The Genesis of Israeli Ultra-apartheid

Unlike South African apartheid which backed supremacy and exploitation, Israeli apartheid condones ethnic cleansing, even mass atrocities – as evidenced by the obliteration of Gaza and anti-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.

by Dan Steinbock | Nov 21, 2025

https://original.antiwar.com/Dan_Steinbock/2025/11/20/the-genesis-of-israeli-ultra-apartheid/

On November 10, the Israeli parliament passed the first reading of a bill to impose the death penalty on Palestinian prisoners convicted of killing Israeli individuals, with 39 votes in favor and 16 against out of 120 members.

The bill would make it mandatory for Israeli courts to impose death penalty against individuals convicted of killing an Israeli “either intentionally or recklessly” if the act is motivated by “racism or hostility towards the public” and “committed with the objective of harming the state of Israel or the rebirth of the Jewish people.”

The controversial and murky bill has been widely condemned by international and Palestinian human rights organizations and prisoners’ groups. As Amnesty International put it, “The shift towards requiring courts to impose the death penalty against Palestinians is a dangerous and dramatic step backwards and a product of ongoing impunity for Israel’s system of apartheid and its genocide in Gaza.”

However, as I have argued (here and here), such shift would be consistent with the Israeli far-right’s redemptionist dreams of Jewish supremacy and Greater Israel, which the Netanyahu cabinet has effectively condoned. It would also codify the move beyond classic apartheid.

Institutionalization of apartheid   

In South Africa, racial discrimination against black people began with large-scale colonization over four centuries ago. By the early 19^th century, British settlers began to colonize the frontier regions. As takeoffs accelerated in in the late 19th century Europe, South Africa industrialized on the back of mining and infrastructure investment. But the Mineral Revolution was a revolution by, of and for the white colonial settlers.

Following the European powers’ scramble for Africa, the Anglo-Zulu War and two Boer Wars, the Boer republics were incorporated into the British Empire. Meanwhile, South Africa began to introduce more segregationist policies towards non-whites. The goals were reflected by the Afrikaans term apartheid (“separateness,” or “apart-hood”).

After the 1948 all-white elections, the National Party enforced white supremacy and racial separation. When the South African republic was established in 1961, it withdrew from the British Commonwealth.

International counter-reaction, black resistance

A year later, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 1761, which requested member states to break off diplomatic relations and cease trading with South Africa and to deny passage to South African ships and aircraft.

A special committee was set up calling for a boycott of South Africa. Though initially ignored, it found allies in the West, including the UK-based Anti-Apartheid Movement.

By 1973, the UN General Assembly agreed on the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. In the process, “apartheid was declared to be a crime against humanity, with a scope that went far beyond South Africa.”

Popular uprisings ensued in black and colored townships in 1976 and 1985. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the last vestiges of apartheid were abolished, and a new constitution was promulgated into law: one person, one vote.

South Africa and Israel as “apartheid states”

The apartheid association between South Africa and Israel is not something new. After the UN vote against the South African apartheid in the early 1960s, the country’s prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was particularly annoyed by Israel’s vote against South Africa’s segregation.

“Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude,” Verwoerd lamented. “They took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”

In effect, martial law had been imposed on the Arab citizens of Israel from 1948 to 1966, and it continues to be intermittently enforced to the present.

Effectively, the Israeli government imposed various restrictions on Palestinians, including on their mobility, with security checkpoints set up to enforce these permits allowing entry. Meanwhile, requests for government services for Arab Israelis were directed to military courts instead of civil courts. These measures were subsequently adopted in the occupied territories, particularly the West Bank.

Subsequently, the UN adopted the (non-binding) Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, sponsored mainly by the Arab League, the Soviet bloc and many new African states.

After the 1967 Six-Day-War and the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian resistance intensified, domestically and internationally. 

The debate on Israeli segregation   

Following the Yom Kippur War, the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 3236 recognized the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, inviting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to participate in international diplomacy.

