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On Friday, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians living in the West Bank, as well as a Washington Post photographer, who was hospitalized with serious injuries.

Photojournalist Heidi Levine was knocked down, beaten, and robbed of her camera equipment by masked settlers in an attack captured on video by other journalists. Those other members of the press rescued her from the attackers while Israel Defense Forces soldiers reportedly stood by.

Levine had lacerations and a wound to her hand that split her finger to the bone, according to the Post, which condemned the attack in a statement. Jasper Nathaniel, an independent journalist who helped Levine escape the attack, said that Levine also had cracked ribs, and may have been stabbed.

Assaults like this one are becoming more common in the West Bank, where settler violence — which is currently targeting the ongoing olive harvest — has worsened. Last week, another photojournalist for the news wire Agence France-Presse was beaten with rifles by settlers, and Palestinian residents of the West Bank have been shot, beaten, and terrorized while the Israeli settlers targeting them face few consequences.

Why settler violence is growing in the West Bank

As my colleague Zack Beauchamp recently explained, under international law, the settler movement in the West Bank is clearly illegal. Nevertheless, it’s continued to grow, and it has a friend in the current Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s also becoming increasingly violent. 

Two current Israeli officials, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, are settlers themselves, and both have used their offices — as ministers of finance and national security, respectively — to further the settler cause, including by making it easier for settlers to commit unchecked violence against Palestinians. 

The United Nations reported in June that settler attacks had reached “the highest sustained levels ever recorded…with [an average of] six daily attacks that have resulted in casualties, property damage or both,” and in many Palestinians being forced from their homes by settlers. In late September, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that expanding Israeli settlements and violence by settlers was “making everyday life untenable” for Palestinian residents of the West Bank.

As Zack has reported, settlements and settler violence are both intentional tactics, serving to force more Palestinians off their land, isolate the ones who stay, and push any potential two-state solution further out of reach. 

That kind of violence is likely only to worsen in the weeks to come: Israel will hold elections on October 27, which could well result in Netanyahu’s settler-friendly government losing power. As a result, the Washington Post reported earlier this month, settlers are “racing to lock down gains” before the election with ever more extreme violence.

One link for later

➨ Agentified kind of life. My colleague Adam Clark Estes turned the keys to his life over to a passel of AI agents for two weeks to see what would happen. They successfully saved him some times, he writes, largely with mundane tasks — but he left with mixed feelings about the experiment, including the possibility of contributing to a world with more AI slop.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the aerodynamic crouch used by jockeys in horse racing — known as the “martini glass position” — made race times roughly 5 to 7 percent faster? Jockeys maintain it with only a few toes resting on each stirrup.
• Today’s trivia: Who is the author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked about the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That would be the number 42 (take it up with Douglas Adams).

In the weeks and months following Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza that followed, the world’s attention turned away from the West Bank. 

Over the past three years, however, the situation in the Israel-occupied territory has worsened as Israeli settlers have carried out more violent attacks on Palestinians.

The attacks can range from acts of daily harassment and trespassing to a major mob assault in the West Bank village of Jalud that overwhelmed Israeli security forces and blocked a displaced Palestinian family from returning home. Last week, Israeli settlers shot and killed a Palestinian man.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has largely dismissed violent West Bank settlers as an issue, blaming the Jalud attack on a “handful of rioters” and referring to settlers as “juvenile delinquents” in a speech to the UN last month, in which he argued that the world should focus on violence committed by Palestinians instead.

But even as he downplays the problem, human rights organizations have documented a record level of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said that such attacks have made everyday life “untenable” for the more than 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The Israeli settlements are also clearly illegal, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained in September — but that hasn’t stopped them from expanding. 

Ahead of Israel’s elections later this month, settlers have accelerated a campaign of ethnic cleansing with the explicit backing of some Israeli cabinet ministers, led by young militant Jewish settlers that are part of a loose network known as the Hilltop Youth. 

The Wall Street Journal’s Feliz Solomon reported on the Jalud attack and has written about the role of Hilltop Youth in worsening settler violence. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the reality on the ground in the West Bank, the settler groups behind it, and how Israeli officials are responding.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell me about the last three years in the West Bank. What’s been happening?

The October 7 attack really hardened a lot of people’s views in Israel, and that’s played out in the West Bank in a number of ways. 

One is that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which has some powerful members who are settlers themselves, became much more overtly supportive of expanding the Jewish settlements. 

