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THE UNPUNISHED: HOW EXTREMISTS TOOK OVER ISRAEL  
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Ronen Bergman, Mark Mazzetti
May 16, 2024
New York Times
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_ After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against
Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the
law. _

A member of a group known as Hilltop Youth, which seeks to tear down
Israel’s institutions and establish ‘‘Jewish rule.’’, Peter
van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times.

 

_This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal
system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the
West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only
Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The
third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself.
Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved
from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power._

PART I.

IMPUNITY

 

By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the
villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150
people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it
had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily
encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days
after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder
threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police
and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for
protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no
consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded
their families into trucks and disappeared.

Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The
Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer
says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left,
little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an
elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a
sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union
providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible
transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the
flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land
now.

 

Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well
documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is
the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment,
assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with
a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli
officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism
that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100
people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the
National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service;
high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime
ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights
lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the
Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps
even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without
punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only
Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of
Israel itself.

After Oct. 7, some settler reservists began manning unauthorized
roadblocks in full I.D.F. uniform, an open but usually unpunished
violation of orders.Credit...Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New
York Times

Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some
speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of
Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of
an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that
violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic
movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually
move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an
account of how voices within the government that objected to the
condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is
a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials
themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of
their country’s democracy.

 

How we reported this article: 

The reporters spent years interviewing more than 100 former and
current Israeli government officials — including four former prime
ministers — scoured secret government documents, and reported from
Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the West Bank and Washington. Natan Odenheimer,
who contributed reporting from Israel and the West Bank, also obtained
documents about how ultranationalist crimes went unpunished.

The interviews, along with classified documents written in recent
months, reveal a government at war with itself. One document
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a meeting in March, when Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s
Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, gave a withering
account of the efforts by Bezalel Smotrich — an ultraright leader
and the official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government
with oversight over the West Bank — to undermine law enforcement in
the occupied territory. Since Smotrich took office, Fox wrote, the
effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled
“to the point where it has disappeared.” Moreover, Fox said,
Smotrich and his allies were thwarting the very measures to enforce
the law that the government had promised Israeli courts it would take.

 

This is a story, pieced together and told in full for the first time,
that leads to the heart of Israel. But it begins in the West Bank, in
places like Khirbet Zanuta. From within the village’s empty ruins,
there is a clear view across the valley to a tiny Jewish outpost
called Meitarim Farm. Built in 2021, the farm has become a base of
operations for settler attacks led by Yinon Levi, the farm’s owner.
Like so many of the Israeli outposts that have been set up throughout
the West Bank in recent years, Meitarim Farm is illegal. It is illegal
under international law, which most experts say doesn’t recognize
Israeli settlements in occupied land. It is illegal under Israeli law,
like most settlements built since the 1990s.

Few efforts are made to stop the building of these outposts or the
violence emanating from them. Indeed, one of Levi’s day jobs was
running an earthworks company, and he has worked with the Israel
Defense Forces to bulldoze at least one Palestinian village in the
West Bank. As for the victims of that violence, they face a
confounding and defeating system when trying to get relief. Villagers
seeking help from the police typically have to file a report in person
at an Israeli police station, which in the West Bank are almost
exclusively located inside the settlements themselves. After getting
through security and to the station, they sometimes wait for hours for
an Arabic translator, only to be told they don’t have the right
paperwork or sufficient evidence to submit a report. As one senior
Israeli military official told us, the police “exhaust Palestinians
so they won’t file complaints.”

And yet in November, with no protection from the police or the
military, the former residents of Khirbet Zanuta and five nearby
villages chose to test whether justice was still possible by appealing
directly to Israel’s Supreme Court. In a petition, lawyers for the
villagers, from Haqel, an Israeli human rights organization, argued
that days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, a raiding party that included
settlers and Israeli soldiers assaulted village residents, threatened
murder and destroyed property throughout the village. They stated that
the raid was part of “a mass transfer of ancient Palestinian
communities,” one in which settlers working hand in hand with
soldiers are taking advantage of the current war in Gaza to achieve
the longer-standing goal of “cleansing” parts of the West Bank,
aided by the “sweeping and unprecedented disregard” of the state
and its “de facto consent to the massive acts of deportation.”

