The Religious Extremism That Motivates Israeli Settler Expansion in the West Bank

Palestinians try to save their property and extinguish a fire set by Israeli settlers in the presence of Israeli armed forces in the industrial area of the West Bank town of Beita, on Aug. 2, 2024. (Wahaj Bani Moufleh/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

Amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the Israeli government has approved its largest West Bank land seizure in over 30 years, fueling settler expansion and rising violence against Palestinians.

Despite international condemnation, Jewish extremism continues to drive these actions, threatening any possibility of a future Palestinian state.

By Allan C. Brownfeld, Reposted from Washington Report On Middle East Affairs

Israel and Judaism

WHILE ATTENTION was focused on Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, Israel approved the largest seizure of land in the occupied West Bank in more than three decades. This aggressive expansion reflects Israeli settlers’ growing influence in the government. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself, has promoted the policy of growing expansion, saying that he hopes to solidify Israel’s hold on the territory and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.

Authorities approved the appropriation of 12.7 kilometers (nearly 5 square miles of land) in the Jordan Valley. Settlement monitors said this land grab connects Israeli settlements along a key corridor bordering Jordan, a move they said undermines prospects of a contiguous Palestinian state.

U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric called it “a step in the wrong direction,” adding that “the direction we want to be heading is to find a negotiated two-state solution.” According to the U.N., about 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Much of the international community condemns these settlements as a violation of international law.

INCREASE IN ISRAELI SETTLER ATTACKS ON PALESTINIANS

Nadav Weiman, a former Israeli Special Forces soldier, is now director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of former Israeli army veterans that advocates an end to Israel’s occupation. As of mid-August, the U.N. Humanitarian Affairs office has recorded more than 650 attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023. Settlers have killed at least 10 Palestinians during this period and Israeli security forces have killed more than 577.

Asked why settlers destroy Palestinian schools, Weiman responds: “Because you want families to feel they are not safe here. With no school here, the kids cannot return. And if you do not have kids, you don’t have life. It’s not just about stealing livestock, it’s about destroying the sense of being safe.”

Human Rights Watch reports on physical violence against Palestinians by settlers, including “frequently stoning and shooting at Palestinian cars. In many cases, settlers abuse Palestinians in front of Israeli soldiers or police with little interference from the authorities.”

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says settler colonists actions include “blocking roadways, so as to impede Palestinian life and commerce. The settlers also shoot solar panels on roofs of buildings, torch automobiles, shatter windowpanes, destroy crops, uproot trees, abuse merchants and owners of stalls in the market. These actions are meant to force Palestinians to leave their homes and farmland, and thereby enable the settlers to gain control of them.”

JEWISH EXTREMISM FUELING SETTLER ATTACKS

What is little understood is the religious extremism that motivates much of the settler movement. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is a disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane, a hero of the settler movement. In a different Israel, he was considered a terrorist and a racist and was expelled from the Knesset. He advocated an Israeli version of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, making marriage between Jews and non-Jews illegal. Until recently, Ben-Gvir had a portrait of Meir Kahane on his living room wall. Prof. Susannah Heschel of the Department of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College calls Kahane one of the most despicable characters to emerge in post-World War II Jewish life.

Followers of Kahane have had a major influence on Israel. In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a Kahane disciple, gunned down 29 Muslim worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. Goldstein, together with Kahane, is viewed in heroic terms by the militant settler colonial movement.

Few Americans understand the extreme views that characterize Israel’s now dominant right wing. At the funeral of Goldstein, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin stated that, “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” Shmuel Hacohen, a teacher in a Jerusalem college, said, “Baruch Goldstein was the greatest Jew then alive, not in one way but in every way. There are no innocent Arabs here.”

Few people are aware of the religious intolerance that motivates the ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlers on the West Bank. Consider the statement of one of their heroes, the former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadiah Joseph: “The only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews.” His funeral was considered the largest ever in Israel, with crowd estimates reaching 800,000. He is admired by settlers as well as other Israelis. His picture is on postage stamps and streets carry his name.

This contempt for non-Jews is widespread. Rabbi A.I. Kook, widely admired in Israel, said of Jews, “We are of a much higher and greater spiritual order than non-Jews.” Rabbi Kook’s entire teachings, which are followed devoutly by many leaders of the settler movement, are based upon the Lurianic Kabbalah. This school of Jewish mysticism dominated Judaism from the late 16th to the early 19th century. One of its basic tenets is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Kabbalah, the world was created solely for the sake of the Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.

Common to both the Talmud and the Halacha (Orthodox religious law) is a differentiation between Jews and non-Jews. The respected Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who headed the Chabad movement, explained: “The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression, ‘Let us differentiate’….We have a case between totally different species. The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality than the bodies of (members) of all nations of the world….A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity….The entire creation of a non-Jew is only for the sake of the Jews.” In the West Bank, followers of Rabbi Schneerson constitute one of the most extreme groups.