The second thing that changed was basically a total breakdown of trust, both between Jews and Arabs, and also between Jews and the state, because a lot of people felt that they were really on their own in terms of security. 

All of this created a really combustible environment. There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.

What does that total impunity look like? We often hear the term “settler violence.” What does that mean?

There’s really a whole spectrum of violent actions. It’s mostly by younger male settlers. There are some acts of daily harassment, like trespassing on Palestinian property, vandalism, stalking people, blocking roads, and preventing access to resources like water wells. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are also acts of extreme violence. 

There have been some very serious physical assaults. Settlers throwing rocks with slingshots. Last year, there was a viral video of an elderly woman who was beaten with a stick. She was hospitalized for days. And lately, we’ve been seeing more mob violence where a large group of settlers will raid a Palestinian village. They’ve set mosques and other property on fire. 

Just to be clear, there’s violence by Palestinians too, but we’re really seeing an alarming surge of violence by settlers that’s often unpunished, and increasingly it’s happening when settlers go into Palestinian areas where they’re not supposed to be.

You reported on an attack that happened last week in the West Bank near the Palestinian village of Jalud. Tell me what happened.

Over the summer, some young settlers who are associated with a group called the Hilltop Youth set up an encampment around three houses on the outskirts of the Palestinian village, Jalud, and essentially besieged the houses. They blocked their access to essential goods and harassed the residents until, in late July, they felt so unsafe that they fled.

Two of those houses belonged to the Tubasi family. In early September, Israel’s high court ordered the state to ensure their safe return, and in late September, they tried to go back. We spoke with Wael, who’s one member of the family, and also with their lawyer about what happened when they tried to go back. 

A few dozen [Israeli] security forces were deployed to escort them home in the middle of the night, and when they got there, they found that the house was totally ransacked. They showed us before and after pictures, and the windows were smashed, the doors were broken, electrical wires were cut, and there was just debris all over the place.

When they came inside for the first time in about two months, they were walking through the property looking at the damage with flashlights, and they’d only been there for a few minutes when suddenly they were surrounded by a mob of settlers. They said at first that there were about 50 settlers around the house, and the military later said that there were more than a hundred people that took part in what they called a riot. 

The authorities told the family to take cover deeper inside the house, and they hid inside a stairwell as the soldiers tried to force these settlers to retreat, but they were shouting and throwing rocks at the house, and then, according to Wael, they even started climbing in through the windows. At that point, the authorities told the family to go upstairs, all the way up to the roof and to hide in a corner of the rooftop. 

Wael explained what he saw up there. He was looking down and he saw the soldiers battling it out with this large group of settlers and this thick cloud of tear gas and loud bangs from stun grenades.

“There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.”

Eventually, the security forces realized that they weren’t getting the situation under control. They had to get this family out of there. They took them back downstairs and outside and put them in a military vehicle, but then the settlers surrounded the vehicle and they were rocking the car. They slashed the tires so that [the family] couldn’t leave. Then the soldiers had to move them into an armored military vehicle and eventually they got them out. 

A short while later, not long after they had escaped, they started receiving video messages from some of their neighbors that showed what happened after they left, which was that their car and their house had been set on fire.

All right, so the Israeli authorities in the form of soldiers were trying to help this Palestinian family legally return and settlers violently blocked them. This is settlers versus the authorities. What do we know about who these settlers are and what is motivating them?

This was a very large group. We know of three people who were detained in this incident. All of them were teenagers. The youngest one I believe was 15 years old. 

A lot of the harassment in this area comes out of a nearby settlement called Esh Kodesh and smaller, more informal settlements around it that are called outposts. And these outposts are usually pretty crude encampments. They often start with just tents or a camper van or a trailer with no electricity and no water. And the people who choose to live in these places tend to be very young, very extreme ideological settlers.

You mentioned something called the Hilltop Youth. Who are they?

The Hilltop Youth is a loose network of settlers that live outside the mainstream, and they often have much more extremist views than the mainstream settler movement. It’s an offshoot of religious Zionism, which is one of the main ideologies of the settler movement, and it sort of fuses the ideas of Orthodox Judaism with ultranationalism. 

The Hilltop Youth take these ideas to the extreme, and I’ve spoken with a bunch of them myself. They believe that they’re on a divine mission to reclaim the Holy Land for Jews, and they’ll cite parts of the Torah and other religious texts that they interpret as empowering them to take the land back and even to use violence. They see it as a preventive type of self-defense, and they see themselves as protecting all other Jews.

