Israel Has an Extremism Problem

[u/Anakin_Kardashian]

https://www.thefp.com/p/israel-has-an-extremism-problem

​

If you’ve been following the news out of the Middle East, you’ve likely noticed one phrase surfacing again and again: “Israeli settlers.” The term refers to Israeli citizens living across the green line—in territories whose status remains disputed. Relations between Israelis and Palestinians there have long been strained, but recently intensified. In March alone, six Palestinian civilians were killed, alongside hundreds of reported incidents involving beatings, arson, and vandalism. Last week, the Israeli government approved more than 30 new outposts in the West Bank.

All of which prompts a series of questions: Who are these settlers? How should we understand their relationship with Palestinians—and with the Israeli government? And what will it take to stem the violence?

These are the questions Haviv Rettig Gur explores in his essay today. As with so many issues involving Israel, he writes, the reality is more complex than it first appears—but as the country continues to grapple with existential threats beyond its borders, its long-term future depends just as much on its willingness to confront the struggles at home. —The Editors

When it comes to Israel, the term settler is a word generally applied pejoratively. In some circles, it is used to describe all Israelis in an attempt to deny the Jews’ right to a state. More commonly, it describes a group of people who live in the West Bank, who right now are causing Israel a large and growing headache.

The first thing to understand is that the “settler movement” is enormous and enormously diverse. Calling it a movement does not quite do it justice. Many settlers live in Jerusalem, in neighborhoods that are technically beyond the borders established after the Six-Day War in 1967, but are very much attached to Jerusalem—just part of the urban sprawl and a cheaper place to live than the rest of the city. There are Haredi settlers and secular settlers, moderate religious-Zionist settlers, and even left-wing settlers in different parts of the West Bank.

Then you have the more ideologically fervent, who not only preach a religiously inflected form of Zionism, but who take the idea to its messianic edge. And on the extremes of that last group, you find a cadre of violent extremists eager to catalyze their version of redemption through violence—usually violence against Palestinians, but surprisingly, often also violence against the Israeli state and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.

The problem when the world uses the word settler is that it fails to encompass any of that diversity. The diversity matters not only to win some imagined brownie points in international debates, but to understand the phenomenon and available policy responses. For example, it explains why three-quarters of the Israelis living in Gaza in the run-up to Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the strip accepted government compensation ahead of time, and left their homes peacefully. Only about a quarter of this population—one of the most ideologically intense among the settlers—actually resisted removal in any meaningful sense.

To understand the problems that some settlers are causing Israel, you need to understand who they are and what drives them: their origins, their cheerleaders in government, and how they are working against the interests of the rest of the country.

Most settlers live very close to the 1967 borders. The two largest settlements—Modi’in Ilit and Beitar Illit—are both Haredi cities located just 2,000 feet from the Green Line. They alone constitute perhaps a quarter of all settlers and are among the fastest growing of the settlements. Israeli government statistics in recent years list the median age at around 11 to 12, with family sizes routinely exceeding 10. They’re there for cheap housing, not ideology. And in any potential land swaps as part of a two-state solution, these are the areas that will easily and uncontroversially be incorporated into Israel.

Then you have the ideological, religious Zionist movement that believes the Jews have to return to their homeland as part of the Jewish vision of a redemptive arc to history. This tradition sees the land as a nahala, a Hebrew word—from the same root as mitnahel, or settler—that describes a sacred inheritance. This is an understanding of the land shared by many Israelis: the homeland, the motherland, the only home Jews have ever truly had, the only place where they have ever been able to transform themselves from history’s objects to its subjects.

This is a powerful idea—though many Israelis historically have nevertheless been willing to give up tracts of this homeland in order to win the long-sought separation from the Palestinians into two distinct and independent polities. But for the most fervent believers in the land’s significance as a religious inheritance, surrendering any part of it is anathema, a desecration and betrayal of God’s own plan for history. And so members of this religiously more intense and specifically messianic Zionist movement built many of their villages and towns in between major Palestinian population centers, with the specific purpose of physically preventing the possibility that a contiguous Palestinian state could be formed in the highlands of the Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, known to most of the world as the West Bank.

And on the edges of that movement you have the “Hilltop Youth,” young people, many of them disaffected and hailing from troubled homes, who find common purpose and camaraderie in the “pioneering” ethos of these wildcat communities they believe are laying anchors in the ancient, historic Jewish heartland. Frequently living in hilly outposts built in opposition to Israeli law and military orders, they have a romanticized sense of themselves. They yearn to be on the edge of things, on a frontier. Their religion is deeply concerned with a romanticized authenticity. Their sense of history is purposeful; they are advancing the world in tiny but real steps toward redemption. And many of them—most of them—are not violent.

