In recent years, the settler movement discovered a winning strategy: Attack the Israeli military
An Israeli soldier scuffles with a masked Israeli settler while trying to remove him from the area of a protest by Palestinians to mark Land Day, in the village of Madama in the Israeli occupied West Bank, March 30, 2017. Photo by Jaafar Ashtiyeh/Getty Images
As the war in Gaza approaches its seventh month, the settler movement has been raging its own separate war against none other than the Israeli military itself. While Israeli society is still healing from the devastation of Oct. 7 and tens of thousands of Israelis are displaced from their homes near the Gaza Strip and the northern border, the settlers have launched campaigns against the Head of the Central Command, advocated for resettling Gaza, and escalated tensions with the Israeli military.
Backed by the political strength of the far-right Jewish supremacist politicians in the government, we can expect that the clashes between the settler movement and the Israeli military will only grow.
The dynamic that has developed in recent years created a win-win position for the settler movement every time they pursue an adversarial campaign against the military: If the Israeli military concedes to the demands, their requested policy is implemented. But if the military and security establishment reject the settler’s demands, they feel compelled to compensate the settlers elsewhere, to remain on good terms politically.
Strains between settlers and the security establishment in Israel are not a new phenomenon. The settler movement has a hypocritical and interdependent position with the Israeli army and the Shin Bet. The settlers are entirely dependent on an enhanced military effort to defend settlements — often located in the heart of Palestinian population centers in the West Bank — for the settler project to exist in the first place. Most of the Israeli army combatants are stationed in the West Bank for that purpose. On the morning of Oct. 7, for example, 22 battalions were located in the West Bank protecting Jewish settlements, compared to five battalions on the northern border with Lebanon and less than two battalions on the Gaza Strip border.
There has also been direct involvement of the settler movement in military strategy, with a full-time settler coordinator nominated for the headquarters of every military regional division, often from a settler background. Furthermore, the army and settlers have operated interchangeably in harassing Palestinians or taking control over land.
Despite this symbiotic-at-times relationship, the settlers are often at odds with the security establishment because they repeatedly operate illegally: establishing Jewish outposts without permits, attacking Palestinians and even harassing soldiers. Settlers also criticize the existence of the Jewish Department in the Shin Bet which is in charge of preventing Jewish terror, the majority of which involves settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank. Many settler leaders believe the Shin Bet should be focused solely on Palestinian terror. Finance Minister and settler leader Bezalel Smotrich claimed in 2015 that there is no such thing as “Jewish terror,” and that the Jewish Department fails to distinguish between Jews and “the enemy.”
In recent years, there has been an upsurge in settler violence, especially since Oct. 7, with the lack of accountability for these actions within the Israeli legal system igniting much protest from the U.S. and the international community. Most recently, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that lays out conditions for sanctioning violent settlers and enforcing these sanctions on four settlers. Soon after, the United Kingdom and several other European countries joined with similar measures.
These new sanctions revealed the depth of the connections between the establishment bloc in the settler movement and the anti-establishment bloc. The settler establishment includes settler politicians such as Smotrich, the Yesha Council —the umbrella organization of the municipal councils of West Bank settlements — and policymakers in settler nongovernmental organizations like Regavim. They are bound to play within the rules of the political game, pushing for policy through advocacy and organizing.
The anti-establishment factions, on the other hand, include groups who organize for activity outside the scope of traditional politics. The hilltop youth and bands affiliated with the Jewish Power party, led by the Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, pursue a more militant approach to controlling land and “protecting” Jewish dignity. These groups, who often organize ad-hoc through WhatsApp, are behind many of the violent settler attacks, including the attack in Hawara in 2023.
While their rhetoric toward using violence as a means to achieve political objectives might differ, the strategic purposes of the two blocs are united. They rely on each other to execute their agenda to complete the Judaization of Area C — which covers 60 percent of the West Bank and is under Israeli military and civil control according to the Oslo Accords.
Violent settlers of the anti-establishment bloc act “independently” on the ground in Area C by founding farming projects on Palestinian land and intimidating Palestinians to prevent them from entering these territories. The settler establishment bloc then follows with a request from the military to protect these new — illegal under Israeli law — projects and leverage their seizure of Palestinian land to forcibly transfer Palestinian communities.
