Eurasia Press & News
West Bank – In a rare move, senior Israeli officials – including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, and Defence Minister Israel Katz – have publicly condemned the recent wave of settler attacks across the occupied West Bank.
Settler attacks surged during the olive harvest in October, marking the most violent month on record since the UN began keeping records in 2006.
Since the Gaza war began, there has been a marked increase in gangs of settlers, usually composed of young, masked men, patrolling the hills of the West Bank and launching attacks against Palestinians and their property.
For decades, Israeli policy facilitated the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank and settler attacks on Palestinian communities. Settlers were de facto tasked with terrorising Palestinians into leaving their land to make way for Jewish settlements, supporting Israel’s goal of annexation.
But now, the settler movement the state helped empower has become chaotic and increasingly uncontrollable, increasingly turning on the Israeli army itself.
The recent spike in settler attacks, including settlers clubbing a 55-year-old Palestinian woman picking olives and stoning a Reuters journalist, is also causing a media frenzy and drawing international condemnation, increasing pressure on the Israeli administration to rein in the settlers.
On Thursday, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK issued a joint statement condemning settler violence and calling for stability in the West Bank. “These attacks are harmful to the ongoing peace efforts and for the lasting security of the State of Israel itself,” it said.
The Israeli state now faces a dilemma: the force it created to advance its annexation goals in the West Bank is now acting independently, drawing international scrutiny and undermining domestic stability.
The chasm is also widening between the traditional Israeli security establishment and settlers, as militia violence risks undermining the state’s long-term goals of an orderly land dispossession.
Even Netanyahu, who has long provided material and ideological support for the settler movement, appears to be feeling the pressure. Under his leadership, settlements have been erected at an unprecedented pace alongside mass home demolitions in Palestinian communities. Despite this, he denounced the recent attacks, attributing them to a “handful of extremists.”
“Every few months, when international pressure mounts over settler violence, Israeli officials issue condemnations and blame ‘extremist individuals.’ They do this to create the appearance that the violence is an isolated phenomenon. In reality, the government continues to back the settlers, granting them complete impunity,” Yair Dvir, spokesperson for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, told The New Arab.
Settler-state cooperation
Since occupying the West Bank in 1967, Israel has appropriated more than two million dunams of land from Palestinians, or nearly 500,000 acres. Some areas have been formally taken over by the Israeli state, which weaponises Ottoman-era agricultural laws to seize Palestinian land, while other communities were forcibly displaced through settler violence.
“Settler violence is the unofficial arm of state violence. The State of Israel funds the outposts it publicly calls ‘illegal’ – connecting them to electricity and water, paving roads for them, and even providing them with rifles, drones, and off-road Ranger vehicles,” said Dvir.
And while the army claims to act as a neutral force to maintain order, in practice, soldiers and settlers often operate in coordination – from settlers treating soldiers as private security guards in Hebron to the army guarding illegal outposts and detaining Palestinians who approach.
In a recorded incident in Turmus Ayya, north of Ramallah, the army blocked the path for Palestinian farmers and international activists, forcing them to turn in the direction of armed settlers who assaulted the group. The army stood by without intervening, a pattern documented by human rights groups and even Israeli media.
And when settlers attack Palestinians, rarely are they held accountable by the Israeli legal system. After Yinon Levi shot and killed schoolteacher and activist Awdah Hathaleen in the village of Umm al-Khair, he was released three hours later – despite the murder being recorded on video. Levi then returned to the Palestinian village and taunted those mourning his death.
The ongoing impunity with which settlers operate has further emboldened them. In rare cases where they are formally charged, settlers are tried under a legal system in their favour. Palestinians in the West Bank live under military law and are prosecuted in military courts, while Jewish settlers in the occupied territory remain subject to civilian law and courts – one of many examples cited as evidence for an apartheid state, where laws are applied differently based on one’s religion, race, or ethnicity.
Last year, Defence Minister Katz also removed administrative detention for settlers, a policy that is widely applied to Palestinians. Under administrative detention, individuals can be arrested and held without charge for a period of six months, which can be renewed indefinitely.
Over 3,000 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli prisons without official charges against them, including 141 Palestinian children.
The current Israeli government – widely described as the most far-right in the country’s history – implements policies dictated by the settler movement, with the movement’s leading political figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich holding senior positions in Netanyahu’s cabinet. Both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich live in West Bank settlements considered illegal under international law.
But while Netanyahu’s coalition has brought the once-fringe settler movement into the cabinet itself, the settlement enterprise is larger than any single administration.
Since 1967, every successive Israeli administration has sustained the settler movement – providing financial incentives for Israelis to settle in the West Bank, blocking legal accountability, and weaponising the military to arrest and assault Palestinians who resist land dispossession.
Together, this reveals a system in which the state has not only failed to restrain settler violence, but actively channelled it towards its own end goals.
Same goals, different means
Despite settlers now reaching the highest ranks of government, state-settler cooperation shows signs of fraying. When the army attempted to demolish an illegal settler outpost near Jab’a last week, the settlers attacked the soldiers and climbed atop the bulldozers.
And after settlers attacked an army vehicle in Beit Lid, Netanyahu convened his cabinet for an emergency meeting on settler violence. Never was an emergency meeting convened when Palestinians were lynched by settlers, but the settlers now threaten the army, raising fears that violence sanctioned for decades as a political instrument may become uncontrollable.
Ongoing clashes between Israeli security forces and the settler movement show one thing: the groups share a similar end goal – West Bank annexation – but with different means of arriving there.
High-profile incidents like settlers beating international solidarity activists in their sleep and stealing their passports create a burden for the state, which is already suffering from a global public relations crisis due to its genocide in Gaza.
The most ideologically extreme settler factions also pose a threat beyond the West Bank. Their growing defiance of state authority risks destabilising Israel’s already fragile social fabric, which is fractured along religious, political, and ethnic lines.
As ultra-nationalist ideology flourishes within settler communities, it increasingly collides with Tel Aviv’s more secular society, the military establishment, and even mainstream Zionism, deepening polarisation within Israel itself.
Netanyahu’s governing coalition also depends on the support of the settler movement but is threatened by the growing power it wields.
By rejecting not only the Palestinian right to self-determination but also civilian law and military authority, settlers challenge the state’s monopoly on force and risk destabilising the country’s highly precarious social cohesion.
Moreover, settler violence risks disrupting the ceasefire in Gaza and drawing the ire of the Trump administration, which has already opposed West Bank annexation.
“Certainly there’s some concern about events in the West Bank spilling over and creating an effect that could undermine what we’re doing in Gaza,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview when asked about recent settler attacks.
“But I saw comments today from the president of Israel and even from the head of the IDF in that region condemning what happened. I thought the comments were very strong,” he added.
