Kristallnacht in the West Bank on Holocaust Remembrance Day
Settlers stage pogroms in the West Bank, Israel flirts with Nazis, Jewish leaders and institutions look away.
On Tuesday, Holocaust Remembrance Day, as leaders and institutions around the world commemorated the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis—and, to a lesser extent, the six million others—Jewish settlers in the West Bank marked the occasion by staging their own Kristallnacht. Or, more precisely, a Feuernacht: “Night of Fire.”
Hundreds of settlers under the protection of the IDF rampaged through three villages in Masafer Yatta, carrying out a tightly coordinated pogrom. They stole 150 head of livestock, uprooted 500 olive trees, torched homes and cars, and beat men, women, and children with clubs.
In Al-Tuban, settlers tried to burn a family alive inside a locked shed, piling wood and straw against the door and setting it on fire; one child was left wheezing from smoke inhalation. In Al-Fakhit, masked settlers clubbed 49-year-old Mohammad Abu Sabha unconscious outside his home, fracturing his skull (second video below), then attacked his family, breaking his elderly mother’s arm and ribs and striking his teenage daughter as soldiers stood by. In Al-Halawa, settlers and soldiers jointly blocked ambulances and fire trucks at gunpoint after settlers stoned them.
The attack lasted over five hours. My sources on the ground described pure terror: families barricading their doors, hiding children, then fleeing for their lives as smoke filled their homes. The only arrests made were of wounded Palestinian villagers.
The Feuernacht was not confined to Masafer Yatta. Earlier that day, masked settlers emerged from a newly erected outpost deep inside Area B to descend on Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem, attacking a family home and setting multiple vehicles ablaze. They scrawled Hebrew slogans across walls—“Judea Is Awakening”—alongside a Star of David, then hurled stones at neighboring houses, shattering windows and leaving the village littered with broken glass. Residents reported hearing live gunfire during the attack.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, the IDF launched sweeping overnight raids, arresting at least 130 people across multiple governorates and transferring them to what Israeli human rights groups describe as a “network of torture camps,” where detainees have been reduced to “walking skeletons” under National Security Minister Ben-Gvir’s policy of starvation. Israeli forces also shot a 20-year-old man dead in South Hebron and wounded several others, including a young man shot in the thigh and arrested in Tulkarm as he left his home with his sister.
In Ras Ein al-Auja—once the largest shepherding community in the West Bank—the last remaining family fled after years of escalating settler violence turned into near-daily pogroms over the past month. In 2024, Israel’s campaign of stripping the local Palestinians of their rights culminated in the unilateral nullification of their land deeds, many of which dated back to Jordanian rule. Armed, masked settlers soon surrounded the village with outposts, cut water and electricity lines, stole livestock, and vandalized homes and property, ultimately emptying the area of its roughly 800 residents.
Homes in the tiny Bedouin village of Mukhmas were burned to the ground for the third time in as many months.
My grandparents and great-grandparents, between them, survived the Russian pogroms, the Holocaust, and the Farhud in Iraq. These were the stories I grew up with, and they taught a simple lesson: recognize what’s unfolding before it’s too late, and do everything you can to stop it.
Today, as this desecration is carried out in our name—through the chillingly familiar pattern of stripping of rights, dispossession, terror, and expulsion—where are Jewish leaders and institutions?
Many of them have remained focused on the urgent issue of the day: scolding people for drawing comparisons between the Nazis and ICE, as it leads its own reign of state-backed terror, tearing families apart and executing civilians in the street.
On Sunday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said, “We have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
In response, the U.S. Holocaust Museum—which has never posted about settler violence, and certainly not about ICE—posted this:
It may be useful to know that last year, Trump announced the appointment of Siggy Flicker to the Board of Trustees of the Holocaust Memorial Council. Flicker, as you hopefully don’t know, starred in The Real Housewives of New Jersey and, confusingly, Why Am I Still Single?!
More to the point, Flicker—now a custodian of the memory of the Holocaust—is the proud stepmother of a January 6 insurrectionist, whose photos from inside the Capitol she herself posted that day. At her induction ceremony to the Holocaust Memorial Council, Flicker stood by Donald Trump and raised an Israeli flag.
On social media, when she isn’t reposting content from President Trump and the US Holocaust Museum, Flicker regularly shares conspiracy theories. She promoted QAnon content during its heyday, and more recently, after Ilhan Omar was attacked while speaking at a town hall, she circulated a post claiming the assailant was actually an actor.
But she also offers a masterclass in demonizing entire ethnic groups, begging the question of how much she knows about what led to the Holocaust. One post she shared reads, “Stop comparing ICE to Nazis. Jews were not lawbreakers.” In another, she writes, “We should be educating every single human on this earth about this evil ideology called ISLAM! Save humanity from this radical poison!!!”
Has anyone expressed outrage that someone so plainly unfit to manage even a Twitter account has been entrusted with the memory of the Holocaust?
Also on the Board of Trustees is Martin Oliner, an attorney and far-right pro-Israel activist. Last year, he penned an op-ed for The Jerusalem Post—Let Donald Trump make Gaza great again—in which he explicitly advocated for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
“Let’s not mince words here,” Oliner wrote. “The people of Gaza are collectively guilty for invading Israel, murdering, raping and kidnapping Israelis and holding them hostage…. they are fundamentally evil, and they must pay a price for their actions.”
Of forced emigration, he wrote: “If enough countries get involved, the international problem of Gaza could be solved.” Call it a final solution.
In another op-ed, Make the Holocaust Memorial Council great again—are you sensing the pattern here?—Oliner wrote that he was grateful that Trump had “begun cleaning house at the [Holocaust] museum.”
In its new form, Oliner wrote, “Its educational approach must be changed. The museum has no shortage of visitors and reaches thousands of teachers. But they are taught about hate, in general… Being indirect by talking more generally about ‘hate’ has been incredibly ineffective.” Antisemitism is the worst form of hate, he explains, and the only one that should be taught at the Holocaust Museum.
Three months later, the Holocaust Museum of LA was forced to apologize for suggesting that nobody should be genocided.
So it should come as no surprise that the Holocaust Museum, run by far-right Trump cronies, would say such things. But what about the good liberals?
Moving left, we reach Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, both-sidesing Walz’s Anne Frank remark alongside the Trump administration’s smears of Alex Pretti, while also whitewashing his murder:
Greenblatt—who has openly reoriented the Anti-Defamation League away from its broader anti-hate mission, toward a singular focus on antisemitism defined to center anti-Zionism—has never tweeted directly about ICE, nor about settler violence in the West Bank. He did, though, once turn to Twitter to announce the ADL’s intention to “correct the misguided move by Ben & Jerry’s independent leadership to pull out of areas in the West Bank.” That’s right: Greenblatt has condemned ice cream more times than he has condemned ICE.1
According to the ADL, if comparing ICE to the Nazis is wrong, then comparing Israel to the Nazis is downright antisemitic. This is from the Understanding Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism page of the ADL’s website:
For my own part, I’d suggest that if Israel and its defenders would like to see the Nazi comparisons go away, perhaps they should consider cutting ties with Nazi-friendly figures. Remember this?