The question is no longer whether settler violence in the West Bank is rising. It is. The question is who is unleashing these settler savages, enabling their rampages across Palestinian towns, farms, and communities with near-total impunity?
For years, diplomatic language has masked an uncomfortable truth: the settler violence is not an isolated phenomenon but is an operational tool serving the larger architecture of occupation and territorial consolidation.
This is not mere chaos by rogue actors. It is part of a coherent system aligned with demographic engineering, land seizures, and the strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian presence in the most vulnerable areas of the West Bank.
Over recent months, well-organised settler attacks burning homes, torching fields, assaulting farmers, and raiding villages have intensified across Nablus, Hebron, the Jordan Valley, and the outskirts of Jerusalem. These attacks consistently coincide with sweeping Israeli military operations including mass arrests, closures, raids, and the destruction of agricultural infrastructure.
This parallel escalation is not a coincidence. When settlers force Palestinian families to flee, soldiers secure the vacated area. When settlers attack herders and seize grazing land, the military expands “closed zones.” When settlers burn orchards, the army later declares the area a “security buffer.” The message is unmistakable: settler violence clears space; the state cements control.
So, who is unleashing them? The answer lies not in individual acts, but in the political, legal, and military ecosystem that cultivates, protects, and rewards settler extremism.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu routinely describes the settler attackers as “a small group of extremists.” The US ambassador in Tel Aviv recently adopted a similar tone, calling them “a few thugs.” These statements are designed to distance the Israeli government from the violence, which is a familiar public-relations manoeuvre
But the structural reality contradicts the rhetoric. Successive Israeli governments across political lines have legalised outposts built on stolen Palestinian land, provided settlers with military protection, infrastructure, and budgets, and created regulatory shields that prevent accountability, as well as integrated the settler leadership into senior policymaking roles.
When a state builds roads, connects electricity, grants permits, and deploys soldiers to protect illegal outposts, the line between extremist vigilantism and state policy disappears. The Israeli government may not publicly order settler violence. It does not need to. It has built a system in which the settlers act as the unofficial vanguard of territorial expansion, testing limits, provoking displacement, and reshaping the map.
Several key ministers in the current Israeli government openly support settler actions, advocate for the annexation of Area C, and call for Palestinian displacement. Figures within the National Security and Finance ministries have called for the “wiping out” of Palestinian villages, directed funds to illegal outposts, and supported armed settler militias. They have also pressured the military and police to avoid arrests of settlers.
When senior officials broadcast such messages, the settlers see a “green light” for their actions. This is how states outsource violence while maintaining plausible deniability. So, I ask again, who is unleashing these settlers? The answer is a political system that simultaneously condemns the violence while engineering the legal and institutional structures that make it possible.
The military’s role: The Israeli army is not merely failing to stop the settler attacks; in many cases it is reinforcing them.
Reports from international agencies, human-rights organisations, and even former Israeli officers point to a systematic pattern in which Israeli soldiers stand by during settler assaults, military checkpoints facilitate settler movement into Palestinian areas, and arrests overwhelmingly target Palestinians. Closed military zones are declared after the settlers seize Palestinian land.
The military’s operational logic is unmistakable: the settlers are an extension of territorial policy, and the Palestinians are treated as a security problem even when they are being attacked.
This raises a central point under international law: when the occupying army protects the perpetrators and punishes the victims, the occupation is transformed into an organised system of persecution. This constitutes a crime under the Rome Statute that set up the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The international NGO Human Rights Watch’s latest report accuses Israel of committing war crimes and pursuing policies designed to forcibly transfer Palestinians from key areas on the West Bank. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has reaffirmed that maintaining the settlements constitutes a serious violation of international law that states must neither recognise nor assist.
Yet, the real problem remains political will. Condemnations are not accountability, and expressing “concern” is not enforcement. If Europe truly believes that the settlements are illegal, for example, why does its trade with settlement-linked companies continue? If the United States claims opposition to settler violence, why is its military aid for Israel unaffected?
The law is not failing. The international system is.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) cannot physically protect Palestinian communities in Area C, but it has strategic tools it is not fully leveraging, including coordinating international legal cases, escalating documentation to the ICC, mobilising targeted diplomatic pressure, and pushing for international protection mechanisms.
The PA must also deepen its engagement with the communities facing daily settler terror, ensuring their voices shape national strategy.
Israeli settler savagery is not spontaneous, isolated, or uncontrollable. It is cultivated by political ideology, shielded by military practice, and normalised by legal manipulation. The question of who is unleashing these settlers must no longer be softened to preserve diplomatic convenience.
The answer is clear: the state that empowers them, the officials who encourage them, the soldiers who protect them, and the international community that tolerates them. Until this chain of responsibility is confronted directly, the Israeli settler violence will remain not an aberration of the occupation, but one of its primary instruments.
The writer is a professor of diplomatic and international law and former head of the Regional Office of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) for the MENA region.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 27 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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