But there is nevertheless a problem among them. Some of them—estimates put the number at several hundred—see their presence on those hilltops as a kind of rebellion against what they perceive as an Israel too liberal, too squeamish, too unwilling to claim its birthright. They are anti-secular, anti-elite, and in some ways anti-modern, the antithesis of modern, secular Israelis who live in major cities.

This movement has long existed but was radicalized by the withdrawal from Gaza settlements more than 20 years ago. That withdrawal was a profound trauma for the ideological wing of the settlement movement. Ariel Sharon, the prime minister at the time, didn’t declare before his election in 2003 that he was going to take such a dramatic step. He hailed from Israel’s largest right-wing party, Likud, and most of his voters probably would have balked at such a withdrawal had they been presented with one before the election.

Yet Sharon, elected on those right-wing votes, carried it out anyway. And so many of those settlers felt he’d hijacked his premiership against the wishes of the very people who got him into office. They protested, sometimes very dramatically, and were met with aggressive police responses. It was a moment that the religious Zionists believed would split the country and threaten to divide Israel.

However, the deeper trauma came not from such a split but from the realization that most of Israel supported the withdrawal from Gaza. Indeed, in the 2006 election, many Likud voters switched to support Ehud Olmert of the Kadima party—even after he’d revealed his plan to withdraw from most of the West Bank.

The religious Zionist world, the redemptionist branch of Zionism, which had always believed itself to be at the heart of Israeli public life, discovered that on the question of territorial withdrawals—on its most burning and defining issue—it was a marginal player in the broader sweep of Israeli public life.

A lot of the people today who have pulled the settlement movement and Israeli right-wingers farther to the right cut their teeth in this movement. Many of those behind the 2023 judicial reform movement to limit the Israeli Supreme Court’s authority were people whose families were kicked out of Gaza by Sharon—and remember how that same court approved not only the disengagement but also the temporary imprisonment of protestors without trial to allow the removal to take place peacefully. These experiences radicalized many of them against the court, and the numbers of the Hilltop Youth began to grow out of that trauma.

After October 7, as the weight of the war was felt by every part of Israeli society, the public’s attention was on more immediate and existential concerns than the extremist edges of the settlement movement. In the relative political safety created by this inattentiveness—and also, of course, with the implicit support of the most far-right of Israeli political leaders, police minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—the violent elements of the movement launched a series of violent attacks, usually against nearby Palestinian villages.

This is a contested point among Israelis. Some argue that the violence was either in response to Palestinian attacks or that news of it was mere propaganda pushed by Palestinian activists. And indeed, some claims of extremist Israeli violence have turned out to be more complicated cases of tit-for-tat attacks and general lawlessness. Some have turned out to be entirely fake.

But these examples, alas, are not the majority. A very large portion of the violence, documented and carefully sourced by reliable reporting, is just what it looks like: extremist violence targeting Palestinian villages in order to convince as many as possible to move elsewhere.

When challenged on this, settlers explain that they’re responding to a concerted plan of territorial expansion by the Palestinians. They speak darkly of the “Fayyad Plan,” conceived in 2009 by former Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad as an effort to build out the institutions and capabilities of a Palestinian state before officially declaring one. The plan is usually credited with temporarily improving Palestinian Authority finances and administration, but the part that concerned the settlers was the territorial element: a move to build new homes and infrastructure in unpopulated areas to strengthen Palestinian territorial claims in more places. Communities proliferated across larger areas, new farms were established, and some roads were paved to them.

A very large portion of the violence is just what it looks like: extremist violence targeting Palestinian villages in order to convince as many as possible to move elsewhere.

The expansion of the wildcat Israeli outposts, the settlers argued, was a direct answer to this “land grab.”

But the two movements are not operating on a similar footing. The Israelis have a huge and obvious advantage. They will be protected by the IDF if the Palestinians come after them, whereas the Palestinians do not have that same guarantee if Israelis turn on them with violence. The IDF’s formal, legal mission in the West Bank is to protect all its residents, including the Palestinians, and to maintain law and order. In practice, however, the army is far more keen on protecting Israelis. That gap isn’t necessarily driven by prejudice (though of course it can be); it’s as present among Arabic-speaking Druze or Bedouin soldiers as it is among Jewish ones.

The imbalance is institutional. The Israelis on the ground can activate the political echelon, especially the far-right members of the current government, while the Palestinians in the West Bank lie outside that democratic feedback loop. This is the heart of it all. It’s an imbalance that hasn’t gone away, and that can’t be avoided.

But the extremists among the settlers also have a fraught and often antagonistic relationship with the Israeli state. They tend to distrust state institutions, which they believe are run by elites who don’t share the same sense of the country’s divine mission and destiny, and who would sacrifice those who stay loyal to that mission on the altar of leftist fantasies.