The oil crisis in 1975 paved the way to resolution 3379, which stated that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” In the UN, Israeli ambassador Chaim Herzog, the future president of Israel, stated the decision was “devoid of any moral or legal value.” Then, he tore the resolution in half.

At the end of the Cold War, Resolution 3379 was revoked by the UN Resolution 46/86, introduced by U.S. President George H. W. Bush. It contributed to Israel’s sense of impunity and the rise of its Messianic far-right. But Bush’s UN address wasn’t just about Zionism and racism. It was about wheeling and dealing. The revocation was Israel’s precondition for participation in the Madrid Conference of 1991, which paved the way to the Oslo Accords – which the Netanyahu cabinets have shunned ever since then.

In 2021, Isaac Herzog, the son of Chaim Herzog, became Israel’s president. When South Africa launched its genocide case against Israel, he declared it a “blood libel” against Jews. Later he shredded the UN Charter in protest of the UN General Assembly vote to boost the status of the Palestinian mission.

And yet it was in 2021 that Human Rights Watch warned that Israel had crossed the apartheid threshold. Many Israeli leaders agreed. A year later, Israel’s former attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair, said that “my country has sunk to such political and moral depths that it is now an apartheid regime.”

Two years later, he was seconded by the former speaker of the Israeli parliament, Avraham Burg. A month before the October 7 offensive, Mossad’s ex-chief Tamir Pardo concurred: “There is an apartheid state here,” since “two people are judged under two legal systems.”

In the case of South African apartheid, international restrictions fostered domestic opposition. But in the case of Israel, those measures proved soft. It was the ineptitude of the international community that reinforced the marginalization of the Israeli anti-apartheid opposition and the rise of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet in late 2022.

Apartheid and ultra-apartheid   

In South Africa and Israel, apartheid rule has sought to crush all opposition by fragmenting territories, restricting mobility, forcing inequality and imposing segregation. Under the Likud and Netanyahu governments, Israel has been morphing into an apartheid state and its occupied territories into Palestinian Bantustans.

Yet, there are major differences with classic apartheid as enforced in South Africa and its Israeli version in the occupied territories. Apartheid policies can be formal and legal as in South African apartheid, or informal and semi-legal as in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

In apartheid South Africa, a white minority dominated a black majority, whereas in Israel a Jewish majority discriminates against a Palestinian minority, keeping the Palestinians under military occupation.

Third, in South Africa, the objective of apartheid was to sustain a system of racial segregation in which one group is deprived of political and civil rights, and exploited as low-cost labor. During apartheid rule, the per capita income of South African blacks relative to the whites climbed from 8.6 to 13.5 percent. The Palestinians’ starting point relative to the Israelis was almost twice as high in percentage terms. But even before October 7, 2023, it had plunged to a lower level than that of South Africa’s blacks at the end of apartheid rule.

But the ultimate difference between South African apartheid and Israel’s ultra-apartheid is ethnic cleansing – as a prelude to worse.

The ultimate difference   

Unlike classic apartheid and its territorial fragmentation, degree of formality and labor exploitation, Israeli apartheid aims further. Since the UN Partition Plan, its ultimate purpose has been the Judaization of Arab Palestine and the drastic expansion of Israeli borders. Apartheid is an instrument to that goal.

Apartheid South Africa was willing to live with segregated, exploited and underprivileged black people. By contrast, since the late 1970s, the Israeli system has sought to use segregation as an interim instrument to ethnically cleanse the occupied territories through Palestinian displacement, dispossession and, if necessary, abject devastation.

In this sense, Israeli apartheid differs from South African apartheid. It is ultra-apartheid. In Latin, ultra means “beyond”, or “on the far side of.” Going beyond the norm, ultra-apartheid officially shuns classic apartheid, yet benefits from the low-cost labor while ultimately seeking its obliteration.

Today, ultra-apartheid is the inspiration of settler violence in the West Bank and the “judicial reforms” by the Netanyahu cabinet, to accelerate the transformation of the secular and democratic Jewish state into a religious and autocratic regime.

 

Israel’s genocide isn’t over. It’s been expanded.

