You can call attacks by extremist Israeli settlers on Palestinian villages in the West Bank outrageous. You can call them disgusting. You can call them terrorism.
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But there’s one thing you can’t call them - a surprise.
For much of the current Israeli government’s term, extremist settlers have been setting up “farms” close to Palestinian villages. The farms start out illegally, but the government later approves them. All the while, the settlers spend less time cultivating crops than burning fields and houses and harassing - even killing - Palestinians. They get away with it. Almost no one is arrested. It’s as if all this were Israeli government policy - which, despite denials, it is.
For years, this behavior has been attributed to the “hilltop youth,” a small, violent group among the settlers, identifiable by their oversized head coverings and the long fringes hanging from their clothes - the marks of politically extreme Orthodox Jews.
It’s no small group anymore. The sheer number of farms - at least 100 and perhaps as many as 240 - and the settler attacks designed to “encourage” Palestinians to leave their land provide clear evidence that this is larger than a hilltop youth problem.
We should have seen this coming.
Most are peaceful, model citizens
Israel took control of the West Bank in 1967. The first settlement was established in a Hebron hotel in 1968. From there sprouted a settlement movement that spread across the length and breadth of the territory. Today, more than half a million Israeli settlers live there.
Most are peaceful, model citizens. The largest settlements are near the old ceasefire line between the West Bank and Israel, and they function as suburbs of Israeli cities, offering cheaper housing at a time when urban housing costs are through the roof. The problematic settlements are in the interior. There, families have lived in relative isolation for 50 years.
If you use the definition of a generation as roughly 17 years, three generations of Israeli settlers have grown up next to Palestinians in an atmosphere of conflict, hatred, aggression, and fear on both sides.
A Tel Aviv University sociology professor conducted a study showing that, as the years passed, residents of isolated settlements grew increasingly extreme in their religious outlook - which included the firm belief that the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, is exclusively Jewish property. From there, it’s not a great leap to attacks by fanatics against Palestinians.
Here’s the thing: That study was conducted about 25 years ago. Since then, the process has continued and intensified.
A small number went overboard and turned to violence
I observed it while traveling around the West Bank and Gaza as a radio reporter back then. Settlements that began as farming communities for mainstream Orthodox Jews evolved over the years into centers for yeshivas, where many of the men wore black suits and hats and spent their days studying - signs of religious ultra-Orthodoxy. A small number went overboard and turned to violence.
Before we get into what to do about this, it’s important to note that the settlers might have been long gone by now if the Palestinians had accepted one of the US-backed peace deals Israel offered. In 2000 and 2008, the Palestinians could have had an independent state in nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza, with parts of Jerusalem as its capital. They turned down the offers, and now they are irrelevant.
They are irrelevant because in 2005, Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip, removing its soldiers and all 21 settlements. Instead of pursuing a peaceful, fruitful partnership with Israel, Gazans chose rule by Hamas terrorists, who fired thousands of rockets at Israel over the years and set off several wars.
Then, in what they call their crowning achievement, Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 people, raping women, butchering children, and dragging 251 hostages, dead and alive, back into Gaza.
PA indoctrinates children with vitriolic hatred
Meanwhile, in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority spent decades indoctrinating children with hatred of Israel, using textbooks containing maps that do not even show Israel’s existence while glorifying terrorists who murder Jews.
Nothing here is meant to excuse or justify atrocities by either side. But anyone who truly believes that a peaceful solution to this conflict can now be achieved simply through an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the creation of a Palestinian state there is either ignorant of recent history or willfully blind to it. With its bloody Oct. 7 invasion, Hamas killed the two-state solution. One can still strive for it, but it is, at best, generations away.
In the meantime, what can be done about the growing number of Israeli settler extremists? There are several options:
Evacuate the extremist settlers and resettle them inside Israel. That is to say, forcibly remove violent settlers who know only the West Bank and its conflicts and plunk them down in, say, Tel Aviv. Even Israelis who favor that solution would say, “Not in my neighborhood.”
Decades ago, I suggested building a new city in the Galilee or the Negev and naming each neighborhood after a settlement that would be evacuated. The idea never gained traction. I’m putting it out there again.
An option: Ban convicted violent offenders from accessing the West Bank
Send in the Israeli army to take control of the entire West Bank, expelling the Palestinians to Jordan, Egypt, or the moon. That’s the extremists’ dream, but besides being political and diplomatic kryptonite, it can’t be done. Israel is already fighting wars on all its borders and far beyond them. Setting off a war to end all wars over the West Bank could bring about the end of Israel.
That leaves an unsatisfying but practical option: Evacuate the bogus “farms,” move the extremist settlers into established, defensible locations, and hunker down for a long struggle. Under such an arrangement, any person - Israeli or Palestinian - convicted of violence against a neighbor would be banned from the West Bank for life.
It’s not ideal, but it’s the best we can do for now.
Mark Lavie has been covering the Middle East for major news outlets since 1972. His second book, Why Are We Still Afraid?, which follows his five-decade career and comes to a surprising conclusion, is available on Amazon.