The Israeli military and other law enforcement authorities in the West Bank fail to respond to these attacks appropriately. But even these insufficient attempts at quelling the violence receive much backlash from the settler establishment and its arms in the Israeli government — most prominently by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
After a joint statement of the head of the Shin Bet, the IDF chief of staff and the national police commissioner called out settler violence as a “nationalist terror” in 2022, both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir publicly criticized them from doing so. Smotrich, for example, said that “the attempt to create an equation between the deadly Arab terror to civil disobedience — no matter how severe they are — is morally wrong and practically dangerous.” Similarly, after the police opened an investigation against two settlers who were suspected of killing a young Palestinian, Ben-Gvir backed the settlers, stating that “whoever protects himself from stone throwing should receive a citation.” Similar statements in such events are commonly released by other Knesset members from their party and from other leaders in the settler establishment.
This kind of backlash weakens the military capability to bolster its response to the raging settler violence. Several key army units in the West Bank are predominantly composed of settlers, who are, naturally, more susceptible to these messages by settler leaders supporting violence against Palestinians. The military has often tried to pass the responsibility to deal with settler violence to the Israeli police, even though the Israeli military is obliged to protect Palestinians under international law, and soldiers are authorized to act against settlers who are attacking Palestinians. Yet after repeated smear campaigns against the military or specific personnel, the Israeli military often offers political concessions to the very settlers who are attacking them.
The relations between the settler movement and the current head of the Central Command, General Yehuda Fox, demonstrate this dynamic. The Central Command is a territorial headquarters responsible for the Israeli military apparatus in the West Bank and, as a byproduct of it, for the security of Jewish settlements and illegal outposts. Settlers have long portrayed former heads of the Central Command as too leftist. But criticism and protests against Fox have reached unprecedented levels since he entered office in the past year.
In May 2022, settlers started a campaign against his dovish policy toward Palestinians in Hawara, a town located on Highway 60 — the main highway going from north to south in the West Bank, used both by Palestinians and Jews. They claimed that Fox was tightening the enforcement against Jewish settlers, while loosening it toward Palestinians throwing stones at the highway, which caused several casualties on the settler side.
Fox and the Israeli army was attentive to this pressure. In the past year, it prohibited Palestinians from using the highway several times, including for over a month following the Oct. 7 attack. Moreover, Palestinians were allowed to use the highway again only after the Israeli government completed the construction of the Hawara Bypass Road — a highway for the exclusive use of Israelis — that connects Jewish settlements in the area, and was constructed partially on privately owned Palestinian land.
The political campaign against Fox continued in May 2023, when settlers crusaded against his decision to follow through with demolishing six illegal Jewish outposts. By September, social media posts portraying Fox as Hitler gained traction online among settlers. Subsequently, in response to settler protests against his policies in November, Fox stated that “99% percent of the hilltop youth” are harmless and that there is no such thing as “settler violence” because there is violence all across Israel. Fox’s diminishment of the grave danger settlers pose to Palestinians in the West Bank is proof that the settlers’ efforts to attack the military were a success.
The pattern repeats itself over and over. Earlier this year, the Central Command conducted a military drill that included preparation for a scenario where military forces would need to address an abduction of Palestinians by Jewish settlers. The Israeli right-wing, including Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, denounced it, saying that the drill was “total madness” and “dehumanizing settlers.”
Unlike what right-wing leaders suggested, the scenario of Jewish settlers abducting a Palestinian during national clashes is far from being science fiction. In 2014, Jewish extremists abducted Muhammad Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian teenager, and burnt him alive in the Jerusalem forest. In February 2023, settler groups launched a massive attack in the town of Hawara, burning houses, stores and farms that led to the killing of one Palestinian and injured dozens. In an interview for Channel 12 following the Hawara riot, Fox said, “We were not prepared for that many people, how they came, the scale, the force of the violence they used, and the planning they had carried out.” How could the army be prepared to deal with this settler violence if it does not include it in such drills?
And yet, this immense political pressure worked and — once again — influenced the military policy toward the settlers. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s political strength led to Netanyahu’s intervention, who claimed that this training was “detached from reality” and demanded answers from the Israeli military as to why they planned it in the first place. Fox ultimately apologized for conducting the drill, saying that “it was a mistake to simulate this specific scenario of abduction of a Palestinian by Israelis,” and ensured that it would not be repeated in future drills. He reiterated that the Central Command views the protection of the settlers as their military objective.
The settler movement has a clear political incentive to keep escalating the tensions with the Israeli military. For them, the anti-military campaign is a win-win strategy: either their demand will be immediately granted, or if rejected, the military is so desperate to remain on good terms with them that the settlers will get something else that they want. It is a chilling reality for their Palestinian neighbors.
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