The Cost of Lawlessness on the West Bank

It was a normal morning during the autumn olive harvest. On a hillside northeast of Ramallah, on November 8, a group of roughly 15 or 20 Palestinians from the village of Deir Jarir were picking dark olives, the most important agricultural product in the occupied West Bank, from low, young trees.

With them were volunteers from the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights, along with Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the leader of Torat Tzedek, a group whose name translates to “Torah of Justice.” They’d come to help with the harvest and to act as a buffer between the Palestinians and any Israeli settlers who might decide to give them trouble.

A few minutes after they began, a settler came down the hillside, cursing and shouting at everyone to leave. A shaky video from a volunteer’s phone shows him shoving villagers and Ascherman. A dozen or more young male settlers soon followed, wearing masks and waving clubs. At another nearby grove, settlers hurled stones, injuring one of the Palestinian pickers.

Next to show up was a handful of Israeli soldiers. The commander presented his phone, showing a freshly issued order declaring the groves a closed military area, off-limits to civilians. Ascherman protested, pointing to a 2006 Israeli supreme-court ruling banning the army from closing an agricultural area to Palestinian farmers in order to end a clash in which the farmers themselves were under attack.

Then the police arrived. They arrested not the settlers but Ascherman, along with a staff member of Rabbis for Human Rights named Dolev Assaf, and a volunteer wearing a T-shirt with the words Fuck Ben-Gvir, referring to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister of national security, who oversees the police. Ascherman was released under a court order banning him from the West Bank for 15 days. At the hearing, he told me, a police investigator referred to him as an “anarchist.”

This account is based on videos and on interviews with Ascherman, Assaf, and others. No settlers were arrested or identified. But the settlers succeeded in their apparent goal: The farmers of Deir Jarir were kept off their land and could not harvest their olives. The settlers went unpunished.

[Assaf Gavron: What settler violence is doing to Israel]

The threats, the violence, and the unfair outcome were what made that day outside Ramallah a normal one. The Israeli human-rights group Yesh Din (“There Is Law”) has documented 114 incidents of violence by settlers or soldiers against Palestinians engaged in harvesting olives in the 49 days from October 1 to November 18. The distinction between soldiers and settlers has blurred, particularly during the current war. Yesh Din stressed that its list of attacks on Palestinians was not complete. These were only attacks connected to the olive harvest.

The larger picture is especially grim: Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has leaped, as reported by the Israeli media and human-rights groups. Especially since the establishment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current hard-right government two years ago, “you see this explosion, this eruption” of settler violence, Sarit Michaeli, the international-outreach director for the rights organization B’Tselem, told me. And in that time, law enforcement has virtually vanished, the attorney Roni Pelli of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel told me.

Keeping statistics on the violence has been beyond B’Tselem’s resources, Michaeli said, because it would require investigating each case. Deciding what to count as an incident is also “a minefield,” she said. Some cases are obvious, such as when masked settlers entered the village of Huwara, in the northern West Bank, on December 4; set fire to a house and two vehicles; and attacked one man with staffs and stones, reportedly fracturing his skull. Other cases are harder to categorize, such as when settlers return to an olive grove and threaten farmers they’ve previously attacked, causing the farmers to flee.

Here’s one sign of the escalation: In September 2023, B’Tselem reported that over the previous two years, about 480 Palestinians had abandoned their homes and fled from six hamlets in the West Bank, in large part because of settler attacks. A little more than a year later, at the end of this past October, Palestinians from 20 additional communities and single-farm families had left their homes—a total of nearly 1,200 people in just more than half the time.   

In principle, Israel’s national police force should be a source of statistics on crimes by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank. In reality, there’s been a “sharp drop” in the number of Palestinians willing to file complaints, Yesh Din’s executive director, Ziv Stahl, told me, as trust of the police has diminished dramatically. (Spokespeople for the Israeli police and military declined to comment for this story.)

Violence in the West Bank goes both ways; Palestinians have attacked Israeli soldiers, police, and civilians. Last Wednesday, for instance, a Palestinian gunman opened fire on an Israeli bus in the West Bank, killing a 12-year-old boy and wounding three other passengers. The difference is that the Israeli army and security services seek to prevent these attacks and to catch the perpetrators. The bus attack set off a 10-hour manhunt, at the end of which the perpetrator surrendered to Israeli forces. In the case of settler violence, such efforts appear to be sporadic and half-hearted.