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and the relief the
villagers are seeking — that the law be enforced — might seem
modest. But our reporting reveals the degree to which decades of
history are stacked against them: After 50 years of crime without
punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have
become one.

Iskhak Jabarin near his home in Shab al Butum. He is part of a
petition to Israel’s Supreme Court seeking protection from settlers,
including those from Avigayil, the settlement behind him at
right.Credit...Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times

SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL

The devastating Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, the ongoing crisis
of Israeli hostages and the grinding Israeli invasion and bombardment
of the Gaza Strip that followed may have refocused the world’s
attention on Israel’s ongoing inability to address the question of
Palestinian autonomy. But it is in the West Bank where the corrosive
long-term effects of the occupation on Israeli law and democracy are
most apparent.

 

A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the
startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the
cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault
and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case,
a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense
Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for
only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an
internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we
listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the
police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the
recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they
didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the
activists as “anarchists.” A spokesman for the Israeli National
Police declined to respond to repeated queries about our findings.

​Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into ‘The Unpunished’
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16, 2024

The violence and impunity that these cases demonstrate existed long
before Oct. 7. In nearly every month _before_ October, the rate of
violent incidents was higher than during the same month in the
previous year. And Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, looking at
more than 1,600 cases of settler violence in the West Bank between
2005 and 2023, found that just 3 percent ended in a conviction. Ami
Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000 — speaking out now
because of his concern about Israel’s systemic failure to enforce
the law — says this singular lack of consequences reflects the
indifference of the Israeli leadership going back years. “The
cabinet, the prime minister,” he says, “they signal to the Shin
Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed,
that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”

Ayalon’s assessment was echoed by many other officials we
interviewed. Mark Schwartz, a retired American three-star general, was
the top military official working at the United States Embassy in
Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021, overseeing international support efforts
for the partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
“There’s no accountability,” he says now of the long history of
settler crimes and heavy-handed Israeli operations in the West Bank.
“These things eat away at trust and ultimately the stability and
security of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s
undeniable.”

After the Arab-​Israeli War of 1967, Israel controlled new territory
in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan
Heights and East Jerusalem. In 1979, it agreed to return the Sinai
Peninsula to Egypt.Credit...The New York Times

How did a young nation turn so quickly on its own democratic ideals,
and at what price? Any meaningful answer to these questions has to
take into account how a half-century of lawless behavior that went
largely unpunished propelled a radical form of ultranationalism to the
center of Israeli politics. This is the history that is told here in
three parts. In Part I, we describe the origins of a religious
movement that established Jewish settlements in the newly won
territories of Gaza and the West Bank during the 1970s. In Part II, we
recount how the most extreme elements of the settler movement began
targeting not only Palestinians but also Israeli leaders who tried to
make peace with them. And in Part III, we show how the most
established members of Israel’s ultraright, unpunished for their
crimes, gained political power in Israel, even as a more radical
generation of settlers vowed to eliminate the Israeli state
altogether.

Many Israelis who moved to the West Bank did so for reasons other than
ideology, and among the settlers, there is a large majority who
aren’t involved in violence or other illegal acts against
Palestinians. And many within the Israeli government fought to expand
the rule of law into the territories, with some success. But they also
faced harsh pushback, with sometimes grave personal consequences.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts in the 1990s, on the heels of
the First Intifada, to make peace with Yasir Arafat, chairman of the
Palestine Liberation Organization, gave rise to a new generation of
Jewish terrorists, and they ultimately cost him his life.

The disagreement over how to handle the occupied territories and their
residents has bred a complex and sometimes opaque system of law
enforcement. At its heart are two separate and unequal systems of
justice: one for Jews and another for Palestinians.

The West Bank is under the command of the I.D.F., which means that
Palestinians are subject to a military law that gives the I.D.F. and
the Shin Bet considerable authority. They can hold suspects for
extended periods without trial or access to either a lawyer or the
evidence against them. They can wiretap, conduct secret surveillance,
hack into databases and gather intelligence on any Arab living in the
occupied territory with few restrictions. Palestinians are subject to
military — not civilian — courts, which are far more punitive when
it comes to accusations of terrorism and less transparent to outside
scrutiny. (In a statement, the I.D.F. said, “The use of
administrative detention measures is only carried out in situations
where the security authorities have reliable and credible information
indicating a real danger posed by the detainee to the region’s
security, and in the absence of other alternatives to remove the
risk.” It declined to respond to multiple specific queries, in some
cases saying “the events are too old to address.”)

