What is the ‘settler violence’ actually about?

“It’s self defense.”

“It’s revenge.”

“There’s two sides to the story but the media only shows one side.”

“It’s a small number of at-risk youth.”

“The military is failing to enforce the law and needs to try harder.”

“The military is complicit.”

“The vast majority of settlers are morally upstanding individuals.”

There are a lot of different opinions about this. According to human rights organizations it is a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and a successful one at that considering that 62 communities containing over four thousand individuals left their homes as a result of settler violence since October 7. The numbers don’t do justice to the extent of this success as these communities are/were composed largely of shepherds and agriculturalists whose lifestyle makes/ made use of large amounts of land.

What is this really about?

In case you weren’t aware, there has been a dilemma in Israeli political discourse for the past 60 years. Israelis want to annex the West Bank, but it is not possible due to demographic reasons. It’s not just about a religious/ nationalistic expansionist ideology; it is also based on very understandable security concerns.

The solution to this quandary is to annex part of the West Bank in a way that provides the country with strategic depth without the need to absorb the Palestinian population.  The original proposal  was the Alon plan, which sought to immediately annex small sections of the West Bank and allow the rest to return to Jordan, thus avoiding the long term occupation of a civilian population.

A more recent plan outlined by Bennett in 2012 is to annex area C and leave the Palestinians with autonomy over areas A and B.  This plan has been stealthily pursued long before area C came into existence, as area C amounts to essentially the rural/ lightly populated sections of the West Bank that were less urgent for Arafat to liberate during the Oslo years.

This is the part that I never managed to understand. In order to annex area C, there is a need to first settle it with a lot of Israeli citizens, and to prevent the Palestinian population from expanding in the meantime. The Golan Heights could be annexed immediately without first undergoing this process, but for some reason this is not possible regarding territory in the West Bank.

There is one thing that is standing in the way of this process: the high court.  Although the high court has allowed the demolition of hundreds of “illegally built” Palestinian homes on a yearly basis (despite the fact that it is nearly impossible for Palestinians to get permits to build legally in area C), it does not keep up with the pace of building being done by the PA with support of the EU. This is certainly a major motive behind the push for making the high court more rightwing.

Now this is where the settlers come in. The settlers create a loophole. The high court may be able to stop the military from demolishing Palestinian homes, but it is not capable of stopping the military from supporting and protecting the settlers while they go about their business.

It is no surprise to see a sharp spike in settler attacks during the current administration, which includes Smotrich who is a cofounder of Regavim, an organization that wrestles with the high court about issuing and carrying out demolition orders against “illegally built” Palestinian structures.

In an interview with Ari Briggs of Regavim he discusses the, “Arabs that are moving into area C and taking whatever they can get their hands on.”

“Why isn’t the government stopping them the minute they start building these structures?”

“…You have 30,000 illegal structures in Yehuda and Shomron. That is a number that just can’t be dealt with on a one on one basis.  We see in Wadi Arah a house that was knocked down. It received a demolition order 37 years ago…There was a stop order on it because the owner went to court time after time after time…In the end it got demolished after Regavim pushed for two years to get it demolished, and 1,500 people came out and rioted…This is what happens when you try and demolish one house. Can you imagine trying to do it with this large number?”

In the words of Salam Fayyad, former Palestinian prime minister,

“To build anything you need a permit and because Israel by design wanted area C out of the equation it would give very few permits. If the Palestinian state is going to emerge, how can they start from point B, the West Bank minus 60% of it?… My focus was on economic development and we are hamstrung by those policies for sure. We engaged in a cat and mouse game with the Israelis, building without permit. Sometimes they demolish and we build again…”

Frustrated by the perceived left-wing bias of the high court, the far right has chosen to take the law into their own hands via the settlers.

An anecdote I heard from a fellow activist demonstrates this approach. He called the police to inform them that a settler was on a Palestinians’ property and was cutting a hole in their fence.

“Do you have documentation of ownership of this property?”

So much is said by that question.  If a Palestinian doesn’t have a building permit from the Israeli government then the military might be blocked by the high court from evicting them, but they will allow settlers to sabotage their property and make it unsafe for the people to continue living there.

The continuation of this conversation says even more.

“If someone in Tel Aviv called to report an intruder vandalizing their property, would you also ask for documents?”

“This isn’t Tel Aviv.”

For Israelis it can be hard to believe what we read about West Bank because we see with our own eyes an Israel that functions like a normal democratic nation. But the words of the police demonstrate that things don’t work the same way on the other side of the green line. A more revealing question to ask would be, “If the person being attacked was Jewish, would you also ask for documents?

So that is essentially what is going on. If you wish to look at this in a sympathetic way, you can say that it might be ugly but it is essential for preventing a much uglier situation in the future, in which the PA controls most of the West Bank and uses this territory to launch a genocidal war against Israeli population centers.  This concern is highlighted by the way the PA continues to BS its European funders that it will remove the glorification of killing Israelis from its textbooks year after year, edition after edition. It is ironic that the Bedouin, who are viewed by Regavim as the front line in the PA’s territorial war, are not seen in this light by themselves or by urban Palestinian society. The Bedouin are largely apolitical and do not have a strong Palestinian identity, and they are looked down upon by urban Palestinian society.

One positive aspect of this situation is that it is not too difficult to stop the settlers but it takes a lot of manpower. During the time that I have spent providing protective presence in Palestinian communities, I have seen that this is an effective way to prevent incidents from occurring.