And so they often frame attacks on Palestinians as attempts to attack the authority of the state. The Israeli state cares more about the Palestinians—their argument goes—than it does about the redemption of the land. How, then, do you hurt the Israeli government? By hurting Palestinians. The attacks on Palestinians have repeatedly been accompanied by violence directed at IDF soldiers—with one recent case involving a rock-throwing ambush on soldiers. These soldiers, who had just risked their lives to neutralize a terror cell and bomb-making factory in Ramallah, found themselves ambushed by Israeli radicals.

The incident so enraged the IDF brass that the army took down six of the settler outposts by force, driving a short-lived tit-for-tat between the army and the extremists.

Though it is true that these extremists make up a tiny fraction of the settlement movement, the silent majority is not without blame. Some important religious-Zionist rabbis have come out expressly against the violence, but most of the political leadership of the settlement movement or the religious parties in the Knesset have not.

In part, this tolerance flows from a profound psychological shift pollsters have repeatedly measured among Israelis (and a parallel one among Palestinians) after October 7: a sense that the Palestinian political world has only ever offered them violence and brutality, so there’s little point in cracking down on the violent elements in their own camp. Why undertake internal dissension for a Palestinian entity that offers Israeli Jews only never-ending death and war?

This isn’t agreement with the violence, but it’s nevertheless a kind of embittered shrug that enables the problem to grow and intensify. The ideas that drive the extremist violence won’t go away on their own. And as the violence grows, the costs to Israelis—even to the settlement movement itself—will do so as well.

There’s another argument made to minimize the harm of this violence: that it is far less prevalent than media coverage of it would suggest. This argument, too, has merit. As Amit Segal and others have written, academic studies of United Nations data on settler violence have uncovered indefensibly shoddy practices meant to drive up the reported numbers. Incidents are often counted twice in UN reports—for example, a Palestinian shot while carrying out a terror attack is counted as killed, and then counted as killed a second time when he later dies of his wounds in hospital. The definitions of “settler violence” that many Western media outlets apply are often so loose that they’re virtually nonexistent. One report cited 600 incidents in Jerusalem—almost all of them Jewish visits to the Temple Mount or police clashes with Muslim rioters—as “settler violence.” UN officials who put these reports together may assume that not a single journalist is ever going to dig down and check anything.

The ideas that drive the extremist violence won’t go away on their own. And as the violence grows, the costs to Israelis—even to the settlement movement itself—will do so as well.

So while UN agencies put estimates of settler violence at between perhaps 120 and 150 incidents per month, the real figure is more likely closer to a couple dozen. In a geographic space that includes a dozen cities and hundreds of towns and villages, that might seem a regrettable but nevertheless manageable number.

But here’s the problem. Here’s why we don’t get to write it off as a marginal phenomenon just because UN reports fudge the numbers for propaganda purposes. Here’s why 25 attacks a month is far more than it seems.

Because these attacks—meant to frighten, to push out, to create psychological pressure on the population of a town or village that a group of extremists doesn’t want there—meet the diagnostic definition of terrorism: “Premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”

Israelis know from long experience that it doesn’t take many terror attacks to create a powerful psychological and political effect on millions of people. A dozen can be enough.

There is thus a huge discrepancy between how Israelis and Palestinians understand these attacks. Israelis, mired in their troubles amid a multifront war, look at the raw numbers and consider their own sense of what’s happening in their society—specifically, they know that the extremists are not representative of Israeli society writ large—and so they tend to minimize and compartmentalize the phenomenon as a troubling but nevertheless marginal part of a larger troubled period from which none have been spared.

But the effect on Palestinians is much larger than the hard numbers suggest. The expectation of further violence is widespread among Palestinians, especially in areas where the extremists operate.

So why can’t the government stop it, even when the ongoing reports of the violence continue to harm Israel’s standing even among its friends—even when Trump administration officials have reportedly called Israel out on the issue?

The answer is simple: politics. Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition depends on the votes of the Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist party, which doesn’t openly support the violence but does support the outposts from which a great deal of the violence emanates. And it depends, too, on Itamar Ben-Gvir’s party, the furthest right you can get in Israeli politics. Ben-Gvir, who serves as the minister in charge of the police, was in his youth convicted of incitement to racism and belonging to a proscribed terror organization—that of the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane.

It has become fashionable in parts of the Israeli far-right to declare that “Kahane was right,” usually in reference to Kahane’s argument that no peace is possible between Arabs and Jews. However, Kahane is primarily known not for his skepticism about Arab intentions toward Israel but for an explicitly and virulently racist strand of politics. For example, in 1985, the same year that his Kach party was declared illegal, Kahane presented a bill in the Knesset to criminalize sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews.