 

According to a senior Israeli defense official, since Oct. 7, some
7,000 settler reservists were called back by the I.D.F., put in
uniform, armed and ordered to protect the settlements. They were given
specific orders: Do not leave the settlements, do not cover your
faces, do not initiate unauthorized roadblocks. But in reality many of
them have left the settlements in uniform, wearing masks, setting up
roadblocks and harassing Palestinians.

All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law
that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are
treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which
formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This
means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the
West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by
Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.

In this system, even the question of what behavior is being
investigated as an act of terror is different for Jews and Arabs. For
a Palestinian, the simple admission of identifying with Hamas counts
as an act of terrorism that permits Israeli authorities to use severe
interrogation methods and long detention. Moreover, most acts of
violence by Arabs against Jews are categorized as a “terror”
attack — giving Shin Bet and other services license to use the
harshest methods at their disposal.

The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin
Bet called the Department for Counterintelligence and Prevention of
Subversion in the Jewish Sector, known more commonly as the Jewish
Department. It is dwarfed both in size and prestige by Shin Bet’s
Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating
Palestinian terrorism. And in the event, most incidents of settler
violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall
under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When
the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it
is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have
sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the
settler cause. This system, with its gaps and obstructions, allowed
the founders of groups advocating extreme violence during the 1970s
and 1980s to act without consequences, and today it has built a
protective cocoon around their ideological descendants.

Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after
losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by
forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious
Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political
desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some
truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir
— who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza
from Arab hands
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Just two months earlier, according to news reports at the time,
Netanyahu refused to share a stage with Ben-Gvir, who had been
convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and,
in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of
Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal
Amir.

 

Now Ben-Gvir was Israel’s national security minister and Smotrich
was Israel’s finance minister, charged additionally with overseeing
much of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank. In
December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu
issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet, including a
clear statement that the nationalistic ideology of his new allies was
now the government’s guiding star. “The Jewish people,” it said,
“have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of
Israel.”

Two months after that, two Israeli settlers were murdered in an attack
by Hamas gunmen near Huwara, a village in the West Bank. The
widespread calls for revenge, common after Palestinian terror attacks,
were now coming from within Netanyahu’s new government. Smotrich
declared that “the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out.”

And, he added, “I think the State of Israel needs to do it.”

In 2005, Israeli authorities arrested Bezalel Smotrich after hearing
of a plot to slow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Smotrich was later
released without charges. One Shin Bet officer who questioned him said
he remained “silent as a fish” throughout.Credit...Moti Kimchi

BIRTH OF A MOVEMENT

With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-​Israeli War of 1967,
Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new
territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the
Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new
land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future
Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic
zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the territories
animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of
the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered
lands.

Gush Emunim followers believed that the coming of the messiah would be
hastened if, rather than studying holy books from morning to night,
Jews settled the newly occupied territories. This was the land of
“Greater Israel,” they believed, and there was a pioneer spirit
among the early settlers. They saw themselves as direct descendants of
the earliest Zionists, who built farms and _kibbutzim_ near
Palestinian villages during the first part of the 20th century, when
the land was under British control. But while the Zionism of the
earlier period was largely secular and socialist, the new settlers
believed they were advancing God’s agenda.

 

The legality of that agenda was an open question. The Geneva
Conventions, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade occupying powers
to deport or transfer “parts of its own civilian population into the
territory it occupies.” But the status of the territory was, in the
view of many within and outside the Israeli government, more complex.
The settlers sought to create what some of them called “facts on the
ground.” This put them into conflict with both the Palestinians and,
at least putatively, the Israeli authorities responsible for
preventing the spread of illegal settlements.

