A history of settler violence in the West Bank
ON FEBRUARY 1ST President Joe Biden issued an executive order imposing sanctions on four individuals “undermining peace, security and stability in the West Bank”. Violence there has increased sharply since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th. On October 11th four Palestinians were killed by settlers in Qusra, a village; two more were shot dead during their funeral procession. By November 860 Palestinians had been forced to leave their homes, according to the United Nations. Who are the settlers in the West Bank—and why has their presence led to decades of violence?
Settlements are communities—a mixture of towns and villages—built by Israeli Jews on occupied land outside the internationally recognised borders of Israel. There were once settlements in the Egyptian Sinai and in Gaza. Today there are a small number in the Golan Heights, which is occupied Syrian territory. But the vast majority are in the West Bank.
The first settlements in the West Bank were established in 1967, when Israel occupied the land after the Six Day War with Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Some were funded and sanctioned by the Israeli government, with the help of the World Zionist Organisation. Some settlers argued that they had religious claims to the land. Others said that they were reclaiming property lost in the war that Israel fought in 1948 against neighbouring Arab countries. Levi Eshkol, then Israel’s prime minister, saw the occupied territories as bargaining chips in any future negotiations with the Palestinians. Some members of his government argued that the settlements could act as a security buffer for Israel.
The international consensus is that settlements are illegal. In 1993 the Oslo Accords, an agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, banned the construction of new sites. But settlers were soon building again. In the three decades after the accords were signed, the number of settlements grew almost three-fold. Many of those were established without government approval; some were retroactively rubber stamped.
There are now 460,000 Israelis living in settlements in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem), most close to the border. Around a third are “ideological” settlers, many of whom live deeper in the West Bank. They enjoy considerable public support in Israel. And their numbers continue to rise. During the first six months of Israel’s current coalition government, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, 12,000 new housing units in West Bank settlements were approved, according to Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group.
Incidents of settler violence against Palestinians were poorly recorded until the 1980s. By then they were becoming a pronounced problem. The Jewish Underground, an Israeli terrorist group, was determined to sabotage the Camp David Accords, signed by Israel and Egypt in 1978, which granted Palestinians autonomy. It feared the agreement could lead to an independent West Bank and threaten settlements. The group planned to blow up the Dome of the Rock, a mosque in East Jerusalem that is among the holiest sites in Islam. But after a Palestinian terrorist attack on Israeli students in 1980, it instead carried out a series of bombings against Arab mayors. Its targets were not all politicians. In 1983 Jewish Underground killed three Arab students and injured more than 30 others in an attack on Hebron University in the West Bank.
In 1993, after the end of the first intifada, when Palestinians rose up against Israel, the number of attacks by Israeli civilians on Palestinians rose again. Settlers received weapons from the Israeli army for self-defence. That year B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organisation, recorded a marked increase in violence by settlers. Shootings, beatings, roadblocks and vandalism increased. In a small fraction of those cases settlers were acting in self defence. Most attacks were designed to intimidate Palestinians living among settlements. Organised violence continued, too. In 1994 Baruch Goldstein, a settler member of Kach, a far-right movement, opened fire in a mosque in Hebron, killing 29 Palestinians.
The number of attacks has not abated in recent years, with more than 1,400 cases recorded between 2005 and 2021, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli watchdog. More than 90% of complaints were dropped by Israeli authorities, who run law enforcement in settler areas, without charges being filed. And settlers’ tactics are becoming more varied. In recent years some have uprooted olive trees during harvest, depriving many Palestinian families of a source of income. Tensions are rising as a result. Many observers fear another uprising in the West Bank might be imminent. ■