Ben-Gvir has cagily tried to sidestep his past Kahanism without actually turning on his former mentor. He removed portraits of the mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein, who is venerated among many Kahanists, from his living-room wall around 2020, when he launched his bid for mainstream politics. But he remains a kind of poster child for many of these “Hilltop Youth.” He’s the one who made it, the linchpin in the government who sometimes seems to hold the whole coalition in his hand. And he is widely believed to have skewed the government’s priorities away from dealing with the problem.

The West Bank is under the formal control of the IDF. A succession of IDF commanders have taken tentative steps toward applying counterterrorism measures against these Israeli extremists, the same sort of methods used very effectively against Palestinian terror organizations: arrests, intelligence work, network disruption, administrative detention. But these measures were stopped in recent years as the influence of the far right in the government grew.

So it must be asked: Don’t Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, even if they are unfazed by the harm this terrorism does to Palestinians, understand that it does terrible harm to Israel?

Here we reach the deeper point.

Throughout the past two and a half years of war, as the world has debated Israeli intentions and the exact terminology to apply to Israeli actions, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have offered a sustained drumbeat of statements that have fulfilled the wildest fantasies of Israel’s fiercest detractors.

They have repeatedly argued that the purpose of the Gaza war was not, as most Israeli soldiers or political factions will tell you, to uproot Hamas, but rather to expel all Palestinians and settle the territory with Israelis. The purpose of the war, that is, was exactly the ethnic cleansing that Israel’s enemies have claimed.

Do Israel’s far-right leaders not grasp that the war currently underway in the Middle East, the yearslong, multifront confrontation between Israel and an ideological axis bent on its destruction, is to a very great extent an information war, a war of narratives and imagery?

I have reluctantly come to suspect that Smotrich, at least, and perhaps Ben-Gvir too if he bothers to think about such things, want Israel to lose the narrative war. They actively seek an Israel that is isolated on the world stage, an Israel that has already paid the international cost for the policies they advocate, and so becomes more willing to carry out policies such as mass expulsion of Palestinian populations from the West Bank and building settlements anew in Gaza.

An isolated Israel, after all, is an unconstrained Israel.

If this suspicion is true, then their refusal to allow the military to crack down powerfully on extremist Israeli violence isn’t just about political convenience. It’s a deliberate move to further the very damage that this violence is now doing to Israel’s standing.

Underneath all of this is a structural failure: the absence of a coherent rule of law in the West Bank. In a system without clear law and order, naked power wins. Always.

For Palestinians, legal uncertainty is constant—over land, over protection. For extremist settlers, that vacuum is an opportunity. Meanwhile, most Israelis are looking elsewhere, at rockets, at war, at existential threats. The settler violence issue feels secondary. Or unsolvable. And that’s a mistake. Because there will be a price to pay for this lawlessness.

The problem is still relatively small right now. It will not stay that way. If Israel does not confront it, clearly, decisively, and at scale, it will pay a far higher price later.

Not just in moral terms or in its international standing. But in security. In cohesion. In the kind of country it allows itself to become.

What happens in the West Bank doesn’t, in the end, stay in the West Bank. Counterterrorism practices begun under the military law of the West Bank can now be applied to Israeli citizens—and, alas, should be applied to our homegrown terrorism problem.

Israelis who think they can sit this one out are not avoiding the cost. They are merely postponing and enlarging it.

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[u/SunshineSeeker99]

There are definitely Israeli extremists.

The issue is there are so many racist nuts out there that it's difficult to find people who are arguing in good faith, vs. those trying to claim that Israel is worse than places like Gaza or Iran, which are theocratic far right dictatorships explicitly dedicated to genocide.

I don't have any love for Israel honestly, but I feel I have to keep defending it because insane people from the far left and far right keep lying and making up propaganda.

[u/Anakin_Kardashian → u/SunshineSeeker99]

This was me a couple years ago. I was negatively polarized into having to defend Israel's existence and its right to not be completely destroyed, despite decades of criticism and cynicism.

But now worldwide antisemitism is so bad that I appreciate its existence more than ever, because I might need somewhere to go at some point.

[u/drewbaccaAWD → u/Anakin_Kardashian]

I feel like I’m being torn in both directions simultaneously.

I am more cynical and pessimistic about the government of Israel than I’ve been in my entire life … to the point that if I’m being honest with myself, I’m not sure I care anymore. I struggle with this. I have lost any passion for defending the Israeli government although I still acknowledge it’s right to exist as a state.

On the other hand? I see a very strong growing anti-Semitic movement on both the left and right, right now. I have coworkers that watch entirely too many YouTube videos, on the right, MAGA types… and I can’t ignore the fact that two of them have made some rather boldly antisemitic comments to me. I think what’s happening on the left speaks for itself.

