Yagil Levy
Foreign Policy / October 4, 2024
Attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank have surged since Oct. 7, 2023.
As Israel marks a year since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza, Israeli security officials are increasingly worried about the surge in violence perpetrated by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. In July, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, the outgoing head of the Israeli military’s Central Command—which includes the West Bank—declared that “nationalist crime has reared its head under the cover of war and has led to revenge and sowed calamity and fear in Palestinian residents who do not pose any threat.” A few weeks later, Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, warned the country’s leaders that Jewish terrorism in the West Bank was out of control and had become a serious threat to national security. Bar implicitly referred to policies promoted by extreme right-wing ministers, primarily Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who openly advocate for the annexation of the West Bank.
But there’s something misleading about these statements. They portray the settlers who commit violence as if they’re operating outside the norms of Israeli occupation, as if the official actions of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) itself are not violent and soldiers are not involved. This framing allows the IDF, the sovereign power in the West Bank, to evade responsibility for the attacks. When security officials or left-center politicians criticize the military itself for failing to address the violence, this again serves to draw a line between the military and the violence itself.
The truth is obviously more complicated. Since the 2000s, two armies within the IDF have gradually formed; alongside the official army, a policing force has emerged in the Israeli-controlled West Bank. This policing army comprises an infantry brigade permanently stationed in the region, units of the border police, and settler militias armed and trained by the IDF for ostensibly self-defense. Unlike the official army, this policing army is informally controlled by a matrix rather than a hierarchical structure, characterized by a network of informal agencies, the most important of which are the settlers’ communities and their politically powerful leadership.
While the official task of this policing army is, among other things, to protect both Palestinian and Jewish communities, its unofficial task is to promote the quiet annexation of parts of the West Bank and prevent territorial contiguity of the Palestinian Authority. To this end, the policing army needs settler violence to carry out what official Israel cannot.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem described this dynamic in a 2021 report titled “Settler Violence = State Violence.” It identified an integrated process for taking over Palestinian land, consisting of the state’s official acts combined with settler violence. “[S]ettler violence is a form of government policy, aided and abetted by official state authorities with their active participation,” the report stated. This is why such violence is systematically tolerated. Between 2005 and 2023, only 3 percent of investigations launched into ideologically motivated offenses by Israelis against Palestinians led to convictions, according to the rights group Yesh Din. This number primarily reflects the period before Ben-Gvir gained control of the police.
In 2022, when Israel was led by a center-right government under Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, the monthly average of settler attacks on Palestinians stood at about 71, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Though that’s a significant number, the public discourse on this issue was relatively muted in this period, and top security officials did not issue warnings. That figure surged to about 110 after the start of the war in Gaza last year and until August of this year.
It follows that, rather than discussing settler violence in general, we should distinguish between two forms: functional and dysfunctional. Functional violence is the type that serves the state’s goals—including violence instrumental to land grabs—and is therefore tolerated. In contrast, dysfunctional violence is extremely aggressive and escalates to a degree that threatens the security order in the West Bank, which official Israel seeks to preserve, and significantly harms the country’s international legitimacy.
Dysfunctional violence includes organized and lethal attacks by settlers on Palestinian communities, such as the recent one in the town of Jit. Dozens of settlers, some masked, set fire to buildings and cars and hurled rocks and firebombs. This kind of attack does not serve Israel’s concrete goal. Similar examples include settlers’ attacks against the IDF. It is this dysfunctional violence that Israeli officials condemn.
In contrast, functional violence is tolerated. If readers are still unconvinced, the case of community displacement may serve as a compelling example. According to B’Tselem, since the beginning of the war, some 19 isolated Palestinian communities and single-farm families, comprising about 1,100 residents, were forcibly displaced. In all cases, the families left following violence committed by settlers or threats thereof, in some instances accompanied by soldiers.
Whether the IDF is able to prevent such violence is an open question. The military admitted following its inquiry into the attacks at Jit that troops received prior warning but did not act as expected to stop the assailants at the scene. Nevertheless, when the displaced communities demanded to return to their lands under IDF protection, the military could have facilitated the process. Instead, it prevented their return and even explicitly declared that it had no intention of assisting them. As of now, only one community, the village of Khirbet Zanuta, has secured a court decision and been allowed to return. In the meantime, settlers destroyed most of the homes there, yet the military has not permitted the residents to rebuild and has even pressured them to leave the village, citing legal excuses.
It is true that the IDF’s authority in the West Bank has declined amid the rise of Israel’s right-wing government in 2023. The coalition agreements gave Smotrich vast powers in the West Bank. As Nahum Barnea, a senior columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, recently revealed, the Smotrich-led administration has played a leading role in the rapid annexation of the West Bank by bypassing the IDF’s authority. Yet the military remains the commending echelon for troops whose role includes protecting Palestinians. When the IDF refrains from providing protection, the message it sends is that such protection is not in its interests.
The conclusion therefore is that settler violence leading to the transfer of communities is functional, even if the army does not directly manage it, because it serves the goal of territorial control—something the IDF could not officially openly achieve. Security officials and center-left voices will continue to condemn the dysfunctional violence. But the functional version—the kind of violence that poses a greater risk to the potential establishment of a Palestinian state—will continue to go unobstructed and unpunished.
Yagil Levy is a professor of political sociology and public policy and the head of the Open University Institute for the Study of Civil-Military Relations; his most recent book in English is: Whose Life Is Worth More? Hierarchies of Risk and Death in Contemporary Wars