Whether or not the government would prove flexible on these matters
became clear in April 1975 at Ein Yabrud, an abandoned Jordanian
military base near Ofra, in the West Bank. A group of workers had been
making the short commute from Israel most days for months to work on
rebuilding the base, and one evening they decided to stay. They were
aiming to establish a Jewish foothold in Judea and Samaria, the
Israeli designation for the territories that make up the West Bank,
and they had found a back door that required only the slightest push.
Their leader met that same night with Shimon Peres, then Israel’s
defense minister, who told the I.D.F. to stand down. Peres would treat
the nascent settlement not as a community but as a “work camp” —
and the I.D.F. would do nothing to hinder their work.

A clothesline in Ofra in 1979.Credit...Micha Bar-Am/Magnum Photos

Peres’s maneuver was partly a sign of the weakness of Israel’s
ruling Labor party, which had dominated Israeli politics since the
country’s founding. The residual trauma of the Yom Kippur War in
1973 — when Israel was caught completely by surprise by Egyptian and
Syrian forces before eventually beating back the invading armies —
had shaken citizens’ belief in their leaders, and movements like
Gush Emunim, directly challenging the authority of the Israeli state,
had gained momentum amid Labor’s decline. This, in turn, energized
Israel’s political right.

By the late 1970s, the settlers, bolstered in part by growing
political support, were expanding in number. Carmi Gillon, who joined
Shin Bet in 1972 and rose by the mid-1990s to become its director,
recalls the evolving internal debates. Whose responsibility was it to
deal with settlers? Should Israel’s vaunted domestic security
service enforce the law in the face of clearly illegal acts of
settlement? “When we realized that Gush Emunim had the backing of so
many politicians, we knew we shouldn’t touch them,” he said in his
first interview for this article in 2016.

 

One leader of the ultraright movement would prove hard to ignore,
however. Meir Kahane, an ultraright rabbi from Flatbush, Brooklyn, had
founded the militant Jewish Defense League in 1968 in New York. He
made no secret of his belief that violence was sometimes necessary to
fulfill his dream of Greater Israel, and he even spoke of plans to buy
.22 caliber rifles for Jews to defend themselves. “Our campaign
motto will be, ‘Every Jew a .22,’” he declared. In 1971, he
received a suspended sentence on bomb-making charges, and at the age
of 39 he moved to Israel to start a new life. From a hotel on Zion
Square in Jerusalem, he started a school and a political party, what
would become Kach, and drew followers with his fiery rhetoric.

Meir Kahane, the militant rabbi from Brooklyn, in 1984, just after his
election to the Knesset.Credit...Benami Neumann/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty
Images

Kahane said he wanted to rewrite the stereotype of Jews as victims,
and he argued, in often vivid terms, that Zionism and democracy are in
fundamental tension. “Zionism came into being to create a Jewish
state,” Kahane said in an interview with The Times in 1985, five
years before he was assassinated by a gunman in New York. “Zionism
declares that there is going to be a Jewish state with a majority of
Jews, come what may. Democracy says, ‘No, if the Arabs are the
majority then they have the right to decide their own fate.’ So
Zionism and democracy are at odds. I say clearly that I stand with
Zionism.”

A BURIED REPORT

In 1977, the Likud party led a coalition that, for the first time in
Israeli history, secured a right-wing majority in the country’s
Parliament, the Knesset. The party was headed by Menachem Begin, a
veteran of the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that carried out
attacks against Arabs and British authorities in Mandatory Palestine,
the British colonial entity that preceded the creation of Israel.
Likud — Hebrew for “the alliance” — was itself an amalgam of
several political parties. Kach itself was still on the outside and
would always remain so. But its radical ideas and ambitions were
moving closer to the mainstream.

Likud’s victory came 10 years after the war that brought Israel vast
amounts of new land, but the issue of what to do with the occupied
territories had yet to be resolved. As the new prime minister, Begin
knew that addressing that question would mean addressing the
settlements. Could there be a legal basis for taking the land?
Something that would allow the settlements to expand with the full
support of the state?

