Impunity in the West Bank

Israel’s role as a safe haven for Jewish people after the Holocaust is central to its identity and values as a modern, democratic state. And so it was striking to read, in a recent story by my colleague Azam Ahmed, multiple prominent Israelis, including former military and intelligence officials, using World War II comparisons to describe what’s currently unfolding in the West Bank. “Eighty years after the Holocaust, ‘Mein Kampf’ in reverse,” one said; another called it “ethnic cleansing.”

Azam spent over a month on the ground reporting on the impunity of settlers attacking Palestinians, a source of growing concern around the world. (Before turning his attention to the West Bank, he also investigated the impunity of U.S.-backed forces in Afghanistan, and won a Pulitzer for it.) I asked him what he learned during a recent trip to the West Bank with retired Israeli generals.

The retired generals sounding the alarm over the West Bank

Azam, you recently accompanied a group of retired Israeli officials and military officers to the West Bank. How did that happen? And what did you see?

One of these generals had known our colleague Ronen Bergman for a long time and asked whether we’d like to come along. We saw villages where settler violence has cleared entire communities. You walk around and it’s like a ghost town. There are the remnants of shepherding pens and homes. But no people.

The most striking thing to me was the language these former military officers used to describe what’s happening. They openly called it “ethnic cleansing.” They also referred to “Jewish terrorism” — the idea that in the name of Judaism settlers terrorize innocent farmers, women and children, and sometimes even kill them.

The violence in the West Bank has unfolded in the shadow of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. But it’s not a military campaign; it’s a civilian campaign. What does that look like?

Groups of settlers have been moving into the occupied West Bank, often into containers or trailers on the hillsides. They tend to settle close to Palestinian population centers. In some cases, they attack the surrounding communities.

They come in with masks, with guns, with bats. They torch homes, and steal livestock. The Palestinians know that they’re not allowed to be armed, and that if they fight back, in many cases the military will show up and defend the Israelis, even when they are the aggressors.

These retired generals say Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is complicit in this violence. How so?

When they call the government “complicit,” they mean several things. In some cases soldiers actually join forces with settlers to attack a village. There was a highly publicized incident of settlers camped outside Palestinian homes in a village called Qusra, and one video shows a soldier praying with the settlers.

These officials also point out that Israeli intelligence in the West Bank is so good that it’s very hard for a Palestinian to pull off any kind of attack. So their question is: How is it that a Palestinian can’t do anything without the Israeli military knowing about it, but settlers face no consequences for violence?

That impunity creates an incentive to keep going.

Did the Israeli government offer any kind of response?

The prime minister’s office declined to respond when we asked them about these officials’ comments, and Netanyahu has played down the attacks. But international concern has been growing and he did speak out about a particularly violent attack last month.

The settlements aren’t new, of course — hundreds of thousands of Israelis have lived among millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories since 1967. So what is actually new here?

It doesn’t come out of nowhere. You’re looking at something that has been building for decades and has now been taken to an extreme by this government. Oct. 7, 2023, was a seminal moment. But so was the formation of Netanyahu’s government in 2022, because he brought in Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and other right-wing officials who have the ambition of claiming the occupied West Bank as part of a Greater Israel.

That’s what the generals, and other critics of this government, believe they’re watching. They’re saying these violent incidents aren’t just “a handful of kids,” which is how Netanyahu once tried to frame it. They see this violence as strategic: settlers taking strategic areas, creating corridors and pushing Palestinians into densely populated cities that can be ring-fenced, so the rest of the land can be claimed.

The generals you spoke to were themselves part of military campaigns that involved violence against Palestinians. How do they differentiate between what they did and what is happening today?

In their eyes, a qualitative moral red line has been crossed. They distinguish between a continuum of state violence — violence in response to an attack, or violence designed to maintain security — and settler violence, which is just lawless individual behavior: civilians terrorizing other civilians, with the state tolerating it.

One of the men we quote, Gal Levertov, used to represent Israel before the International Criminal Court, and he said that if he were asked to defend Israel’s conduct in Gaza, he could — on the basis that there was a military objective. But he said there’s no defending what’s happening in the West Bank.

Palestinians, it’s worth noting, don’t see it this way at all. To them, this is simply a more unvarnished version of what came before.

And Azam, zooming out, what does all this mean for Israel and what it stands for as a country?

That’s maybe the hardest question here. The thing we heard time and again from these generals who care about Israel and believe in it is that Israel is ruining and destroying its values by allowing it to happen, by failing to stop it, by having citizens who are willing to do it and by not having more of a public uproar against it.

These generals are looking at it and saying: “This isn’t the Israel that I fought for. And if we’re not careful, the democratic values that we’re meant to uphold will be lost.”

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