Israel’s religious Zionist camp no longer denies Jewish terror. It celebrates it
Masked Israeli settlers during an on the village of Beita in the West Bank in October 2025
Yoana Gonen writes in Haaretz on 7 January 2026:
The scent of bonfires, bleating sheep, virgin soil and a glint in the eye. This is not a pastoral landscape painted on a porcelain plate, but the soft-focus palette with which the newspaper Makor Rishon depicted settler violence in a completely unhinged interview published over the weekend.
This was not another article in which religious Zionism rolls its eyes heavenward and denies the existence of Jewish terrorism. Quite the opposite: it is a text in which such terrorism is celebrated as heroic and admirable. The hottest trend of 2026: pogrom romance, for those who like to roast their marshmallows over a burning Palestinian home.
The article features interviews with Avital Belezem, Rachel Sela, and Yael Gozlan – activists in the “Mothers’ Forum for the Hilltop and Farm Youth,” established about a year ago to provide support and cookies for all our little terrorists. Some mothers might be horrified to discover that their children beat up the elderly and gouge out lambs’ eyes. These women are proud of it.
“They do it to protect the people of Israel, and instead of honoring and praising them, they are shamed for it,” Belezem explains. “A [military] jeep that enters a village comes out battered… but when the hilltop youth enter a village, everyone hides in their homes, because they have Jewish pride.” One could nitpick and point out that it’s not Jewish pride that sends people running indoors, but armed bullies operating under the protection of the army and the law. But that’s just semantics. The important thing is – they’re getting the job done.
The entire interview is a poetic, embracing text that extols Jewish terrorism as a tool of ethnic cleansing. “Until recently, the mountain ridge was flooded with Bedouins, and they – with two sheep and some tzitzit – made them fold and return to their villages,” Sela marvels (her eyes surely sparkling).
“As for ‘price tag’ attacks, I’m not shocked to see such things,” Gozlan notes. In that very same newspaper, Israeli radio host and journalist Kalman Libeskind regularly publishes whiny columns insisting there is no settler violence. And here these women say: of course there is – and how wonderful that there is! Even violence against soldiers doesn’t really bother them.
“You mustn’t throw stones, certainly not at security forces. But I won’t say a word of condemnation because I know where it comes from,” Sela says. Belezem goes further, scolding her for thinking stone-throwing is wrong in the first place. The militia mothers launder both the clothes and the crimes.
According to UN data, in 2025 there were more than 1,770 settler attacks causing bodily harm or property damage – an average of five a day. More than a thousand Palestinians were injured, and thousands were forced to flee their homes. In an interview with Fox News last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to downplay the situation, claiming the perpetrators were “a handful of kids, about 70 kids, not from the West Bank, teens who come from broken homes.” The Makor Rishon interview exposes this as utter nonsense.
The interviewees themselves testify that these young Cossacks grew up and were educated in the settlements, and that their actions are part of an organized, systematic mechanism of abusing Palestinians in order to seize their land. The army assists, the police look away, and the state encourages and funds it.
These are the two faces of Israel: one that denies Jewish terrorism, and one that celebrates it openly, with fanatical pride. They are not contradictory; they are complementary. The lies from above create a façade and room to maneuver, while the sadistic joy rising from below fuels the militias.
“Remember their names… they are the next generation of leadership,” Sela concludes. She is probably right. Their faces are our future.
This article is reproduced in its entirety