Factories of Extremism: How Prolonged Control Breeds Resistance

Series Preface

Understanding Jewish and Palestinian Equality in Israel explores how questions of law, belonging, justice, and identity shape everyday life between the river and the sea. Written from my perspective as an African-American Christian who also practices Judaism, the series seeks understanding rather than ideology—beginning with equality in law (Part I), comparing civilian and military rule (Part II), examining how security structures shape discrimination (Part III), exploring how bias reinforces inequality (Part IV), and reflecting on the moral lessons of segregation and liberation (Part V). Later essays trace how prolonged control fuels extremism (Part VI), highlight grassroots hope (Part VII), and conclude with a theology of repair (Part VIII).

Together these essays ask a central question: What becomes of equality when fear, control, and identity shape the limits of law?

Abstract

This essay argues that decades of military rule, settlement expansion, political exclusion, and restricted mobility in the West Bank have created the conditions under which extremism grows. Drawing on comparative conflict studies, UN documentation, Israeli security analyses, and global cases—from Algeria to Northern Ireland to Iraq—it shows how prolonged control produces resistance, how resistance justifies deeper control, and how this cycle becomes self-reinforcing.

Israel’s security concerns are real—terrorism, rockets, and armed insurgencies pose genuine danger. But security frameworks cannot indefinitely substitute for political solutions. Without equality, dignity, and meaningful self-determination, prolonged occupation becomes a factory of extremism, generating the very threats it seeks to prevent.

Background

I write from the perspective of an African-American Christian who also practices Judaism. My own experience in the U.S.—where fear was used to justify segregation, and segregation produced revolt—shapes my understanding of how systems of control generate the resistance they claim to manage.

This lens helps illuminate how, in Israel-Palestine, prolonged occupation fosters anger, despair, and political vacuum—all key drivers of radicalization.

Introduction

Nearly six decades after 1967, the West Bank remains governed by a security regime that was designed to be temporary but has become structural. Restrictions on movement, zoning, residency, and political participation create conditions of chronic instability, weak governance, and widespread grievance.

This essay explores how long-term control fuels extremism in three ways:

1. By creating daily humiliation and lack of agency

2. By weakening legitimate Palestinian institutions and governance

3. By empowering non-state armed actors to fill the vacuum

Israel’s strategic challenge is that a system built for stability paradoxically produces instability if left unreformed.

1. Occupation and Radicalization

Control breeds resentment; resentment attracts recruitment.

A significant body of conflict research shows that long-term, military-based governance—without political rights—creates ripe conditions for extremism.

In the West Bank:

• UN OCHA recorded 614 movement obstacles in 2024, rising to 849 by mid-2025, including 94 staffed checkpoints and 288 gates.¹

• Daily encounters with soldiers, home demolitions, and land seizures create an atmosphere of humiliation and hopelessness.²

• Local youth perceive no legitimate political pathway toward self-determination.

International Crisis Group (2023) reports that new armed groups in Jenin and Nablus draw support from young Palestinians who have lost faith in the Palestinian Authority (PA) and see violence as the only available leverage.³

Prolonged subjugation becomes the emotional and political oxygen for extremism.

2. Political Exclusion and Governance Breakdown

When legitimate institutions fail, illegitimate actors rise.

The Palestinian Authority faces deep challenges:

• No national elections since 2006

• Public approval hovering at <30% (PCPSR, 2024)

• Limited jurisdiction in Areas A and B

• Heavy dependence on international donors

• Weak control over armed groups in northern West Bank cities

Where governance is absent or mistrusted, armed groups function as local authorities—providing protection, enforcing order, and shaping identity.

This dynamic mirrors other global cases:

• Afghanistan: Taliban resurgence after delegitimized governance

• Iraq: ISIS growth in disenfranchised Sunni regions

• Nigeria: Boko Haram filling state voids

• Algeria: protracted conflict under colonial administration

The pattern is consistent: vacuums create violence.

3. The Security Paradox

Tactical success can create strategic fragility.

Israel’s incursions, raids, and arrests often disrupt imminent threats.
But each operation also:

• erodes PA legitimacy,

• generates new grievances,

• inspires retaliatory attacks,

• expands the pool of potential recruits.

Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak warned in 2010 that without separation from Palestinians, Israel risks becoming “either non-Jewish or non-democratic… or an apartheid-like state.”⁴
In 2023, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon echoed that military rule fuels radicalization faster than it can suppress it.⁵

Security actions may win battles but lose legitimacy—both locally and internationally.

