Mairav Zonszein
In August, Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s general security service, the Shin Bet, wrote a remarkable letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli cabinet ministers. The letter didn’t get much attention in Israel or abroad, but it went to the heart of the crisis that has afflicted the country since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas. Bar warned that intensifying attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, which he called “Jewish terrorism,” challenge “Israel’s national security” and are a “large stain on Judaism.” He described a trend in which “hilltop youth” (the term used in Israel for extremist settlers, although some of these militants are long past their youth) in the West Bank are not only assaulting Palestinians but also clashing with Israeli security forces—all with the backing of senior members of the government. The settler militias had gone from “evading the security forces to attacking the security forces,” Bar wrote, “from cutting themselves off from the establishment to receiving legitimacy from certain officials in the establishment.”
Over the past year, events in the West Bank have been obscured first by Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza and now by the war’s escalation in Lebanon and Iranian strikes on Israeli territory. But since October 7, 2023, the UN has recorded over 1,400 incidents of settler attacks in the occupied territories (ranging from vandalism to assault, arson, and live fire) that resulted in injury or property damage and led to the displacement of 1,600 Palestinians from their homes, an uptick after an already record-breaking year of settler violence in 2023. Bar’s intervention in the summer came as Israeli officials in the defense ministry and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warned that the West Bank was on the verge of an explosion that could cause hundreds of Israeli fatalities in a new conflagration in Israel’s multifront war.
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