 

It was Plia Albeck, then a largely unknown bureaucrat in the Israeli
Justice Ministry, who found Begin’s answer. Searching through the
regulations of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine in the years
preceding the British Mandate, she lit upon the Ottoman Land Code of
1858, a major effort at land reform. Among other provisions, the law
enabled the sultan to seize any land that had not been cultivated by
its owners for a number of years and that was not “within shouting
distance” of the last house in the village. It did little to address
the provisions of the Geneva Convention, but it was, for her
department, precedent enough. Soon Albeck was riding in an army
helicopter, mapping the West Bank and identifying plots of land that
might meet the criteria of the Ottoman law. The Israeli state had
replaced the sultan, but the effect was the same. Albeck’s creative
legal interpretation led to the creation of more than 100 new Jewish
settlements, which she referred to as “my children.”

Plia Albeck in 1987. Working from the Israeli Justice Ministry, she
used the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 as a precedent to establish more
than 100 new Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Credit...HaOlam
HaZeh

At the same time, Begin was quietly brokering a peace deal with
President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the United States at Camp David. The
pact they eventually negotiated gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt
and promised greater autonomy to Palestinians in the occupied
territories in return for normalized relations with Israel. It would
eventually win the two leaders a joint Nobel Peace Prize. But Gush
Emunim and other right-wing groups saw the accords as a shocking
reversal. From this well of anger sprang a new campaign of
intimidation. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the leaders of Gush Emunim
and the founder of the settlement in the heart of Hebron, declared the
movement’s purposes on Israeli television. The Arabs, he said,
“must not be allowed to raise their heads.”

Leading this effort would be a militarized offshoot of Gush Emunim
called the Jewish Underground. The first taste of what was to come
arrived on June 2, 1980. Car bombs exploded as part of a complex
assassination plot against prominent Palestinian political figures in
the West Bank. The attack blew the legs off Bassam Shaka, the mayor of
Nablus; Karim Khalaf, the mayor of Ramallah, was forced to have his
foot amputated. Kahane, who in the days before the attack said at a
news conference that the Israeli government should form a “Jewish
terrorist group” that would “throw bombs and grenades to kill
Arabs,” applauded the attacks, as did Rabbi Haim Druckman, a leader
of Gush Emunim then serving in the Knesset, and many others within and
outside the movement. Brig. Gen. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, then the top
I.D.F. commander in the West Bank, noting the injuries suffered by the
Palestinian mayors under his watch, said simply, “It’s a shame
they didn’t hit them a bit higher.” An investigation began, but it
would be years before it achieved any results. Ben-Eliezer went on to
become a leader of the Labor party and defense minister.

Bassam Shaka, the mayor of Nablus, in the hospital after a bomb attack
by Jewish terrorists in 1980 blew off both of his legs.Credit...David
Rubinger, via Getty Images

The threat that the unchecked attacks posed to the institutions and
guardrails of Jewish democracy wasn’t lost on some members of the
Israeli elite. As the violence spread, a group of professors at Tel
Aviv University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem sent a letter to
Yitzhak Zamir, Israel’s attorney general. They were concerned, they
wrote, that illegal “private policing activity” against the
Palestinians living in the occupied territories presented a “threat
to the rule of law in the country.” The professors saw possible
collusion between the settlers and the authorities. “There is a
suspicion that similar crimes are not being handled in the same manner
and some criminals are receiving preferential treatment over
others,” the signatories to the letter said. “This suspicion
requires fundamental examination.”

The letter shook Zamir, who knew some of the professors well. He was
also well aware that evidence of selective law enforcement — one law
for the Palestinians and another for the settlers — would rebut the
Israeli government’s claim that the law was enforced equally and
could become both a domestic scandal and an international one. Zamir
asked Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special
duties, to lead a committee looking into the issue. Karp was
responsible for handling the most delicate issues facing the Justice
Ministry, but this would require even greater discretion than usual.

As her team investigated, Karp says, “it very quickly became clear
to me that what was described in the letter was nothing compared to
the actual reality on the ground.” She and her investigative
committee found case after case of trespassing, extortion, assault and
murder, even as the military authorities and the police did nothing or
performed notional investigations that went nowhere. “The police and
the I.D.F. in both action and inaction were really cooperating with
the settler vandals,” Karp says. “They operated as if they had no
interest in investigating when there were complaints, and generally
did everything they could to deter the Palestinians from even
submitting them.”

