ICG / September 6, 2024 [Report # 246]
Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank are on the rise, with a spike since Israel’s present government took office and another since October 2023. Western countries should use their leverage with Israel – military aid and economic ties – to help curb this growing danger.
What’s new? Israel’s devastating war with Hamas in Gaza has diverted attention from systemic and growing violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Increasingly, the settlers are acting in concert with the army or wearing army uniforms themselves. They enjoy the active support of far-right Israeli government ministers.
Why does it matter? Settler violence, which has gone unchecked for years, is both a manifestation and a driver of Israel’s settlement enterprise. Some 730,000 Israelis now live in West Bank settlements (including in East Jerusalem), rendering resolution of the conflict an ever more remote possibility.
What should be done? Outside powers invested in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should sanction violent settlers, as some Western countries have started doing, and officials enabling violence. They should curb sales of weapons used in violation of international law and raise the cost the Israeli government pays for settler violence and the settlement project.
Executive Summary
Israeli settler violence – a phrase referring to ways in which Israelis living in the occupied West Bank terrorize, harm and at times kill Palestinians and destroy their property – is at an all-time high. For decades, Israeli governments have failed to check and often tolerated such violence, but it has escalated significantly since late 2022, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government came to power, rising further after the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack on Israeli communities around Gaza. The government has boosted Israel’s settlement project, while ministers close to hardliners in the settler movement openly cheer attacks on Palestinians. Sanctions the U.S. and European countries have imposed on some violent settlers are a start but ignore that much of the responsibility lies with the Israeli state. Western countries should use their military aid to Israel and economic relations with it to impose greater costs on Israel for settlement expansion and settler violence that directly contradict their own stated policy and are making many parts of the West Bank increasingly unliveable for Palestinians.
Since the 1967 war, during which it seized the West Bank, Israel has exercised military rule over the Palestinian population and expropriated more and more Palestinian land. Today, 230,000 Israelis live in occupied East Jerusalem and about 500,000 in the rest of the West Bank, both of which are internationally recognized as occupied territory. Israeli institutions, particularly the Supreme Court, and Israeli governments, notably that of Yitzhak Rabin in the mid-1990s, have sometimes made rulings or adopted policies curbing settlement activity. But the big picture is clear. Over decades, successive Israeli governments have enabled or encouraged an entrenched occupation in the West Bank that has seen ever more settlers move in. Leaders have usually cited security as the reason to build settlements but, in some cases, they have shared settlers’ ideologically motivated drive to annex the area. Under Netanyahu’s government, land seizures in the West Bank increased dramatically even before the Hamas-led 7 October attack.
Violence by settlers against Palestinians, which for decades has accompanied Jewish settlement expansion, has also spiked in recent years. The aggressive acts, often perpetrated by gangs of armed young men, range from verbal intimidation and harassment to theft of livestock to assaults on Palestinians, in which the settlers uproot farmers’ olive trees and deny them access to land and water. In some cases, violence is motivated by revenge: when Israeli settlers are hurt in a Palestinian attack in the West Bank, for example, settlers retaliate. In two high-profile instances in 2023, after Palestinians shot and killed Israelis, settlers ran riot through the West Bank villages of Huwara and Turmus Aya, destroying property, terrorizing residents and clashing with Palestinians, despite neither village having any evident link to the shootings that supposedly triggered the attack. But if some violence is retribution, much of it aims to dispossess Palestinians, expand settlements and extinguish any hope of Palestinian statehood.
The 7 October attack and war in Gaza have made things even worse. Aided by an army recruitment drive that provided settlers with weapons and uniforms to protect their own communities as reservists, and emboldened by a far-right government committed to expanding Israeli control of the West Bank, settlers have seized thousands of acres of West Bank land from Palestinians over the past year alone. Since 7 October, there have been over 1,000 incidents of settler violence, in which over 1,300 Palestinians have been driven from their homes.
Rarely do [Israeli] courts convict settlers accused of violent acts.
Israeli institutions have largely failed to rein in settlers. The traditional security establishment has increasingly criticized the violence, warning that it and the far right’s influence stoke instability in the West Bank and strain Israel’s ties to Washington. Soldiers sometimes stand between settlers and Palestinians and may themselves face attacks by hardline settlers. Overall, though, the military’s rank and file, like the police officers whose job it is to investigate settler crimes, see their primary obligation as protecting Jewish Israelis’ interests and what they define as Israel’s security, an imperative to which the courts invariably defer. Rarely do courts convict settlers accused of violent acts. Nor is settler violence the work of a few “bad apples, as centrist politicians tend to paint it. As the army, like society, shifts rightward, instances of soldiers and settlers working in unison are more common. Plus, hardline settlers, once on the fringes of Israeli politics, today hold posts that give them power over West Bank affairs. They endorse settler violence by framing it as self-defence in a battle for land to which they say Israel is entitled.
The uptick in settler violence has led Western governments to sanction individual settlers. In a 1 February executive order, the Biden administration put in place a framework for designating individuals and entities for sanctions. It has now listed 24 individuals and entities. European capitals and the EU have followed suit. In taking such steps, Western capitals have gone further than they have been ready to go previously, signaling to Israeli officials that they regard settler violence as a serious problem requiring urgent redress.
Still, sanctioning individuals obscures the problem’s core, reinforcing the narrative of a few lawbreakers acting outside the state’s purview and taking the onus off the government. Western capitals, which mostly concur that settlements break international law, should go further. The U.S. could enforce domestic statutes already in effect, for example, by cutting assistance to Israeli military units that the U.S. knows have committed gross violations of human rights. European governments could better apply rules for trade with Israel involving goods made in West Bank settlements or ban trade in those products altogether. Both the U.S. and Europe could consider sanctioning far-right cabinet members who applaud settler violence – a politically difficult move, but one that would signal where responsibility lies. Such steps will not necessarily force an about-face in Israel’s policies. But they would raise costs for its failure to curb settler violence, and they might dent in the impunity that has helped empower Israel’s far right over decades.
Since October 2023, the West Bank has taken a back seat to the war and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, exchanges of fire on the Israel-Lebanon border and fears of a wider Middle East war. Yet the settlement expansion and surging settler violence in the West Bank is fueling Palestinian militancy and upping the likelihood of a larger outbreak of violence there. Western powers appear reluctant to take stronger action; in the U.S., in particular, any change in policy may have to wait until after the November elections and what is feasible then will almost certainly hinge on the results. For their part, European capitals are split on how to respond. Yet Western leaders’ repeated calls for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on two states have long rung hollow absent firmer measures to check the settlements that are killing off hope of Palestinian statehood.
Jerusalem/Tel Aviv/Ramallah/Washington/Brussels, 6 September 2024
FULL TEXT :
Stemming Israeli Settler Violence at Its Root | Crisis Group
