The Occupation Is Coming Home
The Jewish settler movement has spent decades transforming the West Bank. Now its politics of Jewish supremacy is moving into Israel proper.
For decades, Israelis have debated whether the occupation would erase the 1949 armistice line, the Green Line, by extending Israel’s reach ever deeper into the West Bank. Today, the movement runs in the opposite direction as well. The practices and political culture that nearly six decades of occupation have produced in the West Bank are now being applied inside Israel itself.
Consider Majd al-Krum. In September, young Jewish settlers from the West Bank erected tents and brought infrastructure onto land within the municipal boundaries of this Palestinian Arab town in northern Israel. The land, owned by the Jewish National Fund, had been leased to settlers from the West Bank for grazing. Local residents feared they were watching the beginnings of something familiar from the West Bank: a settler outpost.
The settlement movement has developed a politics of Jewish supremacy in which Jews are not merely citizens of the state but its proprietors. They are entitled – even obligated – to assert their dominance over Palestinians. Places with a substantial Palestinian population become a challenge demanding action and formal Israeli sovereignty is not enough. Jewish control must be made visible through settlement, flags, marches and other displays of ownership and dominance.
Minister of Internal Security Itamar Ben-Gvir has a phrase for this: During Israel’s 2022 election campaign he ran under the slogan, “Who are the masters of the house?” His repeated answer was: “The Jews!”
Palestinian citizens of Israel, living within the country’s Green Line, possess equal citizenship on paper, but the constant performance of Jewish ownership conveys a different hierarchy: Jews are the masters of the space and Arabs are permitted to inhabit it – but on different terms. Their belonging is made to feel conditional.
The logic of Jewish ownership has been pervasive across the Green Line for years. Religious-Zionist groups known as garinim torani’im, or Torah nuclei, have established themselves in mixed Jewish-Arab cities such as Lod, Acre and Jaffa. Their territorial project treats a large Arab presence as a demographic and political imbalance to be corrected by strengthening Jewish presence and making Jewish control of the space unmistakable.
The same impulse can be seen in repeated demonstrations of Jewish presence in Palestinian spaces. In 2009, Mr. Ben-Gvir and other far-right activists marched with Israeli flags into Umm al-Fahm, one of Israel’s largest Arab cities, under massive police protection. Every Jerusalem Day, nationalist marchers pass through Damascus Gate and the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Similar marches have taken place in Arab neighborhoods of mixed cities. Some have been accompanied by physical assaults, verbal abuse and racist chants directed at Palestinian residents.
The humiliation is not incidental. It is part of the performance of supremacy.
March through an Arab neighborhood carrying Israeli flags, surrounded by police. Enter an Arab city precisely because your presence there will be contested. The message goes beyond the legal right of Jews to be anywhere in Israel. It is a demonstration of power: We can enter your space. We can assert ourselves here. And the state will protect us while we do it.
Residents face an impossible dilemma: accept the display of dominance silently or protest it. If they protest, their reaction can be turned against them as evidence of “Arab hostility,” lawlessness or a supposed lack of “governance.” Protesting it evokes resistance which is then invoked to justify an even stronger assertion of Jewish control.
Majd al-Krum takes this politics further. While a march is a one-time event, a settlement is here to stay. This time, settlers sought to establish a Jewish foothold within the municipal boundaries of an Arab town. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Finance Minister and one of the settlement movement’s most powerful political leaders, has spoken openly about bringing what he calls the settlement “revolution in Judea and Samaria” to the Galilee and the Negev.
There is, however, an important difference. Palestinians in the West Bank live under military occupation, but the residents of Majd al-Krum are Israeli citizens. The military regime of the West Bank cannot simply be imported into Israel, yet the hierarchy on which it rests can. Inside the Green Line, Palestinian citizens cannot formally be treated as an occupied population, but they can be treated politically as a population whose presence is excessive, whose equality is questioned and whose belonging is conditional.
That is why Majd al-Krum matters. The settler movement is bringing home a practice of occupation: Palestinian presence as a problem to be contained, Jewish presence as an assertion of power, and Jewish supremacy as something that must be constantly demonstrated. The Occupation is coming home.
