SOUTH HEBRON HILLS, West Bank—Israel’s settlers—many of whom want to take over Palestinians’ land and demolish their homes—have been blamed for a surge in violence and accused of undermining the prospect of a two-state solution.
Extremist settlers were recently hit with travel restrictions by the U.S. and Britain, and the U.S. is holding up weapons shipments to Israel while it waits for assurances that assault rifles won’t end up in the hands of the settlers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally allowed new settlements to be built from 2017, and his latest coalition government includes radical pro-settler politicians pushing for greater expansion to evict even more Palestinians. Settler groups have been condemned by the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, and liberal Israelis among others.
And yet, they have been emboldened by the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, according to the United Nations, which says there has been a surge in violence carried out by the settlers since the assault which killed 1,200.
Naomi Kahn, an American-born Israeli settler, told The Daily Beast that she knows full-well that the settlers are not popular at home or abroad. “A lot of American Jews don’t like me. Because I’m religious, because I’m right-wing, and because I’m a settler,” she said, as we sat in a cafe outside the ruins of the ancient Jewish town of Susya, in the south of the West Bank.
She insists that the settlers are here to stay.
“We have a God-given duty to settle all the lands of Israel,” she explained. “Where we are going is the epicenter of ‘quote-unquote’ settler violence. But that is a complete myth.”
Organizations from the U.S. State Department to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have decried what they see as a wave of extremist settler violence sweeping the West Bank.
The United States recently announced visa restrictions against settlers engaged in extremism, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying they were "targeting individuals and their family members involved in or meaningfully contributing to actions that undermine peace, security, and stability in the West Bank. Violence against civilians will have consequences.”
American settlers in a southern West Bank settlement.
Settlers say their project is compatible with peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian population. “No Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria was built on the ruins of an Arab village,” says Kahn, using the Israeli term for the region. “You can’t say that about Israel proper.”
Kahn is a spokesperson for Regavim, a pro-settler NGO that maps what it calls illegal Palestinian constructions throughout Area C of the West Bank. One of its founders, the far-right politician Bezalel Smotrich, is now Netanyahu’s finance minister.
The settlers have a radically different interpretation of the history of the region than most Western governments and institutions. Worldwide legal authorities, including the International Court of Justice, have described Israel as an occupying power in the West Bank, over which it gained military control during the 1967 Six-Day War. The same authorities consider Jewish settlements in the West Bank as illegal under international law, and those settlements are seen by many advocates of a two-state solution as one of the major obstacles to a lasting peace. When the Israeli government announced earlier this year it was to expand settlements, the U.S. State Department said it was “deeply troubled” although, as usual, it announced no actual consequences.
Kahn described Israeli actions in the 1967 war instead as a “liberation of Jordanian-occupied territory” and says that they view the region as an integral part of Israel. “Israel should extend sovereignty over Area C,” she says, which would involve Israel annexing more than 60 percent of the West Bank’s territory. She also suggests that major Palestinian cities should remain as part of a confederation with Jordan, with Palestinians being given Jordanian citizenship. Some would argue that effectively removing the Palestinians from Israel would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing.
The Oslo Accords signed in 1994 divided the West Bank into a complicated system with three distinct forms of government. Area A, including major Palestinian cities, is under full control of the Palestinian Authority (PA); Area B’s civilian issues are controlled by the PA, while Israel retains security control; and Area C is still under full Israeli jurisdiction. These lands are less densely populated by Palestinians, and it is where Israeli settlers have their communities.
“This is the tragedy of this whole story. We created a Palestinian Authority, a system that no sovereign state has ever done, and ceded authority to people who are sworn to our eradication in the hopes that that would enable them to stay where they are and create a better life for themselves. If Israel really wanted to eradicate the Arab populations of Judea and Samaria when the population was a lot smaller, it could do so now. But we don’t. Do I care if Arabs live here as long as I can live here in peace? But the Arab philosophy is that my existence defiles their land. A Holy War is to rid all places that are considered Islamic land… That includes Spain!” said Kahn.
The settlements we visit, the Gush Etzion bloc near Bethlehem and Carmel in the South Hebron Hills, are quaint and almost idyllic. The streets are clean and perfectly paved, and the residents are unfailingly polite. Some residents carry weapons, but this is normal in Israel, where hundreds of thousands of civilian reservists have been called up to the armed forces. Interestingly, few of the settlers I met were born in Israel proper, among them several South Africans and Americans, and a New Zealander. The settlements are a great contrast to the hustle and bustle, noise and energy of the Palestinian cities around them.
