Fake news! Don’t buy the Israeli right’s sudden concern for settler violence

The West Bank village of Jinsafut after settlers set fire to barns and buildings in January 2026

Dahlia Scheindlin writes in Haaretz on 30 March 2026:

All of a sudden, it looked like Israel might have reached a breaking point over what it is doing to Palestinians in the West Bank.

It happened only after settlers perpetrated a sadistic, high-profile attack involving sexual violence against a Palestinian family in Khirbet Humsa. Then soldiers killed parents and two children during Ramadan, then the army detained and threatened a CNN crew investigating still more West Bank violence, with soldiers justifying revenge attacks against Palestinians. But suddenly since this weekend, even Israeli right-wingers are making statements against settler terror.

Some rabbis, including several from the West Bank, have been speaking out against this violence since early March. It should be said that some of them are genuinely opposed, and not from yesterday – especially those of whom aren’t politicians.

Then on Friday came a highly unusual flood of condemnations. Israel’s Minister of Finance and annexation, Bezalel Smotrich, Erel Segal, the influential pundit and television host on Channel 14 (Israel’s Newsmax), along with the prominent right-wing journalists Haggai and Amit Segal (father and son, no relation to Erel), and even Yisrael Gantz, head of the Yesha Council for settlements, all coincidentally issued impassioned exhortations against such violence, sometimes even calling it “Jewish terror.”

On Sunday, an online group of religious figures held a webinar, broadcast live on Facebook, to condemn Israeli violence against Palestinians (though some speakers spent their time denying there is settler violence at all).

It’s tempting to say this is better late than never. But if you think these statements are cracks in Israel’s iron wall of support for settlements and annexation, they’re not. A close read reveals that the aim of the campaign is to name-check “we said something,” in order to avoid “we did something” – in order to keep Israel’s whole annexation and expulsion program going.

How do we know this? Here are the top arguments in the condemnation charade, translated into their true intentions and ordered from bad to the most egregious.

First, reverse-blame. These messages always emphasize that Palestinian terror against Israeli Jews in the West Bank too is the actual problem, while Israeli violence is bad but marginal. Amit Segal (among the most influential political correspondents in Israel) said with complete confidence – “it is far more dangerous to be a Jew in Judea and Samaria than an Arab.”

It is true that there is Palestinian terror against Jews. The claim that Jews are “more” in danger is false: Palestinians killed 378 Israelis in the West Bank since 2008, including 42 civilians from 2023 to the present, according to the UN. Israelis (whether the army or civilians) killed 2,076 Palestinians in the West Bank since 2008; of those, 840 Palestinians civilians have been killed since 2023 – 20 times more than Israeli civilians).

Second, denialism. These statements include the casual denial that we’re talking about Palestinians. Like most of the others, in Smotrich’s big Friday article in the right-wing religious newspaper Makor Rishon, he used the word “Arab” repeatedly to discuss the object of settler attacks. “Palestinian” appears once – when he mentions that group’s “illegal construction” (according to Israel’s arbitrary occupation rules). If you care about someone’s humanity, you recognize their identity; if not, you don’t.

Third, contempt for the law. The sleight of hand here is an argument that looks almost encouraging but is actually a mockery: Smotrich wrote that these violent actions challenge the rule of law: “They violate the authority of the state and its institutions, and try to make their own law.” Sounds good, except that this government has done more to gut the rule of law in Israel than anything in the history of the country. But when the state is reconstituted as a fundamentalist religious project of Jewish supremacy, apparently the laws and institutions are OK.

Fourth, hypocrisy. One of the most horrible hypocrisies is that some of these voices refer to the victims as “innocents” (this helps to avoid the word “Palestinians”). Erel Segal, among the chief influencers on the right, wrote on X that “we must not harm innocents.” The flipside is constant repetition of the argument that nearly all settlers are innocent and law-abiding, except for the wild fringes.

After Israel’s right wing argued obsessively that there are “no innocents in Gaza” (62 percent of Israelis came to believe it), how would such influencers face the families of all the dead children in Gaza? Would they say “we changed our minds”? The answer is that they wouldn’t, because they haven’t.

Then why this whole show? The fifth hypocrisy is the timing: Apparently U.S. President Donald Trump is not happy about settlers attacking Palestinians. Maybe the Gulf states pressured him. Whatever the reason, Vice President JD Vance was recently forced to deny a media report that he had admonished Israel to crack down on it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also expressed displeasure. Netanyahu cannot afford to alienate his war patron and partner, President Trump. The PM is lurking behind the ill-concealed campaign.

But the timing issue is worse than that: Where were the Segals and the Smotrichs in July 2023, prior to October 7, when Israel killed more Palestinians in the West Bank than in all of 2022, making 2023 the “deadliest year” since the UN began tracking in 2005? Where were they in 2019, when Haaretz’s Amira Hass wrote that “The noticeable escalation in the West Bank is firstly due to settler violence toward Palestinians,” or in 2015 when settlers incinerated a family in their sleep (even recently, right-wing lawmakers were supporting the perpetrators)? Or in 2008, when settler violence shot up relative to 2007?

Where were the Segals and the Smotriches…in 2015 when settlers incinerated a family in their sleep (even recently, right-wing lawmakers were supporting the perpetrators)?

We know where Haggai Segal was in the 1980s: perpetrating Jewish terrorism, as a member of a Jewish underground cell that planted bombs intending to kill a number of Palestinian mayors.  The day after the attacks, which blew off the legs of one and the foot of another, wounding more, he and another member of their gang met with the IDF Chief of Staff, who chided them only for failing to coordinate. Had he known, joked the army chief (and this is according to Segal’s own book, excerpted on an Israeli government website), the army wouldn’t have deported two other prominent Palestinian mayors.

If any of the influencers cared about terrorism against Palestinians, they had decades to say so.

Pulling all of these points together leads to the number one reason for the condemnation campaign: legitimizing settlements, annexation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The speakers literally say so. All of them lament that this violence makes settlements look bad and harms their prospects.

Smotrich wrote that the larger settlement project has no need for fringe criminals: “We are de facto liquidating the idea of dividing the land and the establishment of a terror state in our heartland, we are entrenching our hold through quantity and substance never seen before.” He ticks off a long list of items displaying “progress,” and he’s right.

Now we know why he suddenly loves state capacity: “We’re not doing it underground or in the dark, but via authority and with permission, on the table, in the name of the state of Israel, with the full backing of the IDF and its officers.”

That’s also correct; it was a border police unit and soldiers who mowed down the Bani Odeh family earlier this month. It was an IDF officer who told the CNN journalist Jeremy Diamond that “we’re here because this is our place” and “if you had a brother and they killed him, what would you have done?” It was soldiers who swooped down a hill to block two Israelis when we dared to approach what they called an army position at Sa-Nur. Days later, settler caravans returned to the spot, 20 years after it was dismantled.

The fact is that it was never just about the settlements, or whether the settlers are individually law-abiding. The problem is that Israel’s laws, institutions, ministries, all branches of government and bureaucracy – they’re all pulling together towards annexation as they have been for decades, with their own ongoing dispossession and expulsion-based violence. It’s always been convenient to blame wild-eyed, swaying-peyot crazies.

The true mechanisms of annexation are so much harder to see – and so much easier for the White House to tolerate. If right-wing Israelis make a great deal of noise about what they frame as marginal ruffians, they think the American useful idiots won’t even know where to look.

This article is reproduced in its entirety