In May 1982, Karp and her committee submitted a 33-page report,
determining that dozens of offenses were investigated insufficiently.
The committee also noted that, in their research, the police had
provided them with information that was incomplete, contradictory and
in part false. They concluded that nearly half the investigations
opened against settlers were closed without the police conducting even
a rudimentary investigation. In the few cases in which they did
investigate, the committee found “profound flaws.” In some cases,
the police witnessed the crimes and did nothing. In others, soldiers
were willing to testify against the settlers, but their testimonies
and other evidence were buried.

Judith Karp led a 1982 internal government investigation that found
Israeli authorities unwilling or unable to confront settler crimes.
“We were very naïve,” she now recalls.Credit...Peter van
Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times

It soon became clear to Karp that the government was going to bury the
report. “We were very naïve,” she now recalls. Zamir had been
assured, she says, that the cabinet would discuss the grave findings
and had in fact demanded total confidentiality. The minister of the
interior at the time, Yosef Burg, invited Karp to his home for what
she recalls him describing as “a personal conversation.” Burg, a
leader of the pro-settler National Religious Party, had by then served
as a government minister in one office or another for more than 30
years. Karp assumed he wanted to learn more about her work, which
could in theory have important repercussions for the religious right.
“But, to my astonishment,” she says, “he simply began to scold
me in harsh language about what we were doing. I understood that he
wanted us to drop it.”

Karp announced she was quitting the investigative committee. “The
situation we discovered was one of complete helplessness,” she says.
When the existence of the report (but not its contents) leaked to the
public, Burg denied having ever seen such an investigation. When the
full contents of the report were finally made public in 1984, a
spokesman for the Justice Ministry said only that the committee had
been dissolved and that the ministry was no longer monitoring the
problem.

A WAVE OF VIOLENCE

On April 11, 1982, a uniformed I.D.F. soldier named Alan Harry Goodman
shot his way into the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, one of the
most sacred sites for Muslims around the world. Carrying an M16 rifle,
standard issue in the Israeli Army, he killed two Arabs and wounded
many more. When investigators searched Goodman’s apartment, they
found fliers for Kach, but a spokesman for the group said that it did
not condone the attack. Prime Minister Begin condemned the attack, but
he also chastised Islamic leaders calling for a general strike in
response, which he saw as an attempt to “exploit the tragedy.”

A riot outside the Dome of the Rock mosque in 1982, after Alan Harry
Goodman killed two Arabs and wounded many
others.Credit...Bettmann/Getty Images

The next year, masked Jewish Underground terrorists opened fire on
students at the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three people and
injuring 33 more. Israeli authorities condemned the massacre but were
less clear about who would be held to account. Gen. Ori Orr, commander
of Israeli forces in the region, said on the radio that all avenues
would be pursued. But, he added, “we don’t have any description,
and we don’t know who we are looking for.”

 

The Jewish Department found itself continually behind in its efforts
to address the onslaught. In April 1984, it had a major breakthrough:
Its agents foiled a Jewish Underground plan to blow up five buses full
of Palestinians, and they arrested around two dozen Jewish Underground
members who had also played roles in the Islamic College attack and
the bombings of the Palestinian mayors in 1980. But only after weeks
of interrogating the suspects did Shin Bet learn that the Jewish
Underground had been developing a scheme to blow up the Dome of the
Rock mosque. The planning involved dozens of intelligence-gathering
trips to the Temple Mount and an assessment of the exact amount of
explosives that would be needed and where to place them. The goal was
nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the
Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the
messiah.

Carmi Gillon, who was head of Shin Bet’s Jewish Department at the
time, says the fact that Shin Bet hadn’t learned about a plot
involving so many people and such ambitious planning earlier was an
“egregious intelligence failure.” And it was not the Shin Bet, he
notes, who prevented the plot from coming to fruition. It was the
Jewish Underground itself. “Fortunately for all of us, they decided
to forgo the plan because they felt the Jewish people were not yet
ready.”

A home in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Since Oct. 7, some
7,000 settler reservists were called back by the I.D.F., put in
uniform, armed and ordered to protect the settlements. Credit...Peter
van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times

PART II.

