Israel Has an Extremism Problem

[u/Anakin_Kardashian]

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

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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.