Israeli settlers are causing mayhem in the West Bank

VIOLENCE PERPETRATED by Jewish settlers in the Palestinians’ West Bank has risen sharply since October 7th. The Israeli army and the settlers have, in total, killed at least 155 Palestinians in the territory, the core of a would-be Palestinian state, since Hamas committed its atrocities against Israel. This death toll is a fraction of the number killed by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in the same period. But it is rising dangerously fast. The occupied West Bank is getting closer to boiling over.

Last year was already the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank for 20 years. Settler groups have become bolder and the army has intensified its raids on Palestinian towns and cities. But since October 7th things have dramatically worsened. At the current rate, the four weeks following the Hamas attack will have been more deadly for Palestinians in the West Bank than the whole of last year.

In particular, the war in Gaza has aroused some of the more violent groups of West Bank settlers. Some are out for revenge for Hamas’s atrocities. Others are simply taking advantage of the situation to lash out while Israel’s army is busy elsewhere—in Gaza and on the northern front with Lebanon. As a result, the West Bank’s Palestinians are feeling even more vulnerable than usual.

In Qusra, a village south-east of the city of Nablus, four Palestinians were killed by settlers on October 11th. The next day, during a funeral procession for them, two more were shot dead by settlers, according to Hani Awda Abu Alaa, the town’s mayor. “[The army] assured us over the phone that the new route was secure,” he said. “But they set a trap for us…We encountered a large number of settlers who attacked us with stones and bullets.” The mayor accused Israeli soldiers of “protecting the settlers”.

What has changed in the past few weeks is that elements of the army and those settlers who are bent on violence appear to have teamed up, according to Yonatan Kanonich of Yesh Din, an Israeli watchdog that monitors Jewish settlements in the West Bank. “People sometimes wear army trousers or shirts, they have weapons,” he explains. “You don’t understand if it’s a settler or a soldier, you can’t really tell. It’s all the same now,” he says. “If the soldiers stood back idly before, and didn’t do anything, now they are joining the settlers in their attacks.”

Some 500,000 Israelis live in settlements (excluding East Jerusalem) in the West Bank regarded as illegal by the UN and foreign governments. They are often cited as an obstacle in peace talks and plainly undermine the territorial integrity of a future Palestinian state. The building of settlements has steadily increased since the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords signed in Oslo in 1993.

Since October 7th President Joe Biden has urged Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to rein in the settlers—in vain. Extreme right-wing settlers who hold key posts in Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet seem to have no wish to calm things down. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national-security minister, grinned as he handed out rifles to Israelis to protect “settlements and the cities”. Mr Netanyahu’s current government has delighted the settlers by earmarking large sums for settler roads (from which Palestinians are generally barred) and by giving Bezalel Smotrich, an ultra-nationalist settler who is the finance minister, extra power over planning regulations in the West Bank, though the last word on this still lies with Mr Netanyahu and his defence minister.

On the ground, settlers are rarely punished for initiating the violence. In June they rampaged through Turmus Ayya, a Palestinian town, setting fire to homes and cars. One Israeli officer branded the settler attacks “nationalist terrorism”. But no serious consequences followed. Once labelled as rogue operators, violent settlers now have representation in Israel’s coalition government.

For years some Palestinian officials and foreign observers have been warning of a third intifada, or uprising—and now fear it is likely to break out. “It has already exploded,” says Tawfiq Tirawi, a former Palestinian security chief with strong ties to the West Bank’s refugee camps who fell out with Mr Abbas. “The people are brimming with anger and a revolutionary spirit,” he says.

So far unrest has been mainly limited to protests in Palestinian cities. The Israeli security forces, sometimes aided by the Palestinian authorities, have arrested thousands to keep a lid on things. Israeli checkpoints have been sharply curbing Palestinian movement.

Some Palestinian campaigners say the Israeli government, with the help of settlers, wants to depopulate the West Bank of its Palestinians. Near the big city of Hebron, 13 Palestinian villages, they claim, have been thinned out as a result of threats of settler violence. “It’s clear they are planning and organising…you are talking about an organised militia,” says Shawan Jabarin, a veteran human-rights activist in Ramallah, the Palestinians’ administrative headquarters. He says many Palestinians see the violence as part of a plan eventually to push them out of the West Bank altogether. “It’s about revenge,” adds Mr Kanonich.

When Hamas burst out of Gaza to murder Israeli communities across the border on October 7th, most of the Israeli soldiers stationed in the West Bank were regulars or conscripts. But in the next few days, as around 360,000 reservists were called up, most of the regular troops were deployed either to take part in a ground offensive into Gaza or to the northern border with Lebanon in case of war breaking out with Hizbullah, the Shia Muslim militia. Many Israeli reservists and a number of senior commanders are deeply hostile to the settlers and would like them to be restrained. But they fear that other groups of reservists left behind on the West Bank may be unable or unwilling to do this. Israel’s army and border police have rarely arrested settlers for violence, though one ringleader has been put into administrative detention without being formally charged.

The Palestinian Authority, which is supposed to administer chunks of the West Bank, is largely powerless to protect Palestinian civilians. Its senior officials are strongly against the prospect of another intifada, fearing that that would give Hamas an opportunity to become the dominant Palestinian force in the West Bank. In any case, much of the violence takes place in areas where the Palestinian security forces have no freedom of movement or jurisdiction. Palestinians reckon it is unthinkable that they would arrest or directly confront a settler.

One veteran Palestinian security official says he fears that a single incident may spark an intifada. “I smell blood in the West Bank,” he says. “I don’t know where it will be, but it is coming: the settlers are going to do something terrible.” ■

Correction (December 4th, 2023): The original version of this article mistakenly stated that America does not consider Israel’s settlements in the West Bank to be illegal per se. Under Donald Trump, the American government reversed its decades-long position on this question. Joe Biden’s administration has not overturned that decision. The story has been corrected. Sorry.