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2025/11/20/israels-genocide-isnt-over-its-been-expanded/

Israel’s genocide isn’t over. In the days and weeks after a ceasefire was declared, many Israeli soldiers were withdrawn from Gaza — and then deployed back to the West Bank. 

Right now, Palestinians in the West Bank are experiencing the highest rates of settler and state violence in recent history, all while the mainstream media continues to push Palestine out of the news. 

The Israeli government is rapidly expanding its project of ethnic cleansing, making it abundantly clear that its intention is not simply to erase Palestinians in Gaza, but to erase all Palestinians from their land.

In this Wire, we shine a spotlight on the unfolding crisis in the West Bank.

Settler violence is Israeli policy.

As the Israeli state continues to accelerate its ethnic cleansing and mass displacement, it has again made use of extremist Israeli settlers. These mobs surge into a Palestinian village, carrying clubs and weapons, beating people and burning their homes, fields, and olive trees. Children are not spared. Attacks like this are happening multiple times a day in the West Bank right now, as settlers try to disrupt the olive harvest season. 

Last week, a group of settlers attacked the villages of Beit Lid and Deir Sharaf, burning vehicles, wounding four Palestinians, and attacking Israeli soldiers who responded. Only a day later, settlers torched and defaced a mosque in Deir Istiya and burned a Quran. 

In Turmus’ayya, Israeli settlers descended on the town, one clubbing a Palestinian woman known as Umm Saleh over the head, knocking her unconscious, then striking her repeatedly as she lay on the ground. A freelance journalist caught the attack on video, calling it “the single worst individual act of violence” he’d ever seen.

Settler violence has grown so fierce that Israel has begun to draw international condemnation, reaching such a level that Israeli politicians were recently compelled to make statements claiming these extremist settlers will be held accountable. On Sunday, PM Netanyahu stated that these attacks “do not represent” the majority of the “law-abiding” Israeli settlers in the West Bank. But in reality, extremist Israeli settlers and their ultraviolence against Palestinians is structurally backed by the Israeli government — because their goals are one and the same.

The objective of all Israeli settlements is to push Palestinians out of their land and claim the entire West Bank. These settlements, while baldly illegal under international law and condemned by every legitimate human rights organization in the world, are backed by Israeli military courts, protected by Israeli forces, and represented in the highest levels of the Israeli government. In this process, settlers have been effectively deputized by the Israeli military to terrorize Palestinians. 

Settler attacks are only one strategy in this overall policy of forced displacement, attempting to make Palestinians’ lives unlivable and force them out of their homes. Since the genocide in Gaza began, cooperation between violent settlers and the Israeli state has grown even more blatant: The Israeli government is arming West Bank settlers on an even greater scale, transferring hundreds of thousands of guns and other weapons to Israeli settlers since October 2023.

Displacement at a scale not seen since 1967.

Settler mob violence is far from the only form of regular violence that Palestinians in the West Bank face under Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing. In fact, the majority of documented attacks on West Bank Palestinians and their land in the last month were carried out by the Israeli military, in the form of direct physical attacks, destruction of homes, villages, and infrastructure, and the uprooting and poisoning of Palestinian olive trees and livestock. 

These direct attacks, by both the Israeli state and their settler arm, serve to accelerate Palestinian displacement from the West Bank. After the total destruction of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams refugee camps by the Israeli military, the UN reports that at least 31,919 Palestinian refugees have been displaced from those areas alone — creating the largest displacement crisis in the West Bank since 1967. Operating hand-in-hand with this mass displacement is the further acceleration of Israeli settlement construction, another process that has been turbocharged since the onset of the Gaza genocide — after already ramping up significantly since Trump’s first term in office.

Israeli forces also continue to routinely kidnap Palestinians in the West Bank — arresting 442 West Bank Palestinians in October alone. Released Palestinian prisoners, including the thousands of Palestinian captives freed by the ceasefire deal, have described in detail the conditions of systematic torture and abuse, including extreme physical violence and assault, deprivation of food and sunlight, and sexual abuse. More than 9,200 Palestinians are still being held in Israeli military prisons, the vast majority of whom are held arbitrarily and have not faced any form of trial. 

