Feature | Rosalux International - War / Peace - Israel - Palestine / Jordan - War in Israel/Palestine Israel’s Unseen Second Front

While the war in Gaza rages on, militant Jewish settlers are pushing further into the Palestinian heartland

Information

Author

Edo Konrad,

Scenes of devastation in the village of Duma in the West Bank following a raid by unknown assailants, 12 May 2024. Photo: Flash90 / Nasser Ishtayeh

On 28 February 2024, some four months into Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, dozens of young Israeli settlers saw an opportunity to set a precedent. Nearly 20 years after Ariel Sharon’s government evacuated the Jewish settlements from Gaza, a small number of them — some reportedly carrying construction materials, while at least two were armed with the kind of rifles used by the military — stormed the Erez Crossing in a first attempt to rebuild Jewish settlements.

Edo Konrad is a journalist and the former editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine.

“We came here [because] we wanted to go home. I live in a community of deportees from Gush Katif, and we wanted to go back”, one 18-year-old settler told Local Call. “I would like the government to understand [what] the majority of the people already understood: We are here. It is ours … We need to go to Gaza, destroy all the terror there, and build there ourselves”, said another.

The settlers were successful — at least momentarily. They managed to erect a makeshift outpost, not unlike the kind seen in the occupied West Bank, which they named Nisanit Hachadasha (“New Nisanit”) after one of the settlements of Gush Katif, the Jewish settlement bloc that was evacuated as part of the 2005 disengagement plan. But unlike the disengagement, in which police and soldiers forcibly removed 9,000 settlers from a colony built in the heart of the Palestinian civilian population, this time Israeli security forces stood nearby and provided protection as the settlers swarmed. It would take several hours before the police arrived to remove them.

To the untrained eye, Nisanit Hachadasha might appear as a form of marginal political theatre, not to be taken too seriously. But the event in many ways marked the culmination of a vision that has been percolating among the settler movement for decades — one that could only be realized through a paradigm-shifting explosion of violence such as all-out war or ethnic cleansing, permanently thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian state and turning the settlers into the masters of the land.

Israel’s unprecedented onslaught and devastation in the Gaza Strip, which came as a response to the gruesome Hamas attacks on Southern Israel and the capturing of hundreds of hostages on 7 October, has provided the settlers with precisely such an explosion. While the mood among mainstream Israeli society is one of painful sacrifice for a “necessary” and “just” war of defence, the settlers and their representatives in the Knesset have had a hard time disguising their celebratory mood. They believe their moment to make history has come. Indeed, the question is not only whether they will succeed, but what kind of threat potential failure could pose to their entire project.

National Religious Revanchism

On the morning of 7 October, as the horrors of the Hamas attacks were becoming clearer (1,200 Israelis killed, 252 hostages taken, and half-a-dozen kibbutzim destroyed), Israel’s Settlements and National Projects Minister Orit Strock spoke before the cabinet. “First of all, happy holiday”, the far-right settler reportedly said at the top of her remarks, referring to the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. “A happy holiday this will not be”, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shot back, reflecting the gap between him and the fundamentalist partners key to holding his government together.

As the war dragged on, Strock would come to symbolize what can only be described as a defiant glee that has characterized the National Religious movement since the November 2022 elections brought them to the height of their power, and certainly since the beginning of the war. In May 2024, Strock openly opposed the “terrible” ceasefire agreement, the approval of which would be tantamount to a betrayal of IDF soldiers and Israel’s war aims. In response to American efforts to negotiate a ceasefire, Strock said that the US “does not deserve to be called a friend of the State of Israel”. In early July, she told a group of settlers that Israel had entered a “miraculous” era — the miracle in question being settlement expansion.

She is by no means alone, and the settler movement is certainly not the only segment of Israeli society agitating for more carnage. The entire right wing, from Netanyahu’s allies in the media to right-wing Haredi journalists, is veritably euphoric, joyfully calling for the expulsion of Palestinians and the annihilation of Gaza as we know it.

That euphoria extends deep into mainstream Israeli society, which was shocked by the sheer brutality of Hamas’s attack, enraged by the government and army’s inability to prevent it, and now feels abandoned and betrayed by the world during the Jewish state’s most difficult hours. In this atmosphere, genocidal rap songs have topped the pop charts, large-scale civilian initiatives have been deployed to justify Israel’s ruthlessness, artists who were once associated with multiculturalism have embraced far-right talking points, calls to end the war are often seen as tantamount to treason, and anti-government protests have not reached anywhere near the numbers seen during the movement against the right-wing judicial coup last year.

Were it not for the fracturing of the Israeli public over Netanyahu’s political motivations for quashing any ceasefire deal and the army’s outwardly stated failure to neither defeat Hamas nor rescue the vast majority of hostages through military operations, it is not hard to imagine that the centre and much of the centre-left would still support Netanyahu’s deliberately vague goal of “total victory”. Yet since 7 October, Religious Zionists (the ideology of the vast majority of West Bank settlers) have been the most assiduous supporters of the war and its potential for remaking the country, both demographically and geographically.