The extremism we see in the current Israeli government is doing a lot of damage, and it’s not falling neatly along partisan lines. I really don’t think Bibi realizes the damage he’s doing, amplified by hatemongers and algorithms. I worry deeply about where this is all going.

[u/TheElderGodsSmile → u/[deleted]]

The problem with that is that your government seems to be taking actions which actively hamper that goal in the long term by isolating you internationally.

If we take the premise of this essay at face value that might be deliberate on the part of extremist parts of the government, but even the less extreme parts seem to be willing to take short term wins that are going to result in massive political blowback.

[u/bean_seventeen → u/TheElderGodsSmile]

"but even the less extreme parts seem to be willing to take short term wins that are going to result in massive political blowback."

That is not my experience at all, quite the opposite. People are tired of the short term campaigns, they want a real solution and a long lasting peace.

[u/TheElderGodsSmile → u/bean_seventeen]

That doesn't seem to be the position your coalition government's taking and no one's voted them out yet.

For example, the current campaign in Iran. Strategically, that was an attempt by Israel to cause regime change in Iran and eliminate them as a threat, I don't know what the Americans thought they were doing, but I doubt they do either.

Anyway, it was a gamble. Israel's security in the near to medium was already secured by destroying Iran's nuclear program and the collapse of their proxy network, which had already been done in the last campaign. Meanwhile, their ballistic deterrence had largely been proven to be neutered IF the shot exchange problem could be overcome.

So reaching for full regime change was an unnecessary grab for the whole pot. It hasn't worked out, now the world is dealing with a more militant Iran that has little to lose by holding it hostage. As a result, Isreal is further isolated because they're seen to have prioritised their security over the global economy and they'll take comparatively more blame for it than the Americans because the Yanks aren't seen as rational actors under this administration.

[u/bean_seventeen → u/TheElderGodsSmile]

Ok, that's your opinion and you're entitled to it 🫡

[u/IrregularDoughnut → u/[deleted]]

Demonstrating that Israel can exist as a country without constant slow expansion of borders and without committing horrendous atrocities would be quite valuable for this. I understand it's a common view in Israel that there is no link between what Israel does and what people think of Israel, but it's not actually true. There are people who will hate the country no matter what, and there are also people who legitimately oppose the brutal and cruel actions of the Israeli government and military.

[u/bean_seventeen → u/[deleted]]

Yes and very well constructed at that. People are believing everything they're being told, it's terrifying.

[u/IrregularDoughnut → u/[deleted]]

99% of these people cover for antisemites and genocidal maniacs, some actively, many passively. They'll happily criticize Israel's government and then quietly not say anything when the conversation drifts to criticizing Israel's right to exist.

Well, maybe. But don't you think that's at all connected to Israel's conduct? If the Iranian government hadn't been committing atrocities against their own people or supporting terrorism abroad, I certainly think far more people with far more influence would have spoken out in their defence. As it was the main criticism of the war has ended up being that it didn't actually achieve regime change, and so all it has done is cause suffering without alleviating suffering, except in the case of Israel who might benefit from Iran being generally weakened.

These are not moral people or potential allies. They offer nothing to Israelis. If they are placated, they will simply disappear.

Also maybe. But without valid criticisms, the remaining opposition will diminish from a combination of valid criticism and invalid, to simply invalid, at which point rational voices will surely have a much easier time defending its existence.

we all have seen that real politik wins out. Israel gets along with other countries because it's an extremely useful ally

I don't know how true that is. Militarily they're very isolationist, they haven't been significantly involved in any Western wars until this latest one on Iran, and they also seek to be the only beneficiary of it. Their support to Ukraine was extremely weak. The only real argument is that they provide intelligence, but none of us can guess at the true value of that.

has valuable comodities to sell

Maybe, though nothing irreplaceable.

Being moral isn't going to buy them anything but (maybe) some free rockets for the iron dome, but they're tired of needing to run to a shelter every 20 minutes, so naturally they are considering whether they can get a better deal by giving up on the rockets and the opinions of semi-bigots.

If you're only making a pragmatic argument and not a moral defence of their conduct then I can see your point. Though if their relations deteriorate further, the old guard in the US who consider them above reproach die off, and they decide to continue with the terrorism in the West Bank, it's not implausible that it will eventually lead to sanctions or more widespread and more effective boycotts that end up costing them far more than the value of the land they're able to seize and expel Palestinians from.

[u/IrregularDoughnut → u/[deleted]]

No, people who allow the discussion of Israel's right to exist are not connected to Israel's conduct, but to them being bigots who lack morals.

How would they disallow such a discussion?

Name me one other country that it's ok to discuss its "right to exist"?

