Emboldened Israeli settlers seek to tighten grip on West Bank

Chaim Silberstein, a Jewish settler, can see only one response to the Hamas attack of October 7th – expanding the settlements and solidifying Israel’s already tight grip on the occupied West Bank.

“Let us leverage this to strengthen ourselves, grow our communities and deepen our roots in our homeland,” he said in an interview in his hometown of Beit El. “That should be our primary answer to this aggression.”

Mr Silberstein is one of about 500,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the larger of the two Palestinian territories, which has had a huge upsurge in violence in the weeks since the rampage by Hamas militants through southern Israel sparked war in Gaza.

The UN said Israeli forces shot and killed eight people in the West Bank on Tuesday, bringing the death toll among Palestinians since October 7th to 182, including 46 children. Nearly 1,000 people have been forced from their villages, the UN said.

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“The settlers see the Hamas attack as an opportunity,” said Diana Buttu, a leading Palestinian lawyer. “They’re using violence to take over land and they know no one’s paying attention, because all eyes are on Gaza.”

Indeed some settlers, who consider the West Bank to be part of the Land of Israel, feel vindicated by what happened on October 7th.

“It strengthens our message that the battle here isn’t just about territory – it’s a religious conflict between Judaism and Islam,” said Miri Maoz Ovadiah, who lives in the settlement of Neve Tsuf.

“The left always believed that if Israel would only pull out of Judea and Samaria [the Israeli name for the West Bank] and give it to the Palestinians it would solve the problem,” she said. “But Hamas invaded Israel proper. That shows they just can’t accept the reality of Jews living in this region and that their end-game is to destroy all of us.”

Some settlers now feel so emboldened that they even envisage expanding into Gaza, from which Israel withdrew in 2005. Daniella Weiss, head of the radical settler organisation Nachala, spoke in an interview with the New Yorker this month of “our movement’s efforts to return to Gaza, the entire Gaza, and build settlements”.

Ms Weiss’s dream is not widely shared. But in the West Bank, the settlements which most of the international community consider illegal have been gradually expanding, which Palestinians say is destroying all hope of a two-state solution.

The surge in violence since October 7th is multifaceted, with frequent clashes between the Israel Defense Forces and armed Palestinian groups, confrontations between soldiers and demonstrators, and between settlers and local villagers.

Israeli soldiers have often responded to stone-throwing Palestinians with tear gas, rubber bullets or live ammunition.

Settler leaders acknowledge that the IDF has been more active, but claim this is because of what they perceive as the increased threat. “No one’s willing to take any more chances,” said Oded Revivi, mayor of the settlement town of Efrat.

Even before October 7th, the West Bank, which has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967, was enduring its worst violence since the end of the second intifada, or uprising, in 2005, with Israeli forces conducting almost daily raids into the territory.

With more troops now present, the risk of clashes has increased. “Of course the increased military presence contributes to the growing tension – that comes with the territory,” said Ohad Tal, a settler who is also an MP for the ultranationalist Religious Zionist party. “But it also creates deterrence.”

He pointed to an Israeli raid this month that killed four members of an alleged West Bank militant cell, who police said were planning to carry out attacks on behalf of Hamas.

But the recent violence is not just down to an expanded IDF presence. The UN and others attribute much of it to militant settlers.

“Previously there was a sense of a legal framework restraining them, but that’s beginning to erode,” said one western diplomat. “We’re also seeing a blurring of the division between the IDF and the settlers, who are often accompanied by soldiers in IDF uniform when they go on the rampage.”

They have also been buoyed by the presence of settlers in the Israeli government, widely seen as the most rightwing in Israeli history. These include finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has said the Palestinian people do not exist. “Since this government took office the settlers have enjoyed almost complete impunity,” the diplomat said.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has reported incidents recently of settlers attacking Palestinian residents, “in some cases threatening them at gunpoint or firing at them”, as well as damaging property, stealing livestock, felling trees and vandalising water tanks.

“Emboldened by the support of far-right figures in the Israeli government, settlers are likely seizing the opportunity amid the ongoing war in Gaza to push forward their efforts to take control of additional territory in the West Bank,” said a recent report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, an NGO.

Settler leaders blame a small group of hotheads whose significance has been exaggerated. “The state should hold these people to account, and that’s happening,” said Revivi, the Efrat mayor. “But we’re tending to give disproportionate attention to a small, extreme, loud minority and ... that just gives them a boost.”

Nevertheless, even Israel’s closest allies are alarmed. G7 foreign ministers last week said rising extremist settler violence was “unacceptable, undermines security in the West Bank and threatens prospects for a lasting peace”.

Settlers say they are the ones under attack. Mr Silberstein, who now carries a gun “24/7″, said his daughter lost her baby in 2019 after she was shot by Palestinian militants. He also shows visitors the Molotov cocktail he said was thrown over the fence into Beit El just before the Gaza war began.

The IDF used to show restraint about such acts, but now the gloves were off, he said. “Arabs would throw stones and firebombs into Beit El and we wouldn’t react ... but now there’s zero tolerance.”

That toughened approach is making life increasingly difficult for the Palestinians living in the settlers’ midst. “In terms of the levels of violence and harassment and the numbers of people leaving their homes, what we’re seeing now is unprecedented,” Mr Buttu, the Palestinian lawyer, said. “The settlers are using this chance to assert their supremacy.”

Meanwhile, France condemned violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank on Thursday, calling it a “policy of terror” aimed at displacing Palestinians and urging Israeli authorities to protect Palestinians from the violence.

Speaking to reporters, foreign ministry spokesperson Anne-Claire Legendre also said that about half the 100 tonnes of aid France had sent to Gaza had entered the enclave. She said it was not up to Israel to decide the future governance of Gaza, which she said should be part of a future Palestinian state – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023 and additional reporting from Reuters