Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, is a Christian Zionist who believes that Israel is biblically entitled to all of the Holy Land<\/a>. He\u2019s pretty much the last person you\u2019d expect to condemn Israeli conduct in the West Bank, where settlers have spent decades using a combination of construction, coercion, and outright violence to push Palestinians off their own land.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yet earlier this month, Huckabee went out of his way to denounce the behavior of some settlers<\/a> \u2014 describing them as \u201cband of terrorists\u201d who had committed \u201chorrible activities of criminal nature.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Huckabee\u2019s surprising outrage stems, in part, from their recent choice of victims. Last month, settler extremists besieged three Palestinian homes in the village of Qusra, including one belonging to American citizen Lou Ridi. About two weeks later, masked settlers beat up a NBC News crew<\/a> while they attempted to interview Aida Ahmed Abdullah, a Palestinian who had herself had been forced from her home by settler aggression.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But Huckabee\u2019s outrage reflects something deeper. Settler terrorism, once relatively uncommon, has exploded in severity in recent years \u2014 with wink-nudge support from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s government.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The violence is so egregious, and so indefensible, that retired Israeli generals have compared the settlers to Nazis<\/a> and demanded action to stop them. In mid-September, the INSS \u2014 Israel\u2019s top national security think tank \u2014 issued a strategic alert warning that \u201cJewish terrorism\u201d had become a national crisis and even an existential threat to Israel\u2019s future<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAs history teaches us, democracies that fail to restrain radical forces within them do not survive,\u201d the alert argues.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In Washington, settler terrorism against Palestinians has flipped the Israel debate on its head. Congressional Democrats, who have long been divided over the Gaza war, have come together to support legislation that would impose sanctions on Israeli politicians and corporations implicated in the violence. The Trump administration, the most pro-settlement White House in American history, has very conspicuously stood aside as Canada and European nations implemented sanctions of their own.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For now, the settlers are mostly getting away with it \u2014 because the government wants them to.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For now, the settlers are mostly getting away with it \u2014 because the government wants them to. While basically all Israeli governments have allowed settlements to grow, the current Netanyahu government includes coalition partners unusually aligned with their most radical goals: the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. So long as they see settler terrorism as a useful tactic toward that end, and have the ability to stymie preventive measures and block accountability, the attacks will continue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But if Netanyahu loses Israel\u2019s election in October, and Democrats retake the White House in 2028, things might change dramatically. The political stars could align for a serious effort to change what Israel is doing in the West Bank \u2014 not just attempting to merely slow settler violence, but also challenge the broader apparatus of occupation that makes it possible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In \u201cconversations that I\u2019ve had with congressional Democrats and their staff, this [settler violence] is the No. 1 issue that comes up, the thing they\u2019re angriest about,\u201d said Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer at the center-left Israel Policy Forum. \u201cIf you have a Democrat in the White House, this is something the Israelis are going to have to deal with \u2014 whether they want to or not.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Under international law, Israeli settlement in the West Bank is illegal: Countries are not permitted to move their own civilians<\/a> into territory they occupied after a war. However, under successive Israeli governments \u2014 including the more peace-minded ones \u2014 the settlements have continued to grow. Many of those closest to the border function as suburbs of major Israeli cities; some further east, like Ariel, look like small cities in their own right. During the era when a negotiated solution looked possible in the near term, their growth was often seen as part of a bid to dictate the eventual borders of a Palestinian state \u2014 or blow up negotiations entirely \u2014 with \u201cfacts on the ground<\/a>\u201d that would be hard to undo.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While individual settlers live there for all sorts of reasons \u2014 for many, the housing costs are cheaper \u2014 the political movement overall exists to seize land from Palestinians and slam the door on the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On a macro level, the physical placement of the settlements cut Palestinian communities off from each other, making it hard \u2014 basically impossible \u2014 to construct a contiguous Palestinian state<\/a> so long as they remain standing. On a micro level, settlements are often placed in ways designed to push Palestinians off their land \u2014 by, for example, putting Palestinian-owned land into no-go zones enforced by the Israeli military<\/a>. And politically, the population growth in settlements creates a powerful constituency in Israeli politics<\/a> whose entire way of life depends on preventing a peace agreement that would require settlement evacuation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Settler violence is the literal bleeding edge of this overall strategy. Violent settlers live in ramshackle communities, tiny villages on hilltops<\/a> or herding outposts<\/a> encroaching on Palestinian farmland, that are often illegal even under domestic Israeli law<\/a>. The people living there are the hardest of the hardcore settlers<\/a>: fanatically devoted to the idea that the land is theirs by divine right, and that they have every right to use force to push their Palestinians neighbors out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Their tactics include everything from killing Palestinian livestock<\/a> to cutting off their water supply<\/a> to burning down their homes<\/a> to outright beating and killing them<\/a>. The violence is autonomous, in that individual settlers decide on what to do, but enabled by the overall strategic plan of the settlement movement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no hierarchy deciding that this [specific] house will be attacked. The decision is that this area is an area of all our interest, so we need to subsidize herding farms there. And those bring violence, which lead to displacement\u201d of the local Palestinians, said Yehuda Shaul, co-director of the Israeli think tank Ofek and a leading observer of the settlement movement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Settler terrorism is not new, but it used to be comparatively rare<\/a>. In 2012, Natan Sachs \u2014 a leading expert on Israeli politics at the Middle East Institute think tank \u2014 wrote an essay warning that the growth of the settlements<\/a>, and the radicalization of some settlers, were creating a dangerous new violent movement of settlers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cBack then, it was a fringe thing among settlers,\u201d Sachs tells me. \u201cIt has become much more mainstream.