Israeli leaders are condemning settler attacks. It’s a smokescreen
Palestinians inspect the damage caused during overnight attacks by Israeli settlers near Al-Arroub refugee camp in Hebron, 30 March 2026
Oren Ziv writes in +972 on 2 April 2026:
In recent days, “settler violence” — a sanitized term for attacks carried out by Israelis against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, with the intention of displacing them from their land — has returned to the headlines. A further spike in pogroms and killings since the start of the Iran war has triggered an unusually large wave of condemnations from the Israeli right, including the chief of staff of the army, prominent right-wing commentators and journalists, and even far-right ministers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as is his custom, avoided commenting publicly on the matter, but held a closed “security assessment.”
While the volume of these denunciations goes beyond what we have come to expect, the fact that members of Israel’s government, military, and right-wing establishment are expressing concern about rising settler attacks is nothing new. Periodically, a particularly severe incident pushes this violence over its “normal” threshold, crossing an imaginary red line within the Israeli mainstream.
When that happens, as we see today, media coverage intensifies. Pundits and political figures speak of the need to “eradicate” a problem that “harms the settlement enterprise” and “damages Israel’s reputation abroad.” (Palestinians, you will notice, do not feature anywhere in these condemnations.) Typically, after a few days, the media storm subsides and the issue recedes into the background, where the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians can take place more quietly.
This time, the pressure to act appears to be driven in part by external pressure. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters not only that the United States is “concerned” about settler violence but also that it expects to see the Israeli government “do something about it.” American officials have reportedly conveyed similar demands to Netanyahu himself.