How Settler Violence Wounds Israel
6 min read
Last Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces announced that violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians was causing “enormous damage to security in the West Bank.” A week earlier, Ronen Bar, the head of Shabak, the country’s internal-security agency, sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that settler violence leads to “chaos and loss of control; the damage to Israel is indescribable.” Bar added that the Israeli police has been helpless to stop the attacks, if not secretly supportive of them.
Just yesterday, a Turkish American woman was shot dead by the Israeli military while protesting at a West Bank settlement. But most of the West Bank violence is of a different nature, involving assaults by settlers on Palestinian civilians. July and August saw a terrible spate of these incidents.
A group of off-duty reservists from a settlement shot and killed a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem. Settlers attacked Palestinians, foreigners, and Israelis in the village of Kusra; shot a Palestinian and threw stones at a pizzeria in Hawara; burned fields and threw stones in the village of Rujib; attacked Palestinians with batons in the village of Susya; threw stones and burned the car of four Bedouin Israeli women and a baby in the settlement of Givat Ronen; and rampaged through the village of Jit, shooting a Palestinian dead.
These are acts of terror, meant to scare people and wreak havoc. They are not part of any military operation, even though in some cases, IDF soldiers have been present and stood by. And few such incidents tend to capture the attention of the mainstream Israeli news media, let alone the security forces.
The episodes in Jit and Givat Ronen were exceptions. In Jit, where dozens of masked settlers burned cars, vandalized property, and attacked residents, reserve soldiers on the scene did nothing to stop them. But Israeli police and Shabak forces have since arrested four settlers—likely because the White House called for the criminals to be held to account, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, posted on X that he was “appalled” by the settlers’ violence. In Givat Ronen, the four women who accidentally drove into the settlement, only to come under a hail of stones, tear gas, window smashing, and death threats, were from Rahat, a Bedouin village in the south of Israel. Had the women been run-of-the-mill West Bank Palestinians, as the settlers assumed, rather than Israeli citizens, their story might well have gone unreported.
Settler violence against Palestinians is certainly not a new story. When I researched my novel The Hilltop, published in the U.S. in 2014, I heard about and even witnessed such acts: Settlers physically assaulted Palestinians, burned their olive trees, vandalized their property. But the past year has seen a dramatic increase in the number of attacks.
The chaos of war may be one reason for this. The settlers see the level of aggression that the state is employing against Palestinians in Gaza. Perhaps motivated by their own feelings of humiliation and desire for revenge after the Hamas attack of October 7, they take advantage of the war footing to employ similar force and brutality against Palestinians in the West Bank, knowing that the world’s attention is fixed on other theaters.
But perhaps the more important factor is that the Israeli establishment is supporting settler violence to an entirely new degree. Not only are the IDF or police failing to stop the attacks, but members of the Knesset openly praise and legitimize them. One such politician, Limor Son Har-Melech, suggested that the assault on the Bedouin women was justified because it “could have been a case of espionage.” Netanyahu’s right-wing minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, presides over the national police force and is particularly supportive of the settler movement. His subordinates seem to understand, even when not getting direct instructions, that they are not to stand in the way of rampaging settlers. The head of Shabak intimated as much in his letter—and Ben-Gvir has since called for his dismissal.
Foreign governments, amazingly, have been the ones to step into this vacuum of law enforcement and governance. Since the beginning of the year, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan have placed financial sanctions on individual settlers, as well as particular outposts and right-wing organizations. Such penalties aren’t game changers, but they do hamper the ability of those sanctioned to carry on their regular activities.
Adam Tsachi is a film scholar from the settlement of Tekoa whom I befriended during my Hilltop research. I asked him via WhatsApp what he made of the recent wave of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. He responded:
I deeply oppose this behavior and I can say that the absolute majority of settlers I know—and I know many—are opposed and shocked by it very much. The attackers are a violent handful who do not represent in any way the majority. And it is terrible. First and foremost, they hurt innocent people. Then they hurt us, the settlement movement, discrediting and demonizing it. Finally, they harm the state of Israel.
He defined stopping the violence as a “critical national mission” and lamented that the government seemed to lack the necessary enforcement mechanisms. And he sent me links to statements by settler leaders and op-eds in right-wing newspapers expressing similar sentiments.
I believe in Tsachi’s honesty, and I believe him when he says that some others in the settlements also think like him. But when I followed the links he sent me, I found the statements and op-eds from settler leaders condemning the violence very general and lacking in context. One portrayed the instigators as “dropout youths from all over the country,” as though these weeds had not grown in their own garden; others claimed that the altercations had been started by Palestinians. I was reminded of the time when an extremist with ties to settlers assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995: No real self-reflection or regret emanated from the movement that had produced that crime. Here again was what felt like a rushed, frightened effort to cut losses after a line had been crossed.
Settler violence is an emanation of the doctrine of Jewish superiority, which to my mind is disgusting and shameful, a racist ideology as bad as any in history. The manifestations of this worldview on the ground must be crushed forcefully and quickly. But the Israeli establishment has leaned the other way: The escalation of violence in the West Bank over the past year is the result not of random acts but of a government that has encouraged it and can count the results among its disastrous failures.
I don’t think that Israel’s politics will remain like this forever. This government is an anomaly that will one day come to an end. But settler violence has already inflicted enormous damage: to innocent lives and property, to the future of coexistence, to Israel’s legitimacy and security, and to the quiet endeavor to reach agreements that might end the latest cycle of war. In the absence of principled enforcement, we will need to rely on the continued help of foreign governments, and to strengthen our resistance inside Israel.