This problem dates to the early years of Israeli settlement in occupied territory. In 1982, then–Israeli Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp issued a report that detailed the failure of Israeli police to investigate offenses by settlers against Palestinians. As Karp told me in a 2009 interview, the army and police had regarded their role as protecting Israelis, not Palestinians.

[Gershom Gorenberg: Israel’s disaster foretold]

However difficult to record and quantify, the trend is clear: In recent years and months, settler attacks on Palestinians have grown in frequency, and the perpetrators have faced fewer consequences. Three factors are responsible. A new form of settlement has brought more radical settlers closer to Palestinian communities that are hard to protect, because they are scattered and rural. The Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza have elevated tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank. And Netanyahu’s government has put extremist settlers, including Ben-Gvir, in key positions of authority.

Until the 1990s, most Israeli settlements in the West Bank took one of two forms: large suburban towns near the Green Line—the pre-1967 border—and smaller exurbs deeper in occupied territory. The exurban settlements were intended to prevent even a partial Israeli withdrawal, and they attracted particularly ideological, religious-nationalist settlers. Yet even they actually covered only a small part of West Bank land.

In the 1990s, after the Oslo Accords, a new type of settlement sprang up. Many of these so-called outposts began as a handful of mobile homes on a hilltop near an established settlement. Their purpose was to fill in gaps between the older settlements, break up Palestinian-populated land, and thereby prevent the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state. In 1998, then–Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon set the tone in a radio interview, telling settlers they should “run, should grab more hills … Everything we don’t grab will be in [the Palestinians’] hands.” Many of the outposts were home to the most extreme of all settlers. I have been visiting settlements for many years in the course of my reporting; when I went to the outposts, I was dismayed by the radical readings of Judaism I heard—at the extreme, asserting the settlers’ right to the real estate around them, the olive trees, the fruits of the harvest. Clashes with local Palestinians increased.

Yet the outposts were mere dots on hilltops, and the settler movement’s leaders and government backers feared that the settlement project still lacked control of the countryside. Beginning a bit more than a decade ago, the movement supported another burst of new settlements—most of them farms, each populated by a family and a few young people. According to a recent Haaretz report, there were just 23 such farms in 2017—and about 90 today.

The farm campaign is backed by Amana, an organization that has played a major role in settlement building for decades. In an interview last year in a settler magazine, Amana’s head, Ze’ev (Zambish) Hever, said that the organization’s goal is to hold as much open land as possible in reserve for future settlement. To that end, most farm settlers herd goats, sheep, or cattle over large areas. These farms “hold two and a half times as much land” as all the previous settlements combined, Hever said.

Officially, the farms are illegal—they were established without government approval—but very few have been forced to evacuate, especially under the current government. Hagit Ofran, who works for Settlement Watch, an investigative project that is part of Peace Now, told me that the farm settlements are even receiving state support. Through one channel, she said, some farms have received grazing permits on what Israel had previously (and controversially) designated state-owned land. Through another channel, farms have been allocated funds for security equipment, including all-terrain vehicles, camera systems, and drones.

Drones, Ofran said, are sometimes used to frighten Palestinians’ herds and drive them off the land. Incidents of settlers from the farms harassing Palestinians are a daily matter, she asserted.

[Graeme Wood: ‘You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba’]

Many of the farms are at the southern end of the West Bank and on the hills overlooking the Jordan Valley, where pasture land fades into desert. A number are near Palestinian herding hamlets, B’Tselem’s Michaeli said—“some of the poorest” Palestinian communities. Once a farming outpost is established, she said, the nearby Palestinians start to experience incidents of arson, cut water pipes, and the like. The result, Michaeli said, is “like a war of attrition” in rural areas. And behind the scenes, the government backs one side.

Throughout occupied territory, clashes between settlers and Palestinians spiked when the war began last year. Understandably, many settlers feared that they’d be the next target of a Hamas onslaught. “I’m not discounting the trauma and fear” that Israelis, including settlers, experienced after October 7, Michaeli told me. But some settlers, she asserted, also seized a “golden opportunity” to harass their Palestinian neighbors.

