If you’ve been following the news out of the Middle East, you’ve likely noticed one phrase surfacing again and again: “Israeli settlers.” The term refers to Israeli citizens living across the green line—in territories whose status remains disputed. Relations between Israelis and Palestinians there have long been strained, but recently intensified. In March alone, six Palestinian civilians were killed, alongside hundreds of reported incidents involving beatings, arson, and vandalism. Last week, the Israeli government approved more than 30 new outposts in the West Bank.
All of which prompts a series of questions: Who are these settlers? How should we understand their relationship with Palestinians—and with the Israeli government? And what will it take to stem the violence?
These are the questions Haviv Rettig Gur explores in his essay today. As with so many issues involving Israel, he writes, the reality is more complex than it first appears—but as the country continues to grapple with existential threats beyond its borders, its long-term future depends just as much on its willingness to confront the struggles at home. —The Editors
When it comes to Israel, the term settler is a word generally applied pejoratively. In some circles, it is used to describe all Israelis in an attempt to deny the Jews’ right to a state. More commonly, it describes a group of people who live in the West Bank, who right now are causing Israel a large and growing headache.
The first thing to understand is that the “settler movement” is enormous and enormously diverse. Calling it a movement does not quite do it justice. Many settlers live in Jerusalem, in neighborhoods that are technically beyond the borders established after the Six-Day War in 1967, but are very much attached to Jerusalem—just part of the urban sprawl and a cheaper place to live than the rest of the city. There are Haredi settlers and secular settlers, moderate religious-Zionist settlers, and even left-wing settlers in different parts of the West Bank.
Then you have the more ideologically fervent, who not only preach a religiously inflected form of Zionism, but who take the idea to its messianic edge. And on the extremes of that last group, you find a cadre of violent extremists eager to catalyze their version of redemption through violence—usually violence against Palestinians, but surprisingly, often also violence against the Israeli state and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.
The problem when the world uses the word settler is that it fails to encompass any of that diversity. The diversity matters not only to win some imagined brownie points in international debates, but to understand the phenomenon and available policy responses. For example, it explains why three-quarters of the Israelis living in Gaza in the run-up to Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the strip accepted government compensation ahead of time, and left their homes peacefully. Only about a quarter of this population—one of the most ideologically intense among the settlers—actually resisted removal in any meaningful sense.
To understand the problems that some settlers are causing Israel, you need to understand who they are and what drives them: their origins, their cheerleaders in government, and how they are working against the interests of the rest of the country.