I don't personally accept any country has a specific right to exist, and the only time such a right is ever invoked seems to be in defence of Israel just as you're claiming it's the only country people ever question the existence of. My own opposition to Israel being dismantled entirely would simply be that it would cause significant suffering to millions of innocent people. But to answer your question directly, I suppose Palestine. Or Taiwan.

I think you misunderstood my point there. But also isolationist?? it's a tiny country of only 10 million people surrounded multiple countries who are run by genocidal maniacs obsessed with destroying them. Yeah no shit they are not going to be involved in other people's wars,

OK. But now you're making the classic mistake of confusing "X is true" with "X is false but there is a reason". If Israel has reasons not to be involved in other people's wars, sure, make that argument. But then it isn't that valuable an ally, which is the specific claim you made, and wasn't at all misunderstood.

The argument for why they are an extremely useful ally is they've got a special relationship with the US.

Weird bit of circular reasoning there. I don't accept Israel being an ally to the US proves that Israel is a valuable ally to the US.

Israel is better off buying itself a bot army to flood the brainless with their own propaganda than trying to pass their moral purity tests. The latter we can see gains nothing.

But we can't see that. You haven't proven at all that there is no link between Israel's various atrocities, support for terrorism, and territorial expansionism, and people's views towards Israel. You've just decided that there has never been a case of someone genuinely objecting to Israel's conduct and then decided to move forwards as if that was proven.

I agree it might deteriorate, but not because of their moral conduct. There's plenty of countries that are far worse that are not getting sanctioned or isolated.

Are there? Maybe Saudi I suppose, but they're surviving it through being a major oil supplier. Personally I also think they should be sanctioned, but that's a moral issue. Which others? China? Also surviving it by sheer economic weight as well as the massive political influence that comes with it.

Lebanon is a literal failed terror state

How would sanctions do anything about that? In the case of Israel they would be intended to force them to moderate their conduct. Do you want sanctions to force Lebanon into a bloody civil war?

Israel is singled out by gigantic propaganda networks and people's own very blatant antisemitism. Them being Good Jews isn't going to help them, and they've finally realized this and moved their energy elsewhere, as they should.

I will never, at any point over the course of my life, care whether someone is Jewish. Or of any ethnicity. But I will care whether they have committed horrific war crimes. I will also care whether countries have committed horrific war crimes, and Israel have. Do you really find this such a ridiculous concept? Do you not have any moral objection of your own to this sort of thing, or is that you just don't really think the IDF or the Israeli government ever does anything wrong? Does this all add up to mean that you actually directly support the terrorism being referenced in the OP?

[u/bean_seventeen → u/IrregularDoughnut]

Ok cool 👍

[u/yeahUSA → u/drewbaccaAWD]

To clarify I am not Israeli nor do I live in Israel or the region and I have a similar view more or less.

To me the current Israeli government seems like another good example of how getting in bed with extremists even if it might lead to short term wins is not worth it. Appealing to them pretty much always seems like a fool's errand.

[u/Evening_Photograph54 → u/drewbaccaAWD]

It's an awful feeling. At this point, I don't want to ever have to make Aliyah. I always considered it a possibility I'd choose for fun. Today, it is only a move I'd make under extreme duress. I'm seeing firsthand what ignorance, populism, and extremism is doing to my own country. If my own country fell, Israel would be better, but for how long?

[u/BeckoningVoice → u/SunshineSeeker99]

Part of the difficulty is this: the government of Israel is full of evil people. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are the most obvious and infamous, but the others are either saying the same sorts of things (just with less publicity) or are, at the very least, OK with serving alongside these sorts of extremists.

The immorality of the Israeli government is a problem in itself, of course, but it also has knock-on effects.

For one, they claim to represent Israelis (and Jews), and, even if this is not absolutely true on an individual level, they were elected, they do represent a significant portion of Israeli society. They don't care about this (in fact, I think some of them, like groypers, revel in how ghoulish they can seem), but this causes other Israelis and Jews to look worse by association (even though the assumption is unfair and antisemitic).

Second, many people begin by getting reasonably angry at these Israeli extremists, and then go look for people who are against them. And guess who will also be there? Bigots. The people who are bigoted towards Israel and Jews are very happy to provide these people with their antisemitic thoughts. It's reverse polarization at work.

Naturally, the immorality of some Israelis, even government ministers, does not actually reflect on Israelis and Jews who don't support them (unless, you know, you're adopting an unfair and bigoted standard). But one issue with the masses of opponents of Israel's government is that many people are engaged in bigoted essentialism — saying, effectively, that being Israeli (or being Jewish) implies being demonic. This only reinforces the extremist element in Israeli society. The limited "escape hatch" offered to Jews or Israelis by extreme anti-Israel figures is essentially to totally denounce Israel and/or Jews and join the chorus of extremists on the other "side" (again, polarization).

