Religious nationalists emboldened now their representatives are major players in Benjamin Netanyahu’s new administration
Five bullet holes now scar the walls and window of Hummus Restaurant, a modest fast food outlet near the settlement of Eli on the Israeli-built highway running the length of the occupied West Bank.
On 20 June two gunmen affiliated with Hamas, the militant group in control of the Gaza Strip, shot and killed four people here in one of the worst attacks committed by Palestinians against Israelis in years. The incident was triggered by a huge Israeli army raid in the West Bank city of Jenin, which killed five people. The restaurant attack in turn led to a revenge rampage the next day by Israeli settlers on neighbouring Palestinian villages, in which one person was killed and about 30 homes and 60 cars set alight.https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2023/07/archive-zip/giv-13425Xce11Fa2sswd/
The eye-for-an-eye violence has ratcheted up tensions in what is already the bloodiest period in Israel and the West Bank for decades. But during the Observer’s visit last Thursday, although green-blue fragments of shattered windshield glass still littered the car park and half a dozen soldiers were patrolling the vicinity, business had returned to an uneasy normality.
Friends of 18-year-old Elisha Antman, who died in the attack, sat outside the restaurant selling T-shirts bearing his likeness.
“My 15-year-old works in this restaurant. On that day, he wasn’t working, but I didn’t know that, and I couldn’t reach him,” said Eliana Passentin, who works as an international advocate for the local Mateh Binyamin settlement council.
“You don’t feel better finding out it was someone else’s children who were killed. You just feel sick inside,” she said.
“We are used to attacks, but it is weird to buy food in a place where a week ago Jews were murdered. We have to keep going,” said a customer who gave his name as David. He was wearing a knitted white kippah, identifying him as Dati Leumi, or a Religious Zionist – a member of the modern settler movement, which believes the Judaisation of the Biblical land of Israel is a religious calling.
“It’s simple,” said David’s companion, who refused to give his name. “We need to besiege the Arabs, block the roads, until each village gives up its terrorists. That would curb the attacks immediately. Take the fight to them.”
Israel gained control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the six-day war of 1967, and according to international law, the two Palestinian territories have been occupied ever since. Israeli settlers began to move to Palestinian areas en masse in the 1990s, and since US-brokered peace talks collapsed for good in 2014, their numbers, and the amount of land they control, have increased dramatically.
Israelis in East Jerusalem and the West Bank now number 700,000 people, around a third of whom are religious nationalists. The population is expected to grow by 500,000 in the next five years, putting a two-state solution further out of reach than ever.
Incidents of settler violence – which include beatings, shootings, vandalism and the theft of property and livestock, aimed at driving Palestinians off their land – have taken place on a daily basis across the West Bank for years; the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have been documented both turning a blind eye and joining in. Even when attacks are documented, police data analysed by the Israeli NGO Yesh Din between 2005 and 2021 showed that 92% of all Palestinian complaints were dropped without charges filed.
But in the six months since Israel’s three-time prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, returned to office at the head of the most rightwing government in Israeli history, his administration has given the green light for a record 13,000 settlement units in the West Bank, making 2023 already the highest year on record in terms of approvals, according to analysis by Peace Now, an Israeli rights group.
Settler attacks, often described as vigilantism or “nationalist crime” in Israel, have increased in both scope and scale since Netanyahu made his comeback with the help of new allies – many of whom are extremist settlers themselves.
Netanyahu was able to end Israel’s four-year political crisis, triggered by his ongoing corruption trial, by persuading three far-right fringe parties to merge into one list called the Religious Zionists. In November’s election, the slate’s promises to take a harder line against the Palestinians to tackle the deteriorating security situation helped more than double their seats, from six to 14.
Incidents of settler violence are now occurring at a rate of three a day, according to UN figures, up from two a day in 2022.
In February, the world was shocked by scenes of an unprecedented settler rampage through the Palestinian village of Huwara, a response to the murder of two Israeli brothers. Around 400 young men descended on Huwara overnight, torching homes, businesses and cars, and killing one person. The IDF were roundly criticised as unprepared, or unwilling, to act.
Those scenes were repeated last week, in the aftermath of the Eli roadside restaurant killings – except the marauders attacked in daylight, and according to witnesses, appeared more organised, dividing into units of 10 and ignoring empty houses to target buildings with people inside.
Netanyahu has condemned these revenge attacks and asked the public not to take the law into their own hands.
The IDF chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, also made a pointed statement in telling a combat officers’ graduation ceremony last week: “An IDF officer who stands by when seeing an Israeli citizen planning to throw a molotov cocktail at a Palestinian house cannot be an officer.”
But some members of the newly elevated political elite are fanning the flames. The Religious Zionist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who also holds a defence ministry portfolio giving him de facto control of Israeli policy in the West Bank, called more than once for Huwara to be “erased”, and described last week’s attacks as “civilian counter-actions”.
The Jewish Power party leader and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir last week implored the Jewish public to “run to the hilltops” – a call to establish outposts, the name given to settlements regarded as illegal even under Israeli law. His fellow Religious Zionist slate member Orit Struck, the settlements and national missions minister, was forced to apologise for likening Israel’s army, police and internal intelligence heads to Russia’s Wagner Group forces after they denounced settler violence as terrorism.
The increasingly volatile situation in the West Bank is exposing the deep – perhaps unbridgeable – divide between Israel’s newly minted extremist political leaders and the security establishment, which has for many years preferred to maintain the occupation of the Palestinian territories in a quieter fashion.
For the religious nationalist base, the government and army are not doing enough to halt the mounting wave of terrorist attacks: a senior commander paying a condolence visit to one of the bereaved Eli families this week was called a “traitor” and “murderer,” before being chased away.
The only thing anyone can agree on is that the stakes are rising, and the cycle of violence is likely to intensify.
“We are just trying to live our normal lives, and go home to our children at night, but Israel’s allies blame us for building houses instead of condemning terrorism,” Passentin said.
“It wouldn’t make a difference if my family lived in Eli or in the middle of Tel Aviv. We are targeted and killed simply for being Jews.”