These are young people, some of them teenagers. Where are they coming from? Why are their parents not grounding them? How has this been allowed to unfold the way it has?

It’s a good question, and I should say also that not all Hilltop Youth are violent, but a lot of the violence that’s committed by Jews in the West Bank does come from this group, and they come from all over the place. Some of them grew up in the settlements, and then as teenagers, they kind of wandered and they struck out on their own. And then there are others who come from all over Israel. 

A lot of the Hilltop Youth, we’re finding, are kind of troubled kids. Sometimes they’re dropouts from strict religious schools, sometimes they have behavioral issues or ADHD, and they just didn’t really fit in. We heard from some kids who said that they found out about the outposts by word of mouth, like someone at their school had invited them to come for the weekend and they’d come and they’d stay a few days and eventually they’d start spending more and more time there until at some point they’re just living there. 

There are a number of NGOs that recruit young kids to come work as farm hands on agricultural outposts in the West Bank, and some of those are in these areas that are more prone to radicalization. These organizations present themselves as very innocent in that they’re identifying kids that need help and are bringing them to a place where they will learn some discipline and they will have a purpose and they’ll have something to do. But that often puts them into a more extreme environment.

In the case of the family you profiled in Jalud, it’s clear that the Israeli authorities, in the form of soldiers, attempted to help the family get back to their home. How does this typically play out, though? How do Israeli soldiers typically respond when settlers attack Palestinians?

There have been a number of high-profile examples of video footage circulating that appears to show Israeli soldiers either standing idly by or even, some would argue, siding with the settlers. 

In one recent example, there was a video that showed some soldiers praying alongside settlers who had besieged the home of a Palestinian American man, and that was actually not very far from where the Tubasi house is. The military said that it was looking into it to determine whether disciplinary action needed to be taken. 

In general, military officials acknowledge that this violence by settlers is a big problem, and the security establishment definitely does not support what’s happening here. They see it as getting in the way of counter-terrorism efforts and overall efforts to bring stability to this very volatile area. 

I’ve heard this directly from military officers, but on the ground there does seem to be a breakdown of discipline in some cases and a lack of clear instruction in other cases. Some soldiers simply don’t know how to deal with threats from other Israelis, especially really young ones, as you pointed out. It’s just not what they’re trained to do.

Do you think the government could put a stop to these attacks by settlers if it wanted to, or has the government lost control?

This problem has gotten so big that it’s going to be very difficult to solve without significant backlash, but I have spoken with a number of former Israeli security officials who say yes, much more could be done — starting with a more frank acknowledgement of what’s happening, clearer law enforcement procedures, and more disciplinary actions.

Perhaps it’s just hope springing eternal, but it seems that in the last week alone, there has been a significant step toward people finally understanding and accepting the incalculable toll of Israel’s war crimes and mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

The progress has been twofold, courtesy of a one-two punch from the music and film industries: Robert Kraft Streisand-effected himself and Ed Sheeran in the wake of Macklemore’s support of Palestine. In the days that followed, Sheeran’s other opening acts dropped out of his tour, leaving his remaining dates in limbo and egg all over his face. Musicians and public figures followed, incentivized to stick their necks out for Palestine as a simultaneous middle finger to the average American businessman. Then, Israel threatened to strip “NAZA” co-directors Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham of their citizenship — or worse — if they return to the country, implying that the contents of the documentary making waves in the film festival circuit are really as damning as early critics say. 

Some might call that fate, others coincidence. Really, it’s the result of the tireless efforts by activists, journalists, aid workers and artists globally who have been desperately trying to direct the world’s attention to the human rights crises in Gaza for nearly three years. But no matter what you call it, it’s working.

“Damning” is an understatement for the magnitude of the atrocities Szor and Abraham lay bare — ceaseless, calculated, and escalating crimes committed by the Israeli state. Throughout the film, which screens at this year’s New York Film Festival, Abraham interviews 24 different members of Israeli military intelligence about their day-to-day operations, learning the extent of the inhumanity running the show. Given Israel’s pattern of retaliation against dissenting voices, the interviews are filmed on the condition of anonymity, with voices digitally altered and conversations taking place under the cover of night on the rooftops in Tel Aviv. 

