Israeli settlers attacked a convoy of European diplomats near Taybeh, a largely Christian village in the occupied West Bank, on Saturday and beat a visiting French mayor, in the second harvest attack in two days to injure a foreign national. Cars from the French, Belgian and Polish missions had brought diplomats to visit the village as settlers descended to stop Palestinians gathering olives, witnesses and diplomats told AFP.
Masked settlers made aggressive statements toward the diplomats before kicking Bernard Baudoux, 78, the mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries in northern France, who was in Taybeh with the French consul general in Jerusalem to sign a goodwill cooperation agreement. Video seen by AFP showed Baudoux, wearing a sash in the French tricolour, slumped on the ground against a car. He told AFP he was hurt but did not need hospital treatment, and that the attackers were completely enraged. Other reporting from the scene said a Palestinian man needed stitches for a head injury and a woman in her seventies was assaulted, and that a window of a Belgian diplomatic vehicle was smashed.
The diplomatic responses split inside Israel itself. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said he strongly condemned the severe acts of violence by Israeli rioters. The prime minister’s office, by contrast, criticised what it called a coordinated campaign to smear Israel and the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria during the annual olive harvest, relying on sensational headlines before the full facts emerge. France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, called on Israeli authorities to arrest those responsible and to end the violence, and Belgium’s foreign minister, Maxime Prevot, said Belgium would keep pressing the European Union to impose sanctions on Israeli settlers.
The attack follows Friday’s assault at Abu Falah, covered on this site yesterday, in which settlers injured Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine during the same harvest, and an attack last week on an AFP photographer. The harvest season has become the annual flashpoint for settler violence, and this year it is running into the final days of an Israeli election campaign in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has championed settlers. With European diplomats now among the victims, the file has moved from a policing question in the West Bank to a live dispute between Israel and three EU member states.