Six weeks after the start of the war, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and other groups sent a letter to Netanyahu, the military chief of staff, and the national police chief listing a dizzying number of settler attacks. Nine Palestinians had been killed; 160 families had been forced to leave their homes. In the village of Kisan, the letter said, “settlers attacked village residents and fired live rounds, in front of soldiers,” wounding several residents. At Khirbet Yarza, settlers “stole about 50 cows.” The army and the police, the letter indicated, had failed to protect Palestinians in the West Bank.

In many cases, the settlers had worn army uniforms. That apparently fits another pattern: Regular army units that had been deployed in the West Bank were redeployed to fight in Gaza. To protect settlements, the military called up settlers for reserve duty and assigned them to regional defense units. So in some cases, said Pelli, the civil-rights lawyer, the “settlers who rioted” in a village are the same people as the soldiers who are supposed to deal with the incident. And in these or other cases, settlers who had previously harassed villagers apparently now did so in uniform, with even greater impunity. In July, Major General Yehuda Fox, the outgoing head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Central Command, which is responsible for the West Bank, acknowledged the increase in settler violence and admitted, “It was my responsibility to act. And, unfortunately, I did not always succeed.”

The makeup of Netanyahu’s government has contributed to the sense among settlers of being beyond the law. The ruling coalition includes two far-right parties headed by settlers. Netanyahu gave one of them, Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the Religious Zionist Party, control over most aspects of settlement, including granting legal status to outposts established in defiance of Israeli law. One such outpost is home to a Knesset member from Smotrich’s party, Simcha Rothman, a key figure in the government’s effort to eviscerate Israel’s judicial system.

Ben-Gvir, also a settler and the leader of the Jewish Power Party, received the Ministry of National Security, which administers the national police force. By law and tradition, the minister’s control of the police is limited, with operative decisions, such as how to handle an investigation or a disturbance, the sole province of professional police, not politicians. But Ben-Gvir has repeatedly crossed that line.

[Gershom Gorenberg: Netanyahu’s other war]

The effect on how the police handle—or don’t handle—settler violence is best illustrated by the case of Avishai Mualem, the officer in charge of the serious-crimes investigation unit in the West Bank police district. In a Knesset subcommittee hearing in March, Mualem testified that the number of complaints filed with the police regarding violence by settlers had dropped by half since the beginning of the war, compared with the same period the year before. In the southern sector of the West Bank, the South Hebron Hills, half of the complaints had been false, he said. He blamed “anarchists”—apparently meaning Israelis who volunteer to assist Palestinians.

In early November, the outgoing defense minister, Yoav Gallant, summoned Mualem’s superior, the commander of the West Bank district, for a meeting. Gallant reportedly meant to reprove the officer for failing to do enough about settler violence. A source in Gallant’s office told the Israeli media that Ben-Gvir had blocked the meeting—and had asserted that “there is no such concept as ‘settler violence.’”

Mualem was arrested on December 2 by an independent unit in the state attorney’s office that investigates crime within the police force. Mualem is alleged to have failed to arrest Jews suspected of terror attacks, at Ben-Gvir’s request, and leaked police-intelligence information to the minister, all in return for rapid advancement. Because of the alleged quid pro quo, the potential charges include bribery. Mualem denies the allegations. But if the claims are correct, then the police failure to crack down on settler violence is a matter of policy, dictated by Ben-Gvir.

Settlers who attack Palestinians surely suspect as much. And the price that Palestinians in the West Bank pay for the resulting lawlessness includes the loss of crops, homes, and lives.

Israelis pay a less obvious price that is nonetheless quite real. From its start, the settlement enterprise has been tainted by disregard for the rule of law. The first Israeli settlement, in the Golan Heights in the summer of 1967, received funds fraudulently allocated by a government ministry. Soon after that, the first settlement in the West Bank was established in knowing violation of international law. A 2005 report detailed how the outposts established in the previous decade, in violation of Israeli law, received funding and other support from government ministries. Enforcement of the law against violent settlers has been sporadic all along.

The goal of settlement in occupied territory has always been to change the borders of Israel. But an essential element of a democratic state is the rule of law. The failure to stop settler violence is the latest sign that in the bid to expand Israel’s territory, the settlement project corrodes the foundations of the state itself.