Naturally, this makes the film’s contents easier to refute for those who choose to deny the obvious. But the horrible and useful thing about the world today is that everyone has a camera. Palestinian suffering has been well and faithfully documented — including by Szor and Abraham, two of the four co-directors of the Oscar-winning 2024 documentary, “No Other Land.” But the most frequent and at-risk chroniclers of this critical point in history have been Palestinians displaced from Gaza and the West Bank, hoping to preserve the memory of their homes, lives and families, and hold the world’s attention without breaking its gaze. Now that their horrific plight coincides with Abraham and Szor’s second documentary, that goal stands to become a reality. But nothing will change if the world doesn’t listen up, harden their stomachs and stop pretending that the mass murders happening in Gaza, as “NAZA” so plainly puts it, are anything less than systematic.

Most pointedly, “NAZA” is titled for an Israeli military acronym referring to how many civilians will be killed in an airstrike. Throughout the film, officers rattle off numbers with all the nonchalance of times tables: 10, 15, 20, 25 NAZA, all expandable in Israel’s post-October 7 military escalation. While the state rattles off arguments about Hamas terrorists using human shields to avoid being killed, or going to great lengths to hide themselves, the officers interviewed report that the 75,000-plus Palestinians who have been killed in less than three years were considered disposable. The NAZA were no mere accidents, no casualties of war. They were tens of thousands of innocent people deemed complicit in the actions of a few, and therefore, their lives were of no value to Israeli military officials.

Even more frightening are the claims made about how this information is gathered. According to the interviewed personnel, the number of NAZA is determined by advanced, invasive surveillance — a combination of Gaza building codes that provide all the information needed about a structure’s inhabitants, and subcontracted AI programs that sort through data. The AI analyzes known Hamas agents’ phones for patterns in their cellular signals and compares them to hundreds of thousands of others in Gaza. If someone happens to live near a Hamas operative, or spends enough time in their general vicinity, the cell signal could very well lead the AI to determine that this person is also working for Hamas. The likelihood of that being true is slim, but that doesn’t matter when the mission is to kill anyone who might even tangentially, unknowingly associate with the organization. 

In an evocatively titled section of the film, “Daddy’s Home,” Israeli military officers describe hacking into young girls’ phones and listening, waiting for them to exclaim with happiness that their father — a person the Israeli military believes is tied to Hamas — has returned. That moment, amid the pure and innocent joy of a child reunited with their parent after a long day, is when the airstrike happens. To make sure they’ve accomplished their mission, Israeli officials keep listening, hearing the agonizing screams of mothers trying to save their daughters, and families begging for help and salvation. “It was like a video game,” one official tells Abraham.

This is merely the tip of the “NAZA” iceberg, and at times, it feels alarmingly and disappointingly difficult to compartmentalize it all at once. Not only do we learn swaths of dreadful, unforgettable information — much of which, the film notes, was previously published in the Guardian, Local Call and +972 magazine to little global reaction — but we come to understand AI warfare is not a threat, but a reality. It’s, admittedly, a lot to take in. 

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But that is also the film’s crucial challenge. “NAZA” asks its audience not only to withstand 77 straight minutes of horrifying information about the senseless deaths of Palestinian men, women and children, but to feel their spirit in every last syllable, and hold onto it when we go. We’re tasked with gauging our relative comfort with how much the world has changed in the three years since October 7, and how much bleaker things have become. Ignorance hasn’t done jack sh*t, and hasn’t made anybody’s lives any better. To continue to turn the other cheek now isn’t convenience; it’s cowardice, just as it always has been. That it’s taken this long to reach what could be a watershed moment speaks volumes about how every passing day furthers humanity’s desensitization. 

In the film, Abraham asks one of the Israeli military officers if he thinks that these systematic murders — carried out knowingly alongside efforts to turn Gaza to rubble and deprive Palestinians of shelter, food, water, housing and basic safety — constitute a genocide. “Yes, absolutely,” they reply. In the background, residents of Tel Aviv go about their daily lives mere miles from the catastrophic anguish in Gaza. Here, Szor and Abraham quietly demonstrate the lengths and risks of their allyship, pitting their relatively comfortable upbringing in Israel against their fervent quest to unlearn a propagandistic way of living. Their lens finds people walking on their treadmills, talking on the phone, laughing with one another. Families gather; special moments are cherished. But these sights are drained of their warmth, depicted with a cold, eerie hum that, when it bleeds into the roar of suffering miles away, becomes a deafening cacophony.