New records for violence in the West Bank

Even before Israel’s genocide began, violence against West Bank Palestinians was already at record levels. By September of 2023, UN officials had already declared it the deadliest year for Palestinian children in the West Bank on record. But once the genocide began and the world’s attention moved to Gaza, Israeli settler and state violence against West Bank Palestinians spiked further — and the last few months have become the worst in recent history.

In October 2025, Israeli settlers carried out at least 264 attacks, the highest number in a single month since the UN began keeping records 19 years ago. Since January of this year, 45 Palestinian children in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces, and more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in total by the Israeli military and settlers since October 2023. 

This most recent spike in settler attacks is due in part to the onset of olive harvest season in the West Bank, which Israeli settlers attempt to disrupt by burning trees, villages, and descending on olive groves by the dozens and physically attacking farmers. As a result, non-Palestinian activists and press will often accompany Palestinians to harvest in what is known as “protective presence” — but this is no guarantee of safety. Two Reuters journalists, part of a group of villagers, activists and press attempting to harvest olives, were recently clubbed and stoned in an attack by Israeli settlers, their helmets dented and their cameras smashed.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide: This is Zionism

Whether it’s Israeli settlers attacking villagers or an Israeli military court ordering Palestinians to destroy their own homes, the end goal remains the same: to gain the maximum amount of land for Jewish settlement, with the minimum amount of Palestinians on it. This is the fundamental political goal of Zionism — a politics of eradication and supremacy.

From the West Bank to Gaza, we know what this means in action. The privileging of the rights of one people, and the dehumanization of another, paves the way for genocide. Our work, as a movement, is to grow the fight for an end to U.S. support for the Israeli government’s politics of dehumanization.

 Zionists Are Freaking Out About Losing Control Of the Narrative

Caitlin Johnstone

https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/zionists-are-freaking-out-about-losing-control-of-the-narrative-93bcd00d0983

Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made some very revealing remarks during an appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly on Sunday, expressing frustration with the way younger Jews are dismissing pro-Israel arguments because of the carnage they’ve seen in Gaza.

“We are now wrestling with a new I think generational divide here, and I think that’s particularly true in that social media is now our source of media,” Hurwitz said. “It used to be that the news you got in America was American media, and it was pretty mainstream; you know it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media, which is the global medium; its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews. So while in the 1990s a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them; they find them on their phones.”

“It’s also this increasingly post-literate media; less and less text, more and more videos,” Hurwitz continued. “So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us cannot have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds: carnage. And I sound obscene.”

Hurwitz went on to say that Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad.

“And you know I think unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism,” Hurwitz said. “Because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people. So, when on TikTok all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”

Hoo boy. Lots to unpack here.

It’s just so fascinating to see a former White House speechwriter making so many of the points that anti-Zionists have been making for years, but taking the exact opposite meaning from them:

• The mainstream legacy media has always hidden anti-Israel views from the public — and that was a good thing.
• Social media has now given Palestinians the ability to expose the truth about Israel’s abuses — and that’s a bad thing.
• People aren’t falling for the Zionist spin and narrative-diddling anymore because they’ve seen the carnage in Gaza with their own eyes — and that’s a problem.
• People who learned from Holocaust education that genocide is wrong have been applying those same lessons to the genocide in Gaza — and this means they’re “confused”.

Hurwitz isn’t denying Israel’s abuses or framing its genocidal atrocities as the problem, she’s just coming right out and saying that people obtaining information and moral clarity about those abuses is the problem. The atrocities aren’t wrong, what’s wrong is people seeing those atrocities and calling them what they are.

I love the way she complains that she looks “obscene” for trying to lay out arguments and narratives justifying the Gaza holocaust for people who’ve seen the “wall of carnage” from the genocide. I mean, yes. Yes obviously you’re going to look obscene if you try to tell someone why raw video footage of massacres, mutilated children and emaciated bodies is actually showing something that is justifiable and acceptable.