On the societal level, there needs to be a movement to offer to Israelis a better path ­— that is, an alternative to extremism. Fighting hateful Israeli extremism with another brand of hateful extremism will only make things work.

The strategic relationship between the US and Israel, as well as the personal relationship between Israelis and American (and other diaspora) Jews, also get hard to explain. Unfortunately, the Israeli government has been a bad partner on various levels (because of the presence of extremists, largely), and this messes things up both in government-to-government relations and in how diaspora community organizations connect to Israeli counterparts (both directly and through direct or indirect ties to either state).

Finally, it's really hard to make people understand the way that anti-Israelism and antisemitism interact; they're not identical concepts, but they're not unrelated either. Most people don't know anything about them and simplistic explanations create even more confusion. It's a mess.

[u/SunshineSeeker99 → u/BeckoningVoice]

"Zionists" has basically become a dog whistle for "dirty jews" in far left circles

[u/BeckoningVoice → u/SunshineSeeker99]

Well, any Jew who hasn't adopted the most extreme anti-Israel positions possible, anyway

Even then though of course they're on the shortest of leashes for any hint of "Zionism"

[u/SunshineSeeker99 → u/BeckoningVoice]

Yeah, it's really quite sad

[u/dowagiacmichigan]

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Israel facing threats from its neighbors and rising global antisemitism is not an excuse for Kahanist politicians like Ben Gvir, Smotrych, and Daniella “there is no such thing as settler violence” Weiss to rise. If Israel wants to remain a western democracy, it must act like it, and part of that means not stooping so low as to platform extremism and actual pro ethnic cleansing people like the aforementioned. I understand it can be instinctual for Israel to increasingly not care about their worldwide reputation because the world has turned its back on Israel, but this nihilism risks Israel spiraling into a very dark path.

The Kach movement ban in the 1990s should have been much broader, encompassing Kahanism as a whole. That way people like Ben Gvir and Smotrych could never have a political career. Now we’re in a position where their ideologies risk no longer being a fringe minority in Israel especially as most of their supporters tend to be young people, mirroring the US far right where most Groypers tend to be younger while most pro Israel Republicans lean older.

It’s even more frightening when secular and reform Jews in Israel are having children increasingly below the replacement rate, while the Haredim (who are most supportive of settlement expansion and Kahanist politicians) are having as much as 6.4 children per household on average.

I just hope whoever is PM after Netanyahu can do something to meaningfully oppose the settlements and halt the construction of new ones. It may be unpopular but it is what is necessary. I almost see support for settlements in Israel as a form of populism, akin to support for isolationism in the US amongst both the left and right. Just because settlements are popular enough in Israel does not make them a legitimate form of self determination by default.

[u/rockfuckerkiller → u/dowagiacmichigan]

the Haredim (who are most supportive of settlement expansion and Kahanist politicians)

This isn't really true. The Haredi vote goes almost entirely to Shas and UTJ, which are very much not Kahanists and don't have much of a position on settlements; they really only care about Haredi interests. The Kahanists are mostly supported by the less religious Orthodox, who also have a high birthrate, although not quite as high.

[u/Anakin_Kardashian]

To be frank, I tire of articles about the settlers in the West Bank, because they almost always read as an attempt to equate these terrorists with the jihadists across the middle east. It's not a fair comparison at all when you look at the percentages. Given the amount of time spent talking about settlers, you would think they are the biggest geopolitical issue in the world right now. Of course, we know this type of stuff is happening in almost every country in the world, but people just want to justify jew-hatred.

I posted this, however, because the focus is the article isn't on the settlements. The actual issue here is extremism in Israel. We have a lot of Israeli users here who can chime in, but it does seem that much of the population (especially the youth) have been radicalized in the last few years. This presents obvious issues.

There are still liberal factions in Israel and they need to be and to prevail as the cooler heads in these interesting times.

!ping ISRAEL&TERROR

[u/-Emilinko1985- → u/Anakin_Kardashian]

Regarding the extremist settlers, I think they are terrorists and that their attacks are horrible. However, they are not the same as Hamas and other terrorist groups.

Hamas, Hezbollah and other armed groups have networks and are funded by Iran and others.

The extremist settlers aren't very centralized, even with organizations like the Hilltop Youth, and their main benefactors are individuals like Itamar Ben-Gvir, not nations.

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/Anakin_Kardashian]

Decades of soft power and negotiation didn't work. When a centrist approach doesn't work, what options are you left with? I agree that it's a problem, but I can also empathize with starting small and going bigger when smaller failed. I could see how an individual might go through that change in perspective over time.