WARNINGS

 

“YOU HAVE TO understand why all this is important now,” Ami
Ayalon said, leaning in for emphasis. The sun shining into the
backyard of the former Shin Bet director was gleaming off his bald
scalp, illuminating a face that looked as if it were sculpted by a
dull kitchen knife. “We are not discussing Jewish terrorism. We are
discussing the failure of Israel.”

Ayalon was protective of his former service, insisting that Shin Bet,
despite some failures, usually has the intelligence and resources to
deter and prosecute right-wing terrorism in Israel. And, he said, they
usually have the will. “The question is why they are not doing
anything about it,” he said. “And the answer is very simple. They
cannot confront our courts. And the legal community finds it almost
impossible to face the political community, which is supported by the
street. So everything starts with the street.”

 

By the early 1980s, the settler movement had begun to gain some
traction within the Knesset, but it remained far from the mainstream.
When Kahane himself was elected to the Knesset in 1984, the members of
the other parties, including Likud, would turn and leave the room when
he stood up to deliver speeches. One issue was that the continual
expansion of the settlements was becoming an irritant in U.S.-Israel
relations. During a 1982 trip by Begin to Washington, the prime
minister had a closed-door meeting with the Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations to discuss Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year,
an effort to force out the P.L.O. that had been heavy with civilian
casualties. According to The Times’s coverage of the session,
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, then in his second term, had
an angry exchange with Begin about the West Bank, telling him that
Israel was losing support in this country because of the settlements
policy.

But Israeli officials came to understand that the Americans were
generally content to vent their anger about the issue without taking
more forceful action — like restricting military aid to Israel,
which was then, as now, central to the country’s security
arrangements. After the Jewish Underground plotters of the bombings
targeting the West Bank mayors and other attacks were finally brought
to trial in 1984, they were found guilty and given sentences ranging
from a few months to life in prison. The plotters showed little
remorse, though, and a public campaign swelled to have them pardoned.
Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir also made the case for pardoning them,
saying they were “excellent, good people who have erred in their
path and actions.” Clemency, Shamir suggested, would prevent a
recurrence of Jewish terrorism.

In the end, President Chaim Herzog, against the recommendations of
Shin Bet and the Justice Ministry, signed an extraordinary series of
pardons and commutations for the plotters. They were released and
greeted as heroes by the settler community, and some rose to prominent
positions in government and the Israeli media. One of them, Uzi
Sharbav, now a leader in the settlement movement, was a speaker at a
recent conference promoting the return of settlers to Gaza.

In fact, nearly all the Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs
over the past decades have received substantial reductions in prison
time. Gillon, the head of the Jewish Department when some of these
people were arrested, recalls the “profound sense of injustice”
that he felt when they were released. But even more important, he
says, was “the question of what message the pardons convey to the
public and to anyone who ever thinks about carrying out acts of terror
against Arabs.”

OPERATIONAL FAILURES

In 1987, a series of conflicts in Gaza led to a sustained Palestinian
uprising throughout the occupied territories and Israel. The First
Intifada, as it became known, was driven by anger over the occupation,
which was then entering its third decade. It would simmer for the next
six years, as Palestinians attacked Israelis with stones and Molotov
cocktails and launched a series of strikes and boycotts. Israel
deployed thousands of soldiers to quell the uprising.

 

In the occupied territories, reprisal attacks between settlers and
Palestinians were an increasing problem. The Gush Emunim movement had
spread and fractured into different groups, making it difficult for
Shin Bet to embed enough informants with the settlers. But the service
had one key informant — a man given the code name Shaul. He was a
trusted figure among the settlers and rose to become a close assistant
to Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the Gush Emunim leader who founded the
settlement in Hebron.

Levinger had been questioned many times under suspicion of having a
role in multiple violent attacks, but Shaul told Shin Bet operatives
that they were seeing only a fraction of the whole picture. He told
them about raids past and planned; about the settlers tearing through
Arab villages, vandalizing homes, burning dozens of cars. The
operatives ordered him to participate in these raids to strengthen his
cover. One newspaper photographer in Hebron in 1985 captured Shaul
smashing the wall of an Arab marketplace with a sledgehammer. As was
standard policy, Shin Bet had ordered him to participate in any
activity that didn’t involve harm to human life, but figuring out
which of the activities wouldn’t cross that line became increasingly
difficult. “The majority of the activists were lunatics, riffraff,
and it was very difficult to be sure they wouldn’t hurt people and
would harm only property,” Shaul said. (Shaul, whose true identity
remains secret, provided these quotes in a 2015 interview with Bergman
for the Israeli Hebrew-language paper Yedioth Ahronoth. Some of his
account is published here for the first time.)