You can’t stand in front of a pile of child corpses justifying their murder and then whine when people ignore your spinmeistering and keep staring at the tiny bodies. That’s like murdering an entire family and then telling the cops, “But you’re not listening to my reasons for killing them!” They’re doing the normal thing while you are being obscene.

There’s a viral clip of this tirade going around Twitter and I was curious if Hurwitz had said anything after the video segment ended which might have made what she said sound less horrible, so I went to check out the original video on the Jewish Federations of North America’s Youtube channel, and nope. It didn’t get any better.

Hurwitz went on to say that people are wrong to carry the lessons of Holocaust education into opposition to Israel’s genocidal atrocities because the Holocaust was Nazi Germany blaming Jews for all their problems in the same way people think Israel is the source of all the world’s problems today.

She then mourned the way western Jews “re-imagined Judaism as a Protestant-style religion” in order to integrate into western society rather than retaining a strong identity that is loyal to the state of Israel.

“The problem is, we’re not just a religion,” Hurwitz said. “We’re a nation. Civilization. Tribe. Peoplehood. But most of all we’re a family. And so if you are a young person raised in America who thinks Judaism is a Protestant-style religion, then the seven million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists. So my co-religionists, if I look at them and they’re not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them?”

“But that’s a category error,” says Hurwitz. “The seven million people in Israel, they are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists, it’s easy to slide into anti-Zionism. You don’t necessarily have that connection to them.”

Hurwitz is saying here that Jews around the world should be loyal to Israel no matter what Israel does, not because that’s the moral or truthful position but because Israel is where their loyalties belong.

I don’t know about you, but if my siblings were murdering civilians I would immediately become their enemy. I wouldn’t defend my brother if he was going around shooting children in the head like IDF snipers have been doing in Gaza, in fact I would feel a special responsibility to stop him exactly because he is my brother. Genocide doesn’t magically become acceptable if the perpetrators are your “siblings”, unless you are a sociopath.

It’s just incredible how hard Zionists have been freaking out about the way Israel has lost control of the narrative these last two years. More and more often we’re seeing them say the quiet parts out loud as they frantically scramble to manage perceptions and manipulate minds around the world.

Many things which used to be hidden are finding their way into the light.

As Israel's image collapses, US billionaires move to silence dissent

Gregory Shupak

17 November 2025

Facing record opposition to Israel's genocide in Gaza, America's elites are seizing control of news and tech companies to suppress criticism and rescue a crumbling narrative

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israels-image-collapses-us-billionaires-move-silence-dissent

Public support for Israel in the United States has reached historic lows.

A Gallup poll in July found that 32 percent of Americans approve of the Israeli campaign in Gaza, while 60 percent disapprove, a 10 percent drop in support from the previous September.

Pew Research Center findings showed that a third of American adults (33 percent) say the country sends Israel too much military aid, a larger portion of the population than those who say the US provides the right amount (23 percent) or not enough (8 percent).

A majority of Americans hold a negative view of Israel and report being "extremely" or "very" concerned about its military strikes killing Palestinian civilians and about starvation among Palestinians in Gaza.

A New York Times/Siena poll revealed that there are slightly more Americans who sympathise with the Palestinians than those who sympathise with Israel.

Israel's popularity crisis is particularly acute among young Americans, with only nine percent of those aged 18 to 34 backing Israel's military action in the Strip. Forty-two percent of those in the 18 to 29 cohort say the US grants Israel too much military aid, compared to 21 percent whose opinion is that the US is giving the right amount or too little.

One influential ghoul after another - from Hillary Clinton to wealthy tech investors and members of Congress - has attributed this shift to TikTok, as if American youth are incapable of independently concluding that it is wrong to repeatedly set fire to tents filled with displaced persons.

Amid the decline in pro-Israel sentiment, which is functionally the same as a decline in support for US imperialism in and beyond the Middle East, the US ruling class is aggressively asserting control over powerful media organs.

