Sowing Terror

Under cover of Israel’s war these past two years against the Hamas in Gaza, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Islamist Iran, Jewish settlers in the West Bank, using stones, sticks and, occasionally, firearms, have gradually depopulated several dozen small Arab villages and beduin encampments and struck terror in the hearts of the territory’s close to three million Arab inhabitants. Olive groves, a major Palestinian money-earner, are a favorite settlers’ target, especially in the current olive-picking season. (West Bankers report that this year’s olive crop has been the worst in decades, due both to the paucity of rain and settler violence.) Often, the Palestinian farmers or shepherds and their families try to resist the attackers but they dare not brandish knives or firearms, which would result in intervening IDF soldiers or policemen firing at them.

During the past six weeks the focus of settler attacks has been in the hill country of the West Bank, where the olive groves are concentrated. (The olive harvest is the West Bank Arabs’ major cash-earner since October 7, 2023, when Israel barred them from working in Israel proper.) But during the previous 18 months, the sporadic settler attacks have largely focused on Arab villages and beduin encampments in the Jordan Valley and the southern Hebron Hills.

During the past few weeks settle violence has seriously intensified, with multiple settler raids per night against West Bank villages in the peripheries of the territory’s main towns, while Israeli police, the General Security Service or Shin Bet (Israel’s FBI) and IDF units doing nothing, inactively looking on or occasionally assisting the raiders; indeed, they have sometimes arrested the Palestinians who were trying to resist the raiders. In announcements about the incidents, IDF spokesmen regularly define what has happened as “clashes” between Palestinians and settlers or even Arab attacks on innocent settlers.

The raiding settlers, called by most Israelis euphemistically na’arei g’va’ot (hill-country lads), routinely torch cars and homes, steal or kill cattle or sheep, and leave behind men and women, mostly Arabs but with a sprinkling of left-wing Israelis who try to shield the villagers and their trees and livestock, with broken bones and concussions. The na’arei g’va’ot see Arabs as sub-humans and Israeli Jews trying to help them as traitors. The raiders rarely shoot to kill in order to avoid fatalities that might result in real police or army intervention, arrests and prosecution. But over the past two years settlers have killed more than a dozen Palestinians. The raids are routinely called by liberal and left-wing Israelis “pogroms,” recalling Gentile assaults in Eastern Europe on Jewish communities, often by neighbors while police and soldiers looked on, though in some pogroms Tsarist troops and\or police participated in the murder, rape, beatings, pillage and destruction. The only sin the Jewish settlers have (so far) not committed, routine in the Russian pogroms (and in Arab pogroms against Jews in Palestine pre-1948), is rape.

Last Monday and Tuesday, in what appeared to be a well-coordinated campaign, dozens of settlers raided a garage and destroyed or damaged vehicles in Hawara, a large village just south of Nablus, the West Bank’s main town; attacked the village of Ramun, next to Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian National Authority; and torched three houses and several vehicles in Jab’a, a village near Bethlehem. On one wall they spray-painted criticism of the commander of IDF Central Command, Major-General Avi Bluth, the ex-paratrooper responsible for overall security in the West Bank. Bluth, a former West Bank settler, was educated in religious schools in Jerusalem and in the West Bank settlement of Ali. He recently ordered his troops to cut down many hundreds of olive trees around the West Bank village of al-Mughayyir (completing the destruction of the village’s olive groves by raiding settlers during the previous months), which in a subsequent interview he called “landscape remodeling,” after a nearby terrorist attack on settlers. A few days earlier, settlers torched a mosque and copies of the Koran at the village of Deir Istiya, spray-painting an outside wall with the defiant assertion: “We are not afraid of Avi Bluth.”

Despite the army’s routine of non-intervention and effectively turning a blind eye, the settlers see the IDF, and Bluth himself, as hampering their campaign of intimidation because soldiers sometimes show up at scenes of settler raiding inhibiting their work of intimidation. The raiders’ castigation of the army is misplaced, objectively speaking, as the army has frequently aided the raiders by simply barring Arab olive-pickers from reaching their groves or arresting the pickers. Often the raiders include people in military drab-olive dress, who are either impersonating soldiers or are themselves serving IDF soldiers, be they conscripts or reservists, and usually carry state-issued rifles. The army, police and Shin Bet have detained only a handful of attackers during the past two years, with almost all released almost immediately, and none brought to trial or convicted.

The raiders draw sustenance from the tacit support their campaign enjoys, from right-wing Messianist cabinet members, principally Bezalel Smotrich, the country’s Finance Minister (who is also the minister in the Defense Ministry in overall charge of settler affairs), and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the police minister (officially the “Minister of National Security”). For the past two years Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has declined to condemn the incessant settler violence – though last week, for the first time, apparently under pressure from Washington, Netanyahu publicly condemned the attacks - but dismissed them as the work of “a handful of extremists.”

Alongside Netanyahu, Defense Minister Israel Katz also condemned the settler violence but in the same breath declared that the government “will continue to develop and grow the settlement [enterprise] in Judea and Samaria [the official Israeli designation of the West Bank].” Katz’s hypocrisy is blatant. Within days of taking office in November 2024, Katz revoked the permission to the Shin Bet and police to place suspected settler perpetrators against Arab communities in administrative detention, meaning protracted imprisonment without trial, leave such detention in operation only against suspected Arab terrorists. Without such detentions, the Shin Bet’s division that deals with “non-Arab,” meaning Jewish, terrorists was deprived of its most effective tool of deterrence and punishment. Netanyahu’s appointment last month of ex-IDF general David Zini as the new head of the Shin Bet only rendered the problem more acute – Zini is a Messianic religious settler with eleven children who lives in the Golan Heights.

Most Israeli observers dispute the definition of “a handful of extremists,” arguing that though perhaps only “several hundred” settlers may actually be involved (probably assisted by dozens of abettors who live in Israeli proper), they enjoy the support of many thousands of West Bank settlers and could not operate without the widespread political backing. The perpetrators, who always mask their faces, are mostly drawn from the semi-legal or illegal ma’akhazim or hilltop outposts occupied by young, generally religious or ultra-religious Israelis, many of them school drop-outs and\or children of the well-established settlers in the official, government-established older “legal” settlements. (I write “legal” because, according to international law, all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are illegal. The Israeli government disputes this).

Nonetheless, the heads of the settler community who live in the “legal” large settlements, have repeatedly condemned the violence as counter-productive and injurious to the settlement enterprise. But many Israelis see these official spokesmen as at best insincere, at worst hypocritical, as they well understand that the raiding ultimately helps the enterprise by depriving Arab communities of land and resources, reducing their living space, ultimately generating emigration, which is the perpetrators’ goal. Piecemeal deprivation of land and resources, and emigration, is one face of the piecemeal ethnic cleansing which is advancing eventual Israeli annexation of the West Bank. The violent settler campaign complements the establishment and expansion of official settlements and government confiscations of West Bank Arab lands, together parts of the process of creeping annexation that has been the lot of the territory since its conquest by Israel in the June 1967 Six Day War.

And while it is not clear how many Arabs have actually departed the West Bank during the past two years, clearly thousands have been rendered homeless and landless. In a wide-ranging article in the Israeli daily Haaretz published last month, Hagar Sheizaf described what has happened in the West Bank since October 2023.

Sheizaf gives as an example Khirbert Zanuta, at the southern end of the West Bank, which before October 2023 had a population of 250. In 2021 a band of Jews established a ma’ahaz (a minuscule illegal settlement), Havat Meitarim, on a nearby hilltop. The settlers then began harassing their neighbors, first intimidating their herders and flocks, then raiding their homes. For two months the Palestinians resisted but at the end of October 2023, a few weeks after the Hamas attack on Israel of 7 October which started the current war, they gathered their belongings and left. The settlers then levelled the village and fenced in their lands. The villagers appealed to Israel’s Supreme Court which backed them. But their efforts to return were blocked by armed settlers and they gave up and the police did nothing to uphold the court’s ruling.

According to Sheizaf, more than fifty Palestinian communities – some of them with permanent housing, others with makeshift shelters and tents, were displaced by settlers in the three months following 7 October. Another 30 communities were displaced during the following year and a half. Routinely, the new neighboring settlers first asked the communities to leave, warning of or implying violence if they didn’t. Then came systematic harassment - a blocking of approach ways, the use of loudspeakers blaring music and searchlights in the middle of the night - then attacks on shepherds and farmers in the fields, then raids on the villages or encampments themselves, with theft and destruction of property and beatings. Here and there, Palestinians tried to resist and a handful were killed. Calling in the police or IDF generally achieved nothing as they sided with the raiders, who often claimed that the villagers had stolen sheep from them. The knowledge that the government would do nothing to protect them usually persuaded the villagers and beduin to decide to abandon their homes, fields and unmovable possessions. So did government decisions to declare certain tracts of land as “state land,” meaning that the “squatters” would have to evacuate. In 2024 alone the government designated 24,000 dunams (about six thousand acres) of the West Bank as “state land.” Complementing this, the government announced plans for massive housing construction in the West Bank, most prominently in “Area E1” next to the Jewish settlement of Ma’aleh Admumim, between Jerusalem and Jericho. Israeli construction in and annexation of this area would virtually separate the northern and southern halves of the West Bank, nullifying the possible establishment of a Palestinian “state” and rendering a “two-state” compromise virtually a non-starter.

Before October 7, 2023 there were 180 ma’ahazim around the West Bank. Today, with a great deal of government assistance, there are some 300. The government has built approach roads (some 140 since the October 7, many of them engineered by the IDF; and provided the new settlers with surveillance drones and heavy-duty vehicles and guard units. Many of the ma’ahazim are on the southern slopes of the Hebron Hills at the southern edge of the West Bank and on the eastern slopes of the Hills of Judea and the Hills of Samaria and in the Jordan Valley proper, in the eastern West Bank.

Many of the thousands of Palestinians recently displaced moved to temporary shelters on the outskirts of West Bank towns, such as Tubas and Ramallah, in or beside trash dumps and cemeteries. The displacement of the communities usually leads to the break-up of each community, with families eventually dispersing to different parts of the West Bank.

Unusually, Haaretz – the only Israeli media outlet that has devoted a great deal of attention to the settlers’ campaign of violence – a fortnight ago devoted an editorial calling on IDF chief of general staff Eyal Zamir to rein in the perpetrators, understanding that the police and Shin Bet are, in this respect, useless. The editorial cited the case of northern West Bank town of Beita, where 11people were injured, including Oded Yedaya, the principle of a Tel Aviv arts high school, when trying to fend off the “na’arei g’va’ot.” Yedaya, a veteran of the IDF’s most elite unit, the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit (sayeret matkal), where he served as an officer alongside Netanyahu, suffered broken cheek- and jaw-bones and broken ribs in his effort to help the assailed Arab farmers harvest olives. The newspaper called on Eyal to try soldiers who participated in the “pogroms” and detain the other perpetrators and hand them over to the police. “A chief of general staff who does not do this … is an accomplice in the crimes,” wrote Haaaretz.

According to the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, last October saw 264 attacks or raids by settlers on West Bank Arab communities or an average of eight attacks per day. The OCHA recorded 1,500 such attacks sincve the start of 2025 and “9,600” since 2006, when it started documenting them. Even if one believes that the West Bank or Judea and Samaria “belongs” to the Jews and should eventually be annexed by Israel, this campaign of harassment, pillage, and murder is certainly one of the most shameful episodes in Israel’s history.