When we sat down for lunch with one family, they spoke about their concern for family members fighting in Gaza, as well as rising antisemitism around the world. “We just have to do what we have to do [in Gaza]” one South African settler said, “and not worry about what the rest of the world thinks.” They spoke about one of the young men they had grown up with, who had been stationed on the Gaza border as a soldier and killed by Hamas during the Oct. 7 massacre. He said that the rest of the world had “lost the plot with antisemitism—just look at what is going on at U.S. universities!” Despite their wealth and standard of living compared to their Arab neighbors, they feel more scared and isolated than ever. “We don’t just worry about Gaza, but about Hezbollah in Lebanon, and there are terrorist groups in the West Bank,” he said.
Kahn said that she had a version of a report from the Israeli national police that said there was no uptick in settler violence since Oct. 7 compared to the same period last year. She declined to share it, although a report from the right-leaning Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post reported its own internal figures from the Shin Bet saying violence from settlers had remained roughly the same in this period as it was in a similar period last year. The U.N. has very different figures; a month after the Oct. 7 attack, the U.N. Humanitarian affairs office said: “Israeli settler violence has increased significantly, from an already high average of three incidents per day in 2023 to seven a day now.”
Kahn said the media and international organizations consistently ignored instances of violence from Palestinians that had led to 28 Jewish deaths in 2023. A lot of recorded “settler violence” incidents, she said, were merely graffiti or minor vandalism incomparable to death or serious injury.
Israelis at a cafe outside the ruins of Susya, an ancient Jewish town, near Hebron in occupied Palestinian territories.
Palestinians say that these statistics themselves are part of the problem, that the Israeli authorities turn a blind eye to violence from what they see as their own side. They also believe that the Israeli court system is stacked against them. Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to an Israeli military court system, while settlers benefit from Israeli law being ‘pipelined’ to them and face regular civilian courts. B’Tselem says: “These courts simply cannot be an impartial, neutral arbitrator. They are firmly entrenched on the Israeli side of the power imbalance and serve as one of the central systems maintaining its control over the Palestinian people.”
Muhanned Qafesha, a Palestinian living in the West Bank, believes that Israeli institutions are part of the problem. When I visited him in Hebron, a city overwhelmingly populated by Palestinians with a small pocket of Jewish settlers in the center, he described the settler community there as a “law unto themselves.” He said that the police and Israeli Defense Forces rarely stopped to quell any settler violence yet cracked down on Palestinians who tried to defend themselves. He said that most settler violence incidents he and other Palestinians had tried to report both before and after Oct. 7, were ignored—so the figures should be even higher.
More than 200 Palestinians have been killed in escalating violence throughout the West Bank. However, a trip to the north of the region shows that much of this violence comes from the Israeli military. Many of these deaths have come from raids on the holdouts of Palestinian militant strongholds in areas like Jenin Refugee Camp in the West Bank, raids that have killed and injured soldiers and civilians alike.
The Daily Beast visited Jenin and met several family members of Palestinians killed in raids. They called their family members martyred and confirmed that they had died fighting for what locals call “resistance organizations.”
“It is our honor to support the martyrs,” said one Palestinian man, who had both his legs amputated after an Israeli airstrike. He said he had nothing to do with any militant group but acknowledged they had been operating in the buildings near him. One 16-year-old boy taken to a hospital had been shot six times during a raid and had managed to survive against all the odds. There is a major conflict occurring here but it has little to do with the settlers, who were removed from this region in 2005. The ever-present sense of danger was highlighted at one point when Israeli troops fired in our direction from an armored vehicle, forcing a group of five journalists to sprint for cover.
Some of the young pro-Israel radicals make the settlers look like free Palestine activists. At a recent protest in Jerusalem, several dozen young people waving Israeli flags and banners that said ‘Death to terrorists!’ gathered outside the old city walls. They demanded to be allowed to march to the Muslim quarter before being stopped by police. “Burn down Al-Aqsa Mosque, so we can rebuild the Jewish temple there” said Jacob, a 21-year-old originally from the U.S. He didn’t want to give his last name or have his photo taken “so that I don’t end up on a police list somewhere.” He said that the West Bank should be cleared of Arab inhabitants because not only was it Israel’s biblical land, but because Israel had won it fair and square in war. His thoughts were echoed by many other people at the gathering, including one young woman who said that “anyone who identifies as a Palestinian is a terrorist.” The violence is only making views more radical, and the rising anger and hatred on both sides shows no sign of abating.
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