Control of the narrative

On 25 September, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating that for TikTok to continue operating in the US, one or more Americans had to own the majority of the platform.

Trump's actions, it is worth noting, build on the Biden administration's approach to TikTok, which also called for US control of the app, a position with bipartisan support in Congress.

Accordingly, a group of US investors led by the software firm Oracle is taking control of 65 percent of TikTok.

Oracle is set to oversee TikTok's US operations, provide cloud services for user data storage and secure a licence to take charge of the app's algorithm.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison is one of the top donors to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), a US nonprofit that effectively subsidises the Israeli military. He has said that he feels a "deep emotional connection to the State of Israel" and "we", seemingly a reference to Oracle, will "do everything we can to support the country of Israel". 

A similar process has unfolded in traditional news media. In August, the Ellison family's media company, Skydance - an outfit financially supported by Larry Ellison and run by his son, David - acquired Paramount, a movie studio that owns CBS and a host of cable channels.

Bari Weiss, a talentless behind-kisser and tattle-tale passionately opposed to free speech and to Palestinian freedom, has been named CBS News's editor-in-chief.

Now, the Ellison family has its sights set on Warner Bros Discovery, which owns HBO, TBS and CNN.

Media capture

While there is ample space for pro-Palestine messaging on TikTok, it is not as if traditional news outlets like CBS have a record of supporting Palestinian liberation.

CBS, like all major corporate media in the United States, far more often than not produces content favourable to US-Israeli objectives in West Asia.

For example, in the last year, the CBS News website ran 2,575 stories that mention Gaza, with only 388 containing the word "genocide".

In other words, in a period that mostly predates the Ellison-Weiss regime, only 15 percent of the site's Gaza coverage mentioned the crime of crimes, even as one credible source after another has concluded that Israel has carried out a genocide in the Strip.

Thus, CBS News already had a record of what I have previously called genocide denial by omission, a form of media distortion that helps enable genocide by reducing the likelihood that enough of the American population will accurately understand that their government is party to an extermination campaign to bring it to a halt.

CNN, for its part, helped manufacture consent for the Gaza genocide by making pro-Israel propaganda its official policy.

What the latest developments in the media landscape represent are, as with so much else in the Trump era, a movement towards vulgar, unabashed assertions of raw power that dispense with the typically hollow and hypocritical pretences of an open and democratic society that characterised America's recent past.

Losing legitimacy

The American state and the billionaires it serves know that they cannot win the Palestine-Israel debate, and they see that their colonial outpost is rapidly losing perceived legitimacy.

Trying to stamp out content that makes Israel and the US look bad by occasionally giving audiences a partial glimpse of US-Zionist barbarism in Palestine is a sign of desperation rather than strength.

The gambit will not work.

Media outlets do not operate in a vacuum, and people are not empty vessels that news firms can simply fill with whatever they like.

Israel's image cannot be restored, and neither can that of the US ruling class, certainly not among young people who won't soon forget their peers being suspended, expelled or chewed up by the US's merciless deportation machine.

They won't soon forget their colleges turning riot cops against them or putting snipers on the roofs of school buildings during pro-Palestine student protests. They won't soon forget the mainstream media lying to them while Palestinian journalists showed them the grieving parents whose bereavement was enabled by western, and especially American, taxpayers.

If the Gaza "ceasefire" holds, the international movement in solidarity with Palestine may lose some of its energy in the West.

However, even if the frequency of mass demonstrations in western cities dwindles, the organisations and alliances formed after 7 October are not all going to disappear.

Indeed, many of these formations predate 2023, with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement having established nodes around the world and achieved numerous successes since its inception in 2005.

That institutional memory cannot be erased by media manipulation, nor can the experience, political organising skills and self-confidence that pro-Palestine activists have gained by fighting, and sometimes winning, through 20 years of BDS or two years of resisting genocide.