When an 11-year-old Palestinian girl from Nablus was killed by settlers in 1983, in the defense of the guilty parties, the chief rabbi of the Sephardic community reportedly cited a Talmudic text justifying killing an enemy on occasions when one can see from a child’s perspective that he or she will grow up to be your enemy.

The theft of Palestinian olive harvests has been justified by some rabbis. Former Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu stated: “Since the land is the inheritance of the people of Israel, planting on this land by Gentiles is planting on land that doesn’t belong to them. If someone puts a tree on my land, both the tree and the fruit it yields belong to me.” Some rabbis cite the biblical edict to exterminate the Amalekites to justify both expelling Palestinians from the land and killing Arab civilians in wartime.

While the U.N., the U.S., and the rest of the world believe that the West Bank is occupied territory, Israel’s current right-wing government and the settler-colonial movement have a far different view. In fact, Zionism has shared this view from the beginning. A poster from the Zionist terrorist group Irgun in 1947 quoted Genesis 15:18: “Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the River of Egypt unto the great River, the Euphrates.”

The war in 1967, when Israel captured the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Sinai, and Golan Heights, led to a rise in Jewish irredentism and the movement for a Greater Israel, which focused on colonizing the occupied territories. Members of Israel’s current government speak openly of annexing the territories and expelling the West Bank’s Palestinian population.

MAINSTREAMING EXTREMISM, IN ISRAEL AND THE U.S.

It is not only extremist Israeli settlers who claim that the West Bank should be part of Israel. An article by Barry Shaw, of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, appeared in The Jerusalem Post with the headline, “Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel.” He writes, “Our story tells of a God…who spoke to a man, Abraham, and told him that He would make of him a great nation…And Abraham took his people to the place that God promised. And God made of Abraham a people that cherished the land and, with generations, that land became Israel.”

Ignoring completely the Palestinians who have lived on the land for many centuries, Shaw concludes his article with a statement being heard more and more often in Israel and from its advocates in the U.S.: “Let us say it clearly and affirmatively: Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel.”

Some Jewish Americans are involved in helping to finance illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank. In 2021, the Jewish National Fund approved a new policy allowing the organization to officially purchase land in the West Bank for the expansion of Israeli settlements. An Israeli crowdfunding platform has allowed U.S. residents to donate millions of dollars to causes including illegal West Bank settlements. Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is co-director of a family foundation that has donated large amounts of money to West Bank settlements.

Synagogues in many cities, including Brooklyn and Queens in New York, Englewood and Teaneck in New Jersey, and Los Angeles, California have hosted real estate fairs that promote property for sale in the West Bank to American Jews.

Selling West Bank real estate in the U.S., critics charge, is in violation of international law. Bill Van Esveld of Human Rights Watch said that the Geneva Convention, the International Court of Justice, and most other governments agree: “It’s not Israeli territory. It’s Palestinian. International law is actually quite simple. It’s really a bright-line rule: there’s no appropriation and transfer of property for settlements in occupied territory. It’s not allowed.”

Rabbi Abby Stein, a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council, says: “They’re selling land that—by international law and even U.S. law—Israel has no right to sell.”

ANOTHER NAKBA?

What is taking place in the West Bank today is similar to what happened to Palestinians in 1948. Nadim Bawalsa, a historian of modern Palestine and associate editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, provides this assessment: “In the early months of 1948, Zionist forces terrorized Palestinians. They massacred more than 100 people in the village of Deir Yassin. They destroyed Qatamon, an affluent Palestinian neighborhood near Talbiya…A couple of months ago, my mother heard on the news that some of the radical Israeli settlers on the West Bank were dropping fliers in Palestinian villages and towns telling people to leave, to go to Jordan, or face another Nakba. She was shaken because it reminded her of stories her parents told her of Zionists using the radio or loudspeakers to threaten Palestinians to leave Jerusalem or their fate would be similar to Deir Yassin.”

Some voices in Israel recognize what is happening in the West Bank and understand where the harsh intolerant religious rhetoric of the settlement movement will lead. Haaretz published in July 2024 an editorial titled “Israel’s continued denial of the reality of the occupation will be its ruin.” It declared: “The opinion by the International Court of Justice revealed nothing to Israelis that they do not already know…The opinion shatters the lie that the occupation is only temporary and intended only for security purposes. This is the lie Israelis told themselves during decades of occupation while they seized more and more Palestinian land and built settlements on it….The opinion bursts this bubble of lies and views various acts of the Israeli government as annexation of the territory.”

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu says that the world cannot deny “the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestral home.” In the view of Haaretz, “If Israel continues to ignore what the world tells it, it may wake up to a reality in which it is boycotted and ostracized like apartheid-era South Africa.”

Most Americans don’t understand Israeli settlers’ widespread religious view that God gave this land to them and that Palestinians have no right to be there. Evidently, the U.S. government also fails to understand that the “two-state solution” it periodically refers to has an increasingly diminishing territorial base.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review and editor of Issues. Read other articles by Allan C. Brownfeld

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