4. Settlement Expansion and Spatial Fragmentation

Space shapes politics—and hopelessness.

UN OHCHR documented 24,300 settlement housing units advanced in the year ending October 2023—the highest on record.⁶
Settlement growth:

• deepens spatial fragmentation,

• isolates Palestinian towns,

• reduces agricultural and economic land,

• reinforces the sense of permanent dispossession.

When communities lose land, mobility, and hope, extremist narratives gain traction:
“You have nothing left to lose.”

Spatial inequality becomes political fuel.

5. Moral and Historical Parallels

Systems of control always claim they ensure stability. They rarely do.

From the American South’s segregation regime to South Africa’s apartheid to Northern Ireland’s conflict:

• Domination produced resistance

• Suppression produced radicalization

• Fear justified further domination

• Reform eventually became unavoidable

Prolonged occupation follows the same trajectory.

Israel’s challenge is not unique.
But its duration is: 57 years without political horizon makes the West Bank a textbook case of how control mutates into instability.

6. Lessons from Other Conflict Zones

When political agency is denied, violent agency emerges.

Each case shows the same pattern:
Control without justice produces violence; justice without inclusion cannot endure.

7. Summary — The Logic of Extremism Under Prolonged Control

Extremism thrives where legitimacy fails.

Israel faces genuine security threats.
But the system in the West Bank—checkpoints, restrictions, raids, settlements, and political exclusion—has created a context where:

• humiliation fuels anger,

• anger fuels radicalization,

• radicalization fuels tighter control,

• tighter control fuels humiliation.

This self-reinforcing loop is what scholars call a conflict trap.

No amount of tactical security can substitute for political inclusion, dignity, or long-term equality.

Conclusion — How Control Becomes a Factory of Extremism

The prolonged governance of Palestinians under military rule has created the conditions in which extremism grows. This is not because Palestinians are predisposed to violence, but because any people denied political agency, dignity, and mobility will eventually seek them by other means.

For nearly six decades, millions have lived in a system designed to be temporary but which has become the longest continuous military administration in the modern world. Temporary measures—checkpoints, permits, raids, demolitions—have hardened into a political architecture in which equality is withheld and agency is managed, not granted.

Systems of domination always claim to ensure stability.
Yet history shows they produce the opposite.
Like segregation in the U.S., apartheid in South Africa, and colonial rule in Algeria, prolonged inequality generates resistance that becomes increasingly extreme as legitimate pathways close.

Israel’s challenge is therefore not only moral but strategic:
control cannot produce lasting security.
When political voice is denied, violent voice emerges.
When representation is absent, confrontation takes its place.
When dignity is restricted, radicalization grows.

For Palestinians, the challenge is existential.
For Israelis, it is structural.
For both peoples, the current trajectory is unsustainable.

The path forward lies not in deeper control but in shared security grounded in shared justice.
Only when Palestinians have a meaningful political horizon—and when Israelis have real safety rooted in equality—can extremism lose its fuel.

Until then, the West Bank will remain a place where control produces the resistance that control was meant to prevent—a closed loop that only justice can break.

Footnotes 

1. UN OCHA, Movement and Access in the West Bank: 2025 Update (Jerusalem: OCHA, 2025).

2. B’Tselem, Demolitions and Displacement: Area C (Jerusalem, 2024).

3. International Crisis Group, The New Generation of Armed Groups in the West Bank (2023).

4. Ehud Barak, quoted in The New York Times, February 2010.

5. Associated Press, “Former Mossad Chief Says Israel Enforces Apartheid in West Bank,” 2023.

6. UN OHCHR, Report on Israeli Settlements, A/HRC/52/43 (2023).

Bibliography 

Associated Press. “Former Mossad Chief Says Israel Enforces Apartheid in West Bank.” 2023.

B’Tselem. Demolitions and Displacement: Area C. Jerusalem, 2024.

Human Rights Watch. Israel/OPT: Human Rights Concerns 2024. New York: HRW, 2024.

International Crisis Group. The New Generation of Armed Groups in the West Bank. Brussels: ICG, 2023.

UN OCHA. Movement and Access in the West Bank: 2025 Update. Jerusalem: OCHA, 2025.

UN OHCHR. Israeli Settlements: Annual Report. Geneva: UN, 2023.

World Bank. West Bank and Gaza Economic Monitoring Report. Washington, DC, 2024.