The Ultimate Goal of Jewish Settler Violence in the West Bank

In October, amid the two-year anniversary of the Gaza genocide, Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank hit an all-time high. And they will escalate – as long as they are allowed by U.S.-led West.

by Dan Steinbock | Nov 18, 2025

https://original.antiwar.com/Dan_Steinbock/2025/11/17/the-ultimate-goal-of-jewish-settler-violence-in-the-west-bank/

Last Thursday dawn, Israeli settlers set fire to the Hajja Hamida Mosque in the Palestinian village of Deir Istiya in the north of the West Bank. Photographs taken at the scene showed racist, anti-Palestinian slogans sprayed on the walls of the mosque, which was damaged in the blaze. Copies of the Quran – the Islamic holy book – were also burned.

October 2025 recorded the highest monthly number of Israeli settler attacks since the UN Humanitarian office (OCHA) began documenting such incidents in 2006. That’s more than 260 attacks resulting in casualties, property damage or both – an average of eight incidents per day.

Reminiscent of the Gaza atrocities, one in every five Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in 2025 across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is a child.

During this olive harvest season, settler violence has reached the highest level recorded in recent years, with the injury of more than 150 Palestinians and the vandalism of over 5,700 trees.

This violence is not a fringe phenomenon. It is deliberate, systematic and escalatory. Shunning all international condemnation, it seeks to establish new “facts on the ground.” It is ethnic cleansing aiming at involuntary population transfer and, unless disrupted, mass atrocities.

From vigilantes to state terror   

At the beginning of 2024, Zvi Sukkot, Knesset member of the Religious Zionist Party and a colleague of the self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich, urged the government to “occupy, annex, and demolish all the houses [in Gaza], and build large neighborhoods and settlements.” It sounded harsh, but the zealot was consistent. He had a dream. What happened in Gaza would not stay there but spread to the West Bank.

A far-right Jewish settler living illegally in the West Bank, Sukkot is a former member of The Revolt, a violent Jewish terror group, which has engaged in numerous arson attacks. The group advocates the dismantling of the Israeli state to establish the Kingdom of Israel that follows Jewish Law rather than the rule of (secular) law.

In 2010, Sukkot was arrested in an investigation of a mosque arson and expelled from the West Bank for violent anti-Palestinian attacks. He had defended Jews suspected of firebombing a Palestinian family and been arrested for alleged involvement in “price tagging”; that is, vandalism and violent settler attacks against Palestinians.

As of 2017, the group was still active, in what the Shin Bet internal security agency calls “the second generation of…The Revolt.”

By early 2023, Sukkot had made it to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. And after October 7, Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed him to chair the Knesset Subcommittee for “Judea and Samaria” (read: the West Bank).

To the settlers, Sukkot is a success story reflecting the march of extremist settlers to the Israeli institutions in the past two decades.

As a member of The Revolt, Sukkot could only firebomb a few Palestinians, mosques and churches. It wasn’t efficient. Now he is in a position to shape the future of the land. He is no longer fighting those in charge. He is in charge.

How did the Messianic far-right march into institutions they once hoped to pull to pieces? Ostensibly, democratically. With the rise of the Jewish dual state, the Netanyahu cabinets have subverted the secular democratic state. The parallels are alarming. Similar trajectories broke the back of the Weimar Republic a century ago.

Ironically, the Israeli settlement policy was first developed by the Labor governments, which paved the way for the foxes to take over the henhouse. 

The rise of Jewish settlements   

Since the 1970s there has been a tacit collusion between the Israeli state and the settlers. It is a symbiotic system. The state takes over land, while the settlers, who seek land to further their agenda, engage in violence against Palestinians to achieve their expulsion.

Occasionally, the two cooperate directly, but the preference is to retain an arm’s length distance, to preserve the semblance of the rule of law. The ultimate aim of settler violence is to foster Greater Israel; that is, a Jewish-only space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

A new stage ensued in 2018, when the Basic Law codified that “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening.” In keeping with this principle, Israel has dispossessed Palestinians in the West Bank to use their land to build new settlements and to expand existing ones.