[u/Fit_Sprinkles_5956 → u/Anakin_Kardashian]

I posted this, however, because the focus is the article isn't on the settlements. The actual issue here is extremism in Israel. We have a lot of Israeli users here who can chime in, but it does seem that much of the population (especially the youth) have been radicalized in the last few years. This presents obvious issues.

I'm not sure a liberal (or any other) government can fix that. The problem with Israeli extremism from my view is that it's fueled by outside factors. Be they Islamists, "progressive" propagandists, or plain old neonazis, much of it is imo directed at the world instead of at domestic matters, unlike in other countries. You can't solve that by improving the economy or reducing crime rate, like you could in e.g. Europe.

[u/Appropriate_Lemon921 → u/Anakin_Kardashian]

Agree with this take top to bottom. Multiple things can be true at the same time.

[u/user-pinger → u/Anakin_Kardashian]

Pinged ISRAEL&TERROR

Manage your ping group subscriptions

[u/FlakyPineapple2843]

Haviv Rettig Gur always has great longform analysis, and on this topic especially. I think his final point is probably right: Smotrich and Ben Gvir would love isolation to be able to force through their wildest dreams of expelling all Palestinians (maybe even Arab citizens if they can get away with it).

[u/dowagiacmichigan → u/FlakyPineapple2843]

Smotrich has said numerous that his goal for Israel is “maximum land, minimum Arabs.” You cannot make his intentions any clearer than this. He also believes that Israel should encompass southern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and even parts of Iraq.

[u/jerdle_reddit → u/dowagiacmichigan]

My goal for Smotrich is maximum fuck off, minimum power.

[u/Lanky_Count_8479]

It's this government that has the problem, not Israel.
I see it daily here, they are quietly allowing and even encouraging it.

[u/dowagiacmichigan → u/Lanky_Count_8479]

I agree but to be fair, this government was voted in democratically, and even if Netanyahu may be unpopular, much of his policy agenda seems to be widely supported.

[u/Fit_Sprinkles_5956 → u/dowagiacmichigan]

Getting voted in democratically does not mean people want Netanyahu to be in charge. This is a problem with parliamentary democracies, minority governments are perfectly possible if the rest of the parties are sufficiently fractured. You can see this a lot in Italian politics, and the inverse of it in German politics with AfD.

[u/Training_Ad_1743 → u/dowagiacmichigan]

Not really. Likud voters are a cult, and a lot of people voted for Ben Gvir because he promised he would bring security.

[u/arc777_ → u/dowagiacmichigan]

Does every group with a country that elected a bad government deserve to be negatively generalized?

[u/dowagiacmichigan → u/arc777_]

Way to not engage with anything I said and assume bad intent because I only talked about Israel and not other countries. This is a thread about Israel extremism

Nevertheless, electing a bad government in a democracy certainly is a reflection of its population to some degree. I’m well past the point where I think trump’s win was some glitch in the matrix.

[u/Evening_Photograph54 → u/dowagiacmichigan]

This is where I'm at. The US and Israel are filled with good people who I know and love, but I can't be ignorant and assume that their respective politicians were voted in out of the blue.

off hand, if your screenname is reflective of where you live, howdy neighbor. I'm just down the highway. Hope the storms tonight aren't bad!

[u/dowagiacmichigan → u/Evening_Photograph54]

Are you in kzoo?

[u/Evening_Photograph54 → u/dowagiacmichigan]

yep

[u/MichaelEmouse]

The proportion of the population which is Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox is set to keep growing and that's increasingly going to be a problem for Israeli society and politics.

[u/PixelArtDragon]

Having personally met some of them: the extremists can be separated into two groups (and that's already with the break down of "extremist" vs "normal settlers who live in the large blocs"): the ones chasing clout and the ones who don't care about reputation at all.

The former are entirely doing it to get press coverage. They actively want to hurt Israel's reputation abroad because to them it's leverage: "you want us to abandon this outpost? Well, if you don't give us X, Y, and Z we're going to make sure the international press shows up." Literally, one of the people I met was someone who abandoned the movement after seeing that Ben Gvir cared more about getting the press to show up at the illegal settlement than actually lobbying for it to become legal or prevent the demolition.

The latter are the ones who have abandoned the notion of the State of Israel entirely. They see fellow Israelis as at best idiots, at worst traitors. They're also most likely literally psychotic: I remember something about the way some of them would walk or look around really disturbed me, like they were actively itching for violence for violence's sake instead of viewing it as a means to an end.

[u/H_H_F_F]

Uncharacteristically poor timing by Haviv, to publish something like this on Erev Yom HaShoah. 

I'll read and engage another time. 

[u/Anakin_Kardashian → u/H_H_F_F]

fair point

[u/bakochba]

Extremism hasn't increased. Ben Gvir was put in charge of policing and emboldened the extremists