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Israel\u2019s current government, which took power in late 2022 and is by far the most radical in Israeli history, bears enormous responsibility<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThis particular government is enabling settler violence beyond anything we\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d said Yousef Munayyer, the director of the Israel\/Palestine program at the Arab Center think tank in DC.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, a settler living in a reportedly illegal home<\/a> and a longtime advocate of ethnically cleansing West Bank Palestinians<\/a>, is currently in charge of civilian administration in the West Bank<\/a>. In effect, this allows him to use state resources to orchestrate a historic expansion of settlements across the West Bank<\/a> \u2014 including the illegal outposts that many violent settlers call home.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThis is his life\u2019s work,\u201d said Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine at the International Crisis Group. \u201cHe\u2019s completely dedicated to this and he knows exactly what he\u2019s doing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, also a settler, is if anything more extreme: For years, he hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, a terrorist who massacred 29 Palestinians at a holy site in Hebron, in his living room. Ben Gvir has, among other things, instructed the police forces under his authority not to arrest violent settlers<\/a> and given thousands of weapons to settlers<\/a> themselves.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In theory, the Israeli military and intelligence establishment should be a check on the extremists. Settler violence is not only illegal, but also a national security threat. Settler violence prompts Palestinian retaliation and, at times, even targets Israeli soldiers and police themselves. It can lead to international incidents, like those seen recently, that undermine Israel\u2019s support with key allies abroad. The Israeli military is the ultimate authority in the West Bank; it could act on these concerns if it so chose.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In practice, however, they\u2019re of little help. Israeli government data shows that, between 2005 and 2025, 94 percent of all investigations<\/a> into settler violence fail to yield an indictment. The military will facilitate illegal settlements\u2019 connection<\/a> to the electrical grid. And its ranks are increasingly made up of \u201cnational religious<\/a>\u201d Jewish Israelis, a demographic that\u2019s theologically on board with the settlement enterprise, versus more secular Israelis who primarily see the conflict through a security lens.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And after October 7, the Army dealt with a manpower crisis by significantly increasing the number of \u201cregional defense units<\/a>\u201d \u2014 essentially bands of armed settlers that can be tasked with local security in the West Bank in lieu of regular soldiers. It emboldens violence in exactly the way you\u2019d think.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So while the recent spike in settler terrorism can fairly be blamed on the Netanyahu government, the phenomenon itself is an outgrowth of the structural settlement growth Israel has condoned or actively pursued for decades.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s all one set of policies,\u201d said Ilan Goldenberg, senior vice president and chief policy officer at J Street, an American lobby that favors a two-state solution to the conflict.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Other than Israel\u2019s government itself, the most important player in all this is the American government. As Israel\u2019s chief diplomatic ally and military supplier, it has immense leverage that could be used to affect the West Bank (or anywhere else). Thus, changing American politics on Israel could quite directly produce a transformation on the ground.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Since October 7, Gaza has dominated American discourse over Israel \u2014 and it is arguably the<\/em> most divisive issue in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Many Democrats (and a majority of rank-and-file voters) call Israel\u2019s actions in Gaza genocide, a label others in the party strongly reject. While the Trump administration and most elected Republicans have stood behind Netanyahu<\/a>, a faction \u2014 including Vice President JD Vance<\/a>, Tucker Carlson<\/a>, and a significant chunk of younger GOP voters<\/a> \u2014 have grown increasingly critical of American military support for Israel\u2019s actions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But settler violence, specifically, might as well be another political universe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On the Democratic side, there is basically unanimous condemnation of what\u2019s going on in the West Bank. Even Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), a leading pro-Israel advocacy group, believes that Israel is erring here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cDMFI unequivocally condemns attacks by violent Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel\u2019s government must move beyond just words and take definitive action to protect civilians, and ensure that those responsible are held accountable,\u201d Brian Romick, DMFI\u2019s president, told me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Last year, US Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) \u2014 an influential progressive pro-Israel voice in Congress, where he\u2019s long represented some of the nation\u2019s largest Jewish communities \u2014 co-authored the West Bank Violence Protection Act, legislation that would sanction violent settlers and their enablers. The law would effectively codify an executive order issued by President Joe Biden in 2024, but scrapped by President Donald Trump upon taking office.