According to international law, an occupier must not confiscate land for the needs of the occupier. So, Israel came up with the legal acrobatics of “declaring” instead of “confiscating” land. Based on a subversion of the Ottoman land law from 1858, this bizarre interpretation allowed Israel to take over 16 percent of the West Bank prior to October 7; or 500 to 5,000 dunams per year. Amid the Gaza genocide in the first half of 2024, declarations of state land shot to 24,000 dunams. In other words, while Gaza was burning, Israeli occupation authorities were rushing to take over the West Bank.

Under the labor coalition, the number of settlements grew slowly until the election triumph of the Israeli hard right in the late 1970s. That’s when Prime Minister Begin initiated a huge and purposeful settlement policy to take over the West Bank. In the process, the Jewish settler population soared from a few thousands to over half a million in the West Bank prior to October 7, 2023. 

In parallel, Israeli governments have encouraged increasing Jewish settlement in Jerusalem. Since 1967, it has more than tripled to 600,000, whereas the number of Palestinians is close to 390,000. The tacit objective has been to maximize the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, while increasing the Jewish population in Arab East Jerusalem.

Settler violence   

Following the rise of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet in late 2022, the efforts to achieve Jewish supremacy in the West Bank have escalated dramatically. Taking advantage of the Gaza War, groups of violent settlers have carried out organized operations to expel Palestinian communities, through threats, intimidation, property damage, and physical assaults.

Settler Violence Incidents

Until recently, Israeli and international media have characterized instances of settler violence as “rampages,” which suggests violent but uncontrollable behavior, involving a large group of people. In reality, the violence has been systemic and coordinated.

After the settler violence in Huwara in February 2023, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, head of the military’s Central Command in charge of the West Bank, described the rampage as “a pogrom done by outlaws.” He deliberately used the term referring to mob attacks against Jews in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century. As a result, Fuchs himself was targeted for assassination by Kahanite settlers, according to Shin Bet. It wasn’t the first time. In 2007, then-prime minister Ehud Olmert lashed out at settlers in Hebron, who attacked Palestinians and their property. Like some other Israeli leaders, Olmert called the attacks a pogrom, which made him the target of far-right settlers, supported by U.S. billionaires like the late casino tycoon, Sheldon Adelson.

Referring to antisemitic violence in Russia, the term “pogrom” is usually defined as an officially tolerated organized massacre. In this sense, the pogroms by the Jewish settlers in the West Bank are indeed reminiscent of those in Kishinev and elsewhere, as many Israelis suggest.

More than a century ago, Jews knew only too well the consequences of mobs rushing into Jewish neighborhoods while calling for “Death to the Jews!”

Today, Palestinians know exactly what will follow when Jewish settlers burst into Arab neighborhoods crying for the “Death to the Arabs!”

Settlements as a Security Burden   

Ever since the 1970s, the settlers and their U.S. financiers have argued that the settlements ensure Israel’s security. In this view, settlers allow the residents of Tel Aviv to breathe easy because the settlements are good for national security.

In reality, the settlements are a security burden for Israel. ln the past decades, there have been no major war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Yet, due to the Separation Wall and fragmentation of the West Bank, the line of defense that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is required to protect is today about five times the length it would be without the settlements.

Stunningly, before October 7, the IDF had to deploy more than half its active forces, and in crisis situations even two-thirds of them, in the West Bank. That was more than the forces allocated to guarding all other fronts combined (Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the Jordanian border along the Arava).

Worse, these allocations had to be coupled with a large contingent required to protect the settlements. According to estimates, some 80 percent of IDF forces in the West Bank were allocated to settlement guard duty, while the only 20 percent focused on defending the borders of the pre-1967 Israel.

Furthermore, the IDF presence and operations have contributed to several major uprisings, which penalized economic prospects in Israel as well. If Israeli military presence in southern Lebanon was the architect of Hezbollah, its presence in the West Bank and Gaza has served as the midwife of Hamas.

The brutal occupation has divided Israel internally and isolated it externally. It is responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the genocidal atrocities in Gaza. None of this was inevitable. None of it was warranted.

And none of it could have happened without the continuous flows of arms and financing by the U.S.-led West.