 

But one doesn’t have to be near the desert to hear the dissonance. The sound is here, too. It’s right next to you, wherever you are, if you only listen for it. Those who have tried to tune out the blaring pandemonium — to ignore the cruel, senseless violence enacted upon a Palestine that deserves peace — won’t be able to stave it off much longer. It seems that much of the Western world is waking up, roused by that sonorous noise that they just can’t seem to shake. And with a newly announced, calculated theatrical rollout to “bring ‘NAZA’ to audiences as quickly as possible,” there is, at long last, a real chance that this wave is still rising, and won’t reach its crest. To quote some very succinct words from Macklemore, something I never believed I’d do but am very fortunate to be able to: “When the news cycle moves on, which it will, don’t move with it.”

“NAZA” screens from September 26 at the New York Film Festival, with a limited release in New York September 30, Los Angeles October 9, and a nationwide rollout to follow.

The post “NAZA” could be the tipping point in the public perception of Gaza appeared first on Salon.com.

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, is a Christian Zionist who believes that Israel is biblically entitled to all of the Holy Land. He’s pretty much the last person you’d expect to condemn Israeli conduct in the West Bank, where settlers have spent decades using a combination of construction, coercion, and outright violence to push Palestinians off their own land.

Yet earlier this month, Huckabee went out of his way to denounce the behavior of some settlers — describing them as “band of terrorists” who had committed “horrible activities of criminal nature.”

Huckabee’s surprising outrage stems, in part, from their recent choice of victims. Last month, settler extremists besieged three Palestinian homes in the village of Qusra, including one belonging to American citizen Lou Ridi. About two weeks later, masked settlers beat up a NBC News crew while they attempted to interview Aida Ahmed Abdullah, a Palestinian who had herself had been forced from her home by settler aggression.

But Huckabee’s outrage reflects something deeper. Settler terrorism, once relatively uncommon, has exploded in severity in recent years — with wink-nudge support from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

The violence is so egregious, and so indefensible, that retired Israeli generals have compared the settlers to Nazis and demanded action to stop them. In mid-September, the INSS — Israel’s top national security think tank — issued a strategic alert warning that “Jewish terrorism” had become a national crisis and even an existential threat to Israel’s future.

“As history teaches us, democracies that fail to restrain radical forces within them do not survive,” the alert argues.

In Washington, settler terrorism against Palestinians has flipped the Israel debate on its head. Congressional Democrats, who have long been divided over the Gaza war, have come together to support legislation that would impose sanctions on Israeli politicians and corporations implicated in the violence. The Trump administration, the most pro-settlement White House in American history, has very conspicuously stood aside as Canada and European nations implemented sanctions of their own.

For now, the settlers are mostly getting away with it — because the government wants them to.

For now, the settlers are mostly getting away with it — because the government wants them to. While basically all Israeli governments have allowed settlements to grow, the current Netanyahu government includes coalition partners unusually aligned with their most radical goals: the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. So long as they see settler terrorism as a useful tactic toward that end, and have the ability to stymie preventive measures and block accountability, the attacks will continue.

But if Netanyahu loses Israel’s election in October, and Democrats retake the White House in 2028, things might change dramatically. The political stars could align for a serious effort to change what Israel is doing in the West Bank — not just attempting to merely slow settler violence, but also challenge the broader apparatus of occupation that makes it possible.

In “conversations that I’ve had with congressional Democrats and their staff, this [settler violence] is the No. 1 issue that comes up, the thing they’re angriest about,” said Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer at the center-left Israel Policy Forum. “If you have a Democrat in the White House, this is something the Israelis are going to have to deal with — whether they want to or not.”

The rise of settler terrorism

Under international law, Israeli settlement in the West Bank is illegal: Countries are not permitted to move their own civilians into territory they occupied after a war. However, under successive Israeli governments — including the more peace-minded ones — the settlements have continued to grow. Many of those closest to the border function as suburbs of major Israeli cities; some further east, like Ariel, look like small cities in their own right. During the era when a negotiated solution looked possible in the near term, their growth was often seen as part of a bid to dictate the eventual borders of a Palestinian state — or blow up negotiations entirely — with “facts on the ground” that would be hard to undo.

While individual settlers live there for all sorts of reasons — for many, the housing costs are cheaper — the political movement overall exists to seize land from Palestinians and slam the door on the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict. 