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The key question going forward is what this political dynamic means for policy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n More than 170 House Democrats and 45 senators have cosponsored it, the vast majority of Democrats in both chambers. Goldenberg, whose J Street outfit has been a leading voice supporting the law, says rallying support for it has been easy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n By contrast, no Republicans have cosponsored the bill. When you combine that with Trump reversing the Biden order, and his broader enabling of settlement expansion, you might think that the administration would be willing to take Israel\u2019s side in the argument over settler violence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yet that\u2019s not been the case \u2014 and it\u2019s not just Huckabee freelancing. Earlier this month, when Canada, the UK, and France imposed significant sanctions targeting settlements, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointedly refused to condemn these allied policies, saying that neither he nor Trump had any comment on their decisions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cObviously, we\u2019re not going to do what the UK did. [But] we share the goal of stability: we don\u2019t to see an uptick in violence or conflict or tensions in the West Bank,\u201d he told reporters on September 8<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Settler terrorism, then, has a remarkable effect on both parties: Democrats in Congress go from fractious on Israel to united, and the Trump administration goes from Israel\u2019s chief defender to a tacit enabler of allied pressure campaigns against it. Why?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I put this question to all the experts I spoke with, and everyone offered a basically similar explanation: that settler violence is morally and politically straightforward. Even the most hardline pro-Israel advocate, ones who rationalize mass civilian killing in Gaza as necessary to destroy Hamas and restore Israel\u2019s security, blanch at videos of armed settlers beating up on defenseless Palestinians, which cannot be justified on the same grounds. Virtually nobody in American politics wants to be in a position of having to defend this kind of thing, and many of the most influential pro-Israel voices on the American side do not share the settlers\u2019 extremist ideology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere aren\u2019t two sides\u2026it\u2019s just one side terrorizing the other,\u201d Israel Policy Forum\u2019s Koplow said. \u201cThere are literally WhatsApp groups and Signal groups run by the Israelis perpetrating the violence where they themselves boast about it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On the White House side, there are also Trump priorities that the violence complicates. In his comments about the allied sanctions, Rubio said instability in the West Bank \u201chas implications as well on our ability to make progress on Gaza, on the 20-point plan, and the Board of Peace that we\u2019re very committed to.\u201d However serious you think these initiatives are \u2014 there are very good reasons for skepticism<\/a> \u2014 the White House seems to at least be publicly concerned about violence derailing it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The key question going forward is what this political dynamic means for policy. While the Trump administration may not be willing to go out of their way to defend settler violence, they\u2019re not exactly going out of their way to try and shut it down either. Huckabee\u2019s comments about \u201cterrorists\u201d are symbolically significant, but the reversal of the Biden executive order speaks about the limits of this stance for actual policy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Democrats, by contrast, are clearly animated by the issue and willing to act on it. The question is what exactly those actions entail \u2014 especially if they retake Congress in 2026 and the White House in 2028.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Here, there\u2019s real disagreement between the experts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Skeptics suggest that there may be less substance here than it appears. Targeted sanctions against some violent settlers might matter on the margins, but unless they go after the settlement enterprise and US-Israel relationship more broadly they\u2019re leaving the root cause of the problem intact. In the worst case, a focus on settler violence specifically might even be counterproductive \u2014 functioning as a kind of pressure release valve that allows Democrats to satiate their increasingly Israel-critical base without actually doing much that matters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Such a focus \u201ccreates, in a lot of ways, more problems than it solves,\u201d the Arab Center\u2019s Munayyer said. \u201cIt reinforces this idea politically that it\u2019s too risky politically to hold accountable the actual decision-makers in the Israeli government, and the real processes at play here \u2014 which are driven by the state.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Others see this as a misread of the political dynamics \u2014 one that Sachs of the Middle East Institute called \u201ctoo cynical by half.\u201d On this line of thinking, targeted action on settler violence is just morally necessary: the violence is really terrible, and if the United States can curtail it even on the margins it matters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Moreover, they argue, something like sanctions on West Bank settlers opens the door to broader action: creating a real precedent for punishing bad actors in Israel that could create a kind of ratchet dynamic for future action taking on the deeper Israeli policies behind settler violence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s hard to say in advance which of these views are right. Experts in both camps say there\u2019s a lot of uncertainty here: we don\u2019t know what will happen this November, let alone who the Democratic 2028 nominee will be or whether they\u2019ll win. A Democratic trifecta with President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez<\/a> would likely be quite different than, say, a divided government with President Mark Kelly<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But either way, how Democrats handle the settler violence question could well be an indicator of where the party is going to go on the US-Israel relationship more broadly \u2014 and, by extension, the future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, is a Christian Zionist who believes that Israel is biblically entitled to all of the Holy Land. He\u2019s pretty much the last person you\u2019d expect to condemn Israeli conduct in the West Bank, where settlers have spent decades using a combination of construction, coercion, and outright violence to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7063005,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112525,112527,108443,182,153493],"tags":[12954,2331,16978,66766,5109,11572,6692,215097,20031,17252,1762,153494],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7063004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-israel","category-palestine","category-policy","category-politics","category-world-politics-2","tag-alliance","tag-bank","tag-israel","tag-israels","tag-palestine","tag-policy","tag-politics","tag-settlers","tag-threatening","tag-violent","tag-west","tag-world-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nThe rise of settler terrorism<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
How the violence could lead to a deeper break between America and Israel<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n