In September 1988, Rabbi Levinger, Shaul’s patron, was driving
through Hebron when, he later said in court, Palestinians began
throwing stones at his car and surrounding him. Levinger flashed a
pistol and began firing wildly at nearby shops. Investigators said he
killed a 42-year-old shopkeeper, Khayed Salah, who had been closing
the steel shutter of his shoe store, and injured a second man.
Levinger claimed self-defense, but he was hardly remorseful. “I know
that I am innocent,” he said at the trial, “and that I didn’t
have the honor of killing the Arab.”

Prosecutors cut a deal with Levinger. He was convicted of criminally
negligent homicide, sentenced to five months in prison and released
after only three.

Rabbi Moshe Levinger (left) with followers in 1975. A leader of Gush
Emunim, he declared the movement’s purposes on Israeli television.
The Arabs, he said, “must not be allowed to raise their
heads.”Credit...Moshe Milner/GPO, via Getty Images

Shin Bet faced the classic intelligence agency’s dilemma: how and
when to let its informants participate in the very violent acts the
service was supposed to be stopping. There was some logic in Shin
Bet’s approach with Shaul, but it certainly didn’t help deter acts
of terror in the West Bank, especially with little police presence in
the occupied territories and a powerful interest group ensuring that
whoever was charged for the violence was released with a light
sentence.

Over his many years as a Shin Bet mole, Shaul said, he saw numerous
intelligence and operational failures by the agency. One of the worst,
he said, was the December 1993 murder of three Palestinians in an act
of vengeance after the murder of a settler leader and his son. Driving
home from a day of work in Israel, the three Palestinians, who had no
connection to the deaths of the settlers, were pulled from their car
and killed near the West Bank town Tarqumiyah.

Shaul recalled how one settler activist proudly told him that he and
two friends committed the murders. He contacted his Shin Bet handlers
to tell them what he had heard. “And suddenly I saw they were losing
interest,” Shaul said. It was only later that he learned why: Two of
the shooters were Shin Bet informants. The service didn’t want to
blow their cover, or worse, to suffer the scandal that two of its
operatives were involved in a murder and a cover-up.

In a statement, Shin Bet said that Shaul’s version of events is
“rife with incorrect details” but refused to specify which details
were incorrect. Neither the state prosecutor nor the attorney general
responded to requests for comment, which included Shaul’s full
version of events and additional evidence gathered over the years.

Shaul said he also gave numerous reports to his handlers about the
activities of yet another Brooklyn-born follower of Meir Kahane and
the Jewish Defense League: Dr. Baruch Goldstein. He earned his medical
degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and in 1983
immigrated to Israel, where he worked first as a physician in the
I.D.F., then as an emergency doctor at Kiryat Arba, a settlement near
Hebron.

 

In the years that passed, he gained the attention of Shin Bet with his
eliminationist views, calling Arabs “latter-day Nazis” and making
a point to visit the Jewish terrorist Ami Popper in prison, where he
was serving a sentence for the 1990 murder of seven Palestinians in
the Tel Aviv suburb Rishon LeZion. Shaul said he regarded Goldstein at
the time as a “charismatic and highly dangerous figure” and
repeatedly urged the Shin Bet to monitor him. “They told me it was
none of my business,” he said.

‘CLEAN HANDS’

On Feb. 24, 1994, Goldstein abruptly fired his personal driver.
According to Shaul, Goldstein told the driver that he knew he was a
Shin Bet informer. Terrified at having been found out, the driver fled
the West Bank immediately. Now Goldstein was moving unobserved.

That evening marked the beginning of Purim, the festive commemoration
of the victory of the Jews over Haman the Agagite, a court official in
the Persian Empire and the nