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Why settler attacks corrode Israeli security, morality and world standing
- Hundreds of West Bank Palestinians have been killed by settlers or Israeli soldiers since Hamas’s October 7th 2023 attacks, and thousands have been displaced.
- The assaults have intensified since Israel and America went to war with Iran in February.
- The author, a former adviser to Shimon Peres, argues settler violence is manufacturing its own enemy while corroding Israel’s security, morality and international standing.
In school biology we learned that evolution spans generations. A mutation, by contrast, may erupt inside one lifetime. On a recent visit across the West Bank, I watched such a transformation begin. I encountered a young Palestinian — to shield him and his relatives, call him Ali — previously indifferent to politics, unaffiliated with any movement, absent from protests for national claims, untouched by arms. I encountered a person devoted entirely to making a wage and sustaining his household, now teetering toward combat, possibly even toward becoming a shahid (martyr).
Although neither his language nor his behaviour revealed any deliberate plan to shift direction, listening to him — soft-spoken, unnervingly composed — and observing the powerlessness, I could only dread what comes next in his story.
On that trip I spoke with additional people as well. It remains possible that certain details I ascribe to Ali reached me through them. Still, Ali serves simply as an allegory for developments unfolding a 40-minute drive from home.
A shepherd pushed toward the brink
He is in his late twenties, tall, fit in appearance, holding a steady gaze free of both haughtiness and deference. A person who is plain-spoken, avoiding evasion — what Israelis term tachles. As soon as he began talking, his eloquence, sharp mind and level-headedness became evident to me.
He entered the world ten months after his 13-year-old brother was fatally shot by our troops. Ali carries that brother’s name. His household occupies ancestral ground held for generations and earned — or, more accurately, formerly earned — a livelihood by tending sheep.
No Hebrew idiom captures their dwelling and environment more exactly than kivsat ha-rash — the destitute man’s solitary ewe. It stands part ruin, part tent, ringed by worn, crumbling tools. Power and water flowed — or rather, used to flow — via makeshift conduits. Yet until lately, they held onto their soil without grumbling over their harsh lot.
Then, several months back, the Israeli showed up. Furnished with a polished caravan and an SUV in the West Bank (a present from Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the state budget), he hoisted a proud blue-and-white flag, planted an “outpost” or “farm” only dozens of metres from Ali’s dwelling, and embedded himself like a hand around their neck. Since that moment, the armed “Lord of the Land” has rendered life wretched for Ali’s household in all conceivable manners.
That record includes disruption of water and power provision; stealing of livestock and possessions; habitual entries — by daylight and darkness — into their tight quarters, frightening women and youngsters; orders to tear down each “illegal” construction (in zones where permits are invariably denied to Palestinians, while Israelis breaching identical statutes, such as the adjacent Lord of the Land, encounter no enforcement). It frequently includes frightening “friendly advice” to abandon the district and depart “or else”.
The household’s dread of that individual, supported by armed Israeli agents of law and order, proves crippling. Each provocation receives a courteous response for fear it will spiral toward brutality and detention, as lately befell Ali’s younger sibling, who ventured to question why he must demolish a shed erected inside his own yard.
What former commanders saw on the ground
The West Bank excursion, among numerous undertakings launched by Major General (Res.) Mendi Or, a past Israel Defence Forces (IDF) regional commander, gathered former senior figures from Israel’s defence and diplomatic institutions. After dedicating our prime years to protecting the country, we stay briefed, linked and engaged through assorted bodies, among them Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS), an organisation of over 550 retired senior military, security-agency and foreign-service personalities to which I belong. We confronted one startling discovery: all our assumptions regarding the actions of violent settlers fade beside the facts on the terrain. Absent direct observation and testimony, one cannot entirely comprehend the significance, scale and harm of Jewish terror.
Prior to such excursions, CIS had cautioned every accountable party — inside the government, the Knesset (parliament), the IDF and the Shin Bet internal-security agency — about the perils of tolerating or promoting assaults by Jewish settlers in their drive to enlarge settlements and dominate territory well outside them. Hundreds of West Bank Palestinians have perished through settlers or Israeli soldiers since Hamas’s attacks on October 7th 2023; thousands have been displaced. The assaults have intensified still further since Israel and America went to war with Iran in February.
Disregard for those cautions has fostered a Wild West Bank of terror, pogroms, plunder and killing. Such offences represent more than individual catastrophes for immediate victims. They sap the safety of the Israeli state, its ethical core and its international standing after the Iran war.
The aftermath the settlers are counting on
I possess no means to foresee when something within Ali will break, when he might seize a gun, or whether he would enlist with Hamas or strike solo. I cannot tell whether he would kill the neighbouring Lord of the Land or an arbitrary target.
Just a single outcome strikes me as likely: the morning after whatever lies inside him erupts, the settler-intruders and their supporters will proclaim, “We told you so. They are all terrorists.”
Nimrod Novik
They will then rally behind their perverse “Zionist response” and install an Everlasting Lord of the Land upon the earth of the shahid they manufactured.
And the spiral of terror and domination will grind forward to the violent detonation. ■
Nimrod Novik, a former senior adviser to the late Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, is a distinguished fellow with the Israel Policy Forum, a member of the leadership of Commanders for Israel’s Security and a fellow with the Economic Co-operation Foundation.
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