On a macro level, the physical placement of the settlements cut Palestinian communities off from each other, making it hard — basically impossible — to construct a contiguous Palestinian state so long as they remain standing. On a micro level, settlements are often placed in ways designed to push Palestinians off their land — by, for example, putting Palestinian-owned land into no-go zones enforced by the Israeli military. And politically, the population growth in settlements creates a powerful constituency in Israeli politics whose entire way of life depends on preventing a peace agreement that would require settlement evacuation.

Settler violence is the literal bleeding edge of this overall strategy. Violent settlers live in ramshackle communities, tiny villages on hilltops or herding outposts encroaching on Palestinian farmland, that are often illegal even under domestic Israeli law. The people living there are the hardest of the hardcore settlers: fanatically devoted to the idea that the land is theirs by divine right, and that they have every right to use force to push their Palestinians neighbors out.

Their tactics include everything from killing Palestinian livestock to cutting off their water supply to burning down their homes to outright beating and killing them. The violence is autonomous, in that individual settlers decide on what to do, but enabled by the overall strategic plan of the settlement movement.

“There’s no hierarchy deciding that this [specific] house will be attacked. The decision is that this area is an area of all our interest, so we need to subsidize herding farms there. And those bring violence, which lead to displacement” of the local Palestinians, said Yehuda Shaul, co-director of the Israeli think tank Ofek and a leading observer of the settlement movement.

Settler terrorism is not new, but it used to be comparatively rare. In 2012, Natan Sachs — a leading expert on Israeli politics at the Middle East Institute think tank — wrote an essay warning that the growth of the settlements, and the radicalization of some settlers, were creating a dangerous new violent movement of settlers.  

“Back then, it was a fringe thing among settlers,” Sachs tells me. “It has become much more mainstream.”

Israel’s current government, which took power in late 2022 and is by far the most radical in Israeli history, bears enormous responsibility.

“This particular government is enabling settler violence beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” said Yousef Munayyer, the director of the Israel/Palestine program at the Arab Center think tank in DC.

Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, a settler living in a reportedly illegal home and a longtime advocate of ethnically cleansing West Bank Palestinians, is currently in charge of civilian administration in the West Bank. In effect, this allows him to use state resources to orchestrate a historic expansion of settlements across the West Bank — including the illegal outposts that many violent settlers call home. 

“This is his life’s work,” said Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine at the International Crisis Group. “He’s completely dedicated to this and he knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, also a settler, is if anything more extreme: For years, he hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, a terrorist who massacred 29 Palestinians at a holy site in Hebron, in his living room. Ben Gvir has, among other things, instructed the police forces under his authority not to arrest violent settlers and given thousands of weapons to settlers themselves.

In theory, the Israeli military and intelligence establishment should be a check on the extremists. Settler violence is not only illegal, but also a national security threat. Settler violence prompts Palestinian retaliation and, at times, even targets Israeli soldiers and police themselves. It can lead to international incidents, like those seen recently, that undermine Israel’s support with key allies abroad. The Israeli military is the ultimate authority in the West Bank; it could act on these concerns if it so chose.

In practice, however, they’re of little help. Israeli government data shows that, between 2005 and 2025, 94 percent of all investigations into settler violence fail to yield an indictment. The military will facilitate illegal settlements’ connection to the electrical grid. And its ranks are increasingly made up of “national religious” Jewish Israelis, a demographic that’s theologically on board with the settlement enterprise, versus more secular Israelis who primarily see the conflict through a security lens.

And after October 7, the Army dealt with a manpower crisis by significantly increasing the number of “regional defense units” — essentially bands of armed settlers that can be tasked with local security in the West Bank in lieu of regular soldiers. It emboldens violence in exactly the way you’d think.

So while the recent spike in settler terrorism can fairly be blamed on the Netanyahu government, the phenomenon itself is an outgrowth of the structural settlement growth Israel has condoned or actively pursued for decades.

“It’s all one set of policies,” said Ilan Goldenberg, senior vice president and chief policy officer at J Street, an American lobby that favors a two-state solution to the conflict.

How the violence could lead to a deeper break between America and Israel

Other than Israel’s government itself, the most important player in all this is the American government. As Israel’s chief diplomatic ally and military supplier, it has immense leverage that could be used to affect the West Bank (or anywhere else). Thus, changing American politics on Israel could quite directly produce a transformation on the ground.

Since October 7, Gaza has dominated American discourse over Israel — and it is arguably the most divisive issue in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Many Democrats (and a majority of rank-and-file voters) call Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide, a label others in the party strongly reject. While the Trump administration and most elected Republicans have stood behind Netanyahu, a faction — including Vice President JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and a significant chunk of younger GOP voters — have grown increasingly critical of American military support for Israel’s actions.

But settler violence, specifically, might as well be another political universe. 

On the Democratic side, there is basically unanimous condemnation of what’s going on in the West Bank. Even Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), a leading pro-Israel advocacy group, believes that Israel is erring here.

“DMFI unequivocally condemns attacks by violent Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel’s government must move beyond just words and take definitive action to protect civilians, and ensure that those responsible are held accountable,” Brian Romick, DMFI’s president, told me.

Last year, US Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) — an influential progressive pro-Israel voice in Congress, where he’s long represented some of the nation’s largest Jewish communities — co-authored the West Bank Violence Protection Act, legislation that would sanction violent settlers and their enablers. The law would effectively codify an executive order issued by President Joe Biden in 2024, but scrapped by President Donald Trump upon taking office. 

The key question going forward is what this political dynamic means for policy.

More than 170 House Democrats and 45 senators have cosponsored it, the vast majority of Democrats in both chambers. Goldenberg, whose J Street outfit has been a leading voice supporting the law, says rallying support for it has been easy.

By contrast, no Republicans have cosponsored the bill. When you combine that with Trump reversing the Biden order, and his broader enabling of settlement expansion, you might think that the administration would be willing to take Israel’s side in the argument over settler violence.

Yet that’s not been the case — and it’s not just Huckabee freelancing. Earlier this month, when Canada, the UK, and France imposed significant sanctions targeting settlements, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointedly refused to condemn these allied policies, saying that neither he nor Trump had any comment on their decisions.

“Obviously, we’re not going to do what the UK did. [But] we share the goal of stability: we don’t to see an uptick in violence or conflict or tensions in the West Bank,” he told reporters on September 8.

Settler terrorism, then, has a remarkable effect on both parties: Democrats in Congress go from fractious on Israel to united, and the Trump administration goes from Israel’s chief defender to a tacit enabler of allied pressure campaigns against it. Why?

I put this question to all the experts I spoke with, and everyone offered a basically similar explanation: that settler violence is morally and politically straightforward. Even the most hardline pro-Israel advocate, ones who rationalize mass civilian killing in Gaza as necessary to destroy Hamas and restore Israel’s security, blanch at videos of armed settlers beating up on defenseless Palestinians, which cannot be justified on the same grounds. Virtually nobody in American politics wants to be in a position of having to defend this kind of thing, and many of the most influential pro-Israel voices on the American side do not share the settlers’ extremist ideology.

“There aren’t two sides…it’s just one side terrorizing the other,” Israel Policy Forum’s Koplow said. “There are literally WhatsApp groups and Signal groups run by the Israelis perpetrating the violence where they themselves boast about it.”

On the White House side, there are also Trump priorities that the violence complicates. In his comments about the allied sanctions, Rubio said instability in the West Bank “has implications as well on our ability to make progress on Gaza, on the 20-point plan, and the Board of Peace that we’re very committed to.” However serious you think these initiatives are — there are very good reasons for skepticism — the White House seems to at least be publicly concerned about violence derailing it.

The key question going forward is what this political dynamic means for policy. While the Trump administration may not be willing to go out of their way to defend settler violence, they’re not exactly going out of their way to try and shut it down either. Huckabee’s comments about “terrorists” are symbolically significant, but the reversal of the Biden executive order speaks about the limits of this stance for actual policy. 

Democrats, by contrast, are clearly animated by the issue and willing to act on it. The question is what exactly those actions entail — especially if they retake Congress in 2026 and the White House in 2028.

Here, there’s real disagreement between the experts. 

Skeptics suggest that there may be less substance here than it appears. Targeted sanctions against some violent settlers might matter on the margins, but unless they go after the settlement enterprise and US-Israel relationship more broadly they’re leaving the root cause of the problem intact. In the worst case, a focus on settler violence specifically might even be counterproductive — functioning as a kind of pressure release valve that allows Democrats to satiate their increasingly Israel-critical base without actually doing much that matters.

Such a focus “creates, in a lot of ways, more problems than it solves,” the Arab Center’s Munayyer said. “It reinforces this idea politically that it’s too risky politically to hold accountable the actual decision-makers in the Israeli government, and the real processes at play here — which are driven by the state.”

Others see this as a misread of the political dynamics — one that Sachs of the Middle East Institute called “too cynical by half.” On this line of thinking, targeted action on settler violence is just morally necessary: the violence is really terrible, and if the United States can curtail it even on the margins it matters.

Moreover, they argue, something like sanctions on West Bank settlers opens the door to broader action: creating a real precedent for punishing bad actors in Israel that could create a kind of ratchet dynamic for future action taking on the deeper Israeli policies behind settler violence.

It’s hard to say in advance which of these views are right. Experts in both camps say there’s a lot of uncertainty here: we don’t know what will happen this November, let alone who the Democratic 2028 nominee will be or whether they’ll win. A Democratic trifecta with President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would likely be quite different than, say, a divided government with President Mark Kelly.

But either way, how Democrats handle the settler violence question could well be an indicator of where the party is going to go on the US-Israel relationship more broadly — and, by extension, the future for Israelis and Palestinians alike. 

At the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, the documentary NAZA received a 25-minute standing ovation. In Israel, it’s all anyone’s talking about, even though few have actually seen it. 

Made by two Israeli filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, the movie takes place on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, where 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence agents and soldiers discuss things that they did in Gaza and how they did them.

As Bilge Ebiri writes in his Vulture review of NAZA, “One officer recalls blowing up a building with 500 people in it to go after one target. They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll.”Another interviewee agrees that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. 

Since its reception in Venice, the film has faced harsh criticism from the Israeli government — with at least one politician issuing a call to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. 

Shany Littman is a journalist for Haaretz in Israel and has been reporting on the film’s reception. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the conversation around the movie in Israel. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Have you seen the documentary NAZA?

I haven’t. I asked the PR person of the movie to send me a link and it’s not possible. I mean, considering the huge storm that came out, they’re probably rethinking how to handle the distribution of the film.

What I hear you saying is it’s safe to assume most people in Israel have not actually been able to see the movie. Is that right?

Yes, that’s correct.

But they are aware of what is in it. Let’s talk about the conversation around this movie in Israel. What’s the reaction been like?

You can find many different types of criticism from all sides of a political range. It’s not only right-wing people or people who are supporting the war. The claims are first that maybe the film itself is not verified. They have witnesses that are anonymous that they didn’t verify well enough. But I think most people — they just feel that this is an opportunity for all the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli, and [antisemitic] people in the world to attack Israel. Israelis from all sides are afraid of the way the world is seeing us at the moment. 

Is anybody in Israel saying, “Hey, we’re glad that they did it. We’re glad that they made this movie”?

Yes. There are people who are supporting Yuval and Rachel, the filmmakers, supporting their right to criticize, to investigate. As a liberal country, we should be able to investigate ourselves, to criticize ourselves. They are doing their work as journalists. 

There has also been a reaction from the Israeli government at a more official level. What has the Israeli government said about this film?

“There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening.”

The first person to react was the minister of culture. He said that the nationality of Yuval and the filmmakers should be revoked. That they should not be Israeli citizens anymore. There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening. I’m completely horrified by this. 

I already saw some clips on social media by people who were filming themselves where…you could see a house [in the background] and someone was saying, “You can all come here. This is the house of Rachel Szor’s parents. They live here and you can come and do whatever you want. I invite you all to come here and take revenge.” And there were several clips with the same message. 

I’m guessing they’re not coming back to Israel at the moment. I think it has become really dangerous for them to be here, and it’s a new level. I published an article about this. I didn’t do the movie. I just published an article supporting them in Haaretz and my mother is afraid that someone will attack me. The echoes of this event, they’re going very far now.

Are you frightened for the filmmakers if they choose to return? Do you fear for their safety?

Yes, absolutely. Especially because the elections are coming in a month. Many Israelis see this day as like the red line or the moment where we will be able to know if we can still live in Israel as a democracy, as a liberal democracy, or that the country has changed in a way that many [civil] rights and liberties that we think we have are gone. And that this country is not a democracy anymore. And so I think this is also why the blood is boiling.

This is a very, very tense and fragile moment. And for them I assume it is even more crucial and I hope they will not do anything that will put them in danger.