How violent West Bank settlers are threatening Israel’s alliance with America
A Palestinian man inspects damage to his home after an attack by Jewish settlers in the village of Beit Imrin, north of Nablus in the West Bank. The settlers attacked Palestinian homes, destroying walls and infrastructure, cutting off electricity, and stealing homes' contents. | Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, is a Christian Zionist who believes that Israel is biblically entitled to all of the Holy Land. He’s pretty much the last person you’d expect to condemn Israeli conduct in the West Bank, where settlers have spent decades using a combination of construction, coercion, and outright violence to push Palestinians off their own land.
Yet earlier this month, Huckabee went out of his way to denounce the behavior of some settlers — describing them as “band of terrorists” who had committed “horrible activities of criminal nature.”
Huckabee’s surprising outrage stems, in part, from their recent choice of victims. Last month, settler extremists besieged three Palestinian homes in the village of Qusra, including one belonging to American citizen Lou Ridi. About two weeks later, masked settlers beat up a NBC News crew while they attempted to interview Aida Ahmed Abdullah, a Palestinian who had herself had been forced from her home by settler aggression.
But Huckabee’s outrage reflects something deeper. Settler terrorism, once relatively uncommon, has exploded in severity in recent years — with wink-nudge support from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
The violence is so egregious, and so indefensible, that retired Israeli generals have compared the settlers to Nazis and demanded action to stop them. In mid-September, the INSS — Israel’s top national security think tank — issued a strategic alert warning that “Jewish terrorism” had become a national crisis and even an existential threat to Israel’s future.
“As history teaches us, democracies that fail to restrain radical forces within them do not survive,” the alert argues.
In Washington, settler terrorism against Palestinians has flipped the Israel debate on its head. Congressional Democrats, who have long been divided over the Gaza war, have come together to support legislation that would impose sanctions on Israeli politicians and corporations implicated in the violence. The Trump administration, the most pro-settlement White House in American history, has very conspicuously stood aside as Canada and European nations implemented sanctions of their own.
For now, the settlers are mostly getting away with it — because the government wants them to.
For now, the settlers are mostly getting away with it — because the government wants them to. While basically all Israeli governments have allowed settlements to grow, the current Netanyahu government includes coalition partners unusually aligned with their most radical goals: the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. So long as they see settler terrorism as a useful tactic toward that end, and have the ability to stymie preventive measures and block accountability, the attacks will continue.
But if Netanyahu loses Israel’s election in October, and Democrats retake the White House in 2028, things might change dramatically. The political stars could align for a serious effort to change what Israel is doing in the West Bank — not just attempting to merely slow settler violence, but also challenge the broader apparatus of occupation that makes it possible.
In “conversations that I’ve had with congressional Democrats and their staff, this [settler violence] is the No. 1 issue that comes up, the thing they’re angriest about,” said Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer at the center-left Israel Policy Forum. “If you have a Democrat in the White House, this is something the Israelis are going to have to deal with — whether they want to or not.”
The rise of settler terrorism
Under international law, Israeli settlement in the West Bank is illegal: Countries are not permitted to move their own civilians into territory they occupied after a war. However, under successive Israeli governments — including the more peace-minded ones — the settlements have continued to grow. Many of those closest to the border function as suburbs of major Israeli cities; some further east, like Ariel, look like small cities in their own right. During the era when a negotiated solution looked possible in the near term, their growth was often seen as part of a bid to dictate the eventual borders of a Palestinian state — or blow up negotiations entirely — with “facts on the ground” that would be hard to undo.
While individual settlers live there for all sorts of reasons — for many, the housing costs are cheaper — the political movement overall exists to seize land from Palestinians and slam the door on the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict.
On a macro level, the physical placement of the settlements cut Palestinian communities off from each other, making it hard — basically impossible — to construct a contiguous Palestinian state so long as they remain standing. On a micro level, settlements are often placed in ways designed to push Palestinians off their land — by, for example, putting Palestinian-owned land into no-go zones enforced by the Israeli military. And politically, the population growth in settlements creates a powerful constituency in Israeli politics whose entire way of life depends on preventing a peace agreement that would require settlement evacuation.
Settler violence is the literal bleeding edge of this overall strategy. Violent settlers live in ramshackle communities, tiny villages on hilltops or herding outposts encroaching on Palestinian farmland, that are often illegal even under domestic Israeli law. The people living there are the hardest of the hardcore settlers: fanatically devoted to the idea that the land is theirs by divine right, and that they have every right to use force to push their Palestinians neighbors out.
Their tactics include everything from killing Palestinian livestock to cutting off their water supply to burning down their homes to outright beating and killing them. The violence is autonomous, in that individual settlers decide on what to do, but enabled by the overall strategic plan of the settlement movement.
“There’s no hierarchy deciding that this [specific] house will be attacked. The decision is that this area is an area of all our interest, so we need to subsidize herding farms there. And those bring violence, which lead to displacement” of the local Palestinians, said Yehuda Shaul, co-director of the Israeli think tank Ofek and a leading observer of the settlement movement.
Settler terrorism is not new, but it used to be comparatively rare. In 2012, Natan Sachs — a leading expert on Israeli politics at the Middle East Institute think tank — wrote an essay warning that the growth of the settlements, and the radicalization of some settlers, were creating a dangerous new violent movement of settlers.
“Back then, it was a fringe thing among settlers,” Sachs tells me. “It has become much more mainstream.”
Israel’s current government, which took power in late 2022 and is by far the most radical in Israeli history, bears enormous responsibility.
“This particular government is enabling settler violence beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” said Yousef Munayyer, the director of the Israel/Palestine program at the Arab Center think tank in DC.
Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, a settler living in a reportedly illegal home and a longtime advocate of ethnically cleansing West Bank Palestinians, is currently in charge of civilian administration in the West Bank. In effect, this allows him to use state resources to orchestrate a historic expansion of settlements across the West Bank — including the illegal outposts that many violent settlers call home.
“This is his life’s work,” said Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine at the International Crisis Group. “He’s completely dedicated to this and he knows exactly what he’s doing.”
Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, also a settler, is if anything more extreme: For years, he hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, a terrorist who massacred 29 Palestinians at a holy site in Hebron, in his living room. Ben Gvir has, among other things, instructed the police forces under his authority not to arrest violent settlers and given thousands of weapons to settlers themselves.
In theory, the Israeli military and intelligence establishment should be a check on the extremists. Settler violence is not only illegal, but also a national security threat. Settler violence prompts Palestinian retaliation and, at times, even targets Israeli soldiers and police themselves. It can lead to international incidents, like those seen recently, that undermine Israel’s support with key allies abroad. The Israeli military is the ultimate authority in the West Bank; it could act on these concerns if it so chose.
In practice, however, they’re of little help. Israeli government data shows that, between 2005 and 2025, 94 percent of all investigations into settler violence fail to yield an indictment. The military will facilitate illegal settlements’ connection to the electrical grid. And its ranks are increasingly made up of “national religious” Jewish Israelis, a demographic that’s theologically on board with the settlement enterprise, versus more secular Israelis who primarily see the conflict through a security lens.
And after October 7, the Army dealt with a manpower crisis by significantly increasing the number of “regional defense units” — essentially bands of armed settlers that can be tasked with local security in the West Bank in lieu of regular soldiers. It emboldens violence in exactly the way you’d think.
So while the recent spike in settler terrorism can fairly be blamed on the Netanyahu government, the phenomenon itself is an outgrowth of the structural settlement
