture has reached a more advanced stage of decolonization than any other group in the Jewish world.

The Solution

The “tribe” of Israeli society that the hilltop youth represent has tremendous revolutionary potential. But it needs to be properly channeled in such a way that advances Jewish national interests..

The best way to put a stop to the violence is not to make that violence a pretext for the persecution or suppression of the entire subculture, but rather to change the roles Palestinians and the Israeli state play in their narrative.

As counterintuitive as it might seem, the “Jewish extremists” – including the hilltop youth – may represent the sector of Israeli society most capable of successfully reconciling with our neighbors.

First of all, because they’re not coming with a colonial mentality. They don’t see themselves as “civilized westerners” fighting “violent savages” but rather as a local tribe engaged in conflict with other tribes.

When it comes to the Jews and Jewish communities in the territories, there are two spectrums. One is the extent to which they live according to settler-colonial structures. The other is how violent they are.

These spectrums are actually inverted. The most violent are the least “settler” and those actually living as “settlers” here are generally the least violent.

Unlike the Jews living in walled communities with full military protection, the hilltop youth live without walls and fences. They distrust the army and they see themselves as responsible to deter any security threats on their own. While at present, this may lead to more acts of extra-legal Jewish violence, in the longterm it could lead to reconciliation and a healthier relationship dynamic than the Zionists could ever achieve.

In addition to the fact that they share many core values and cultural norms with their Palestinian neighbors, the hilltop youth also share many experiences of oppression. Police violence, demonization in the Israeli press, administrative detention, aggressive interrogations, and politically motivated house demolitions.

The “tribe of Shimon” is the sector of Israeli society best equipped to change our relationship with the Palestinians – and the broader Arab world – for the better. It’s therefore in our interest to make them Israel’s face to our neighbors in the region. The challenge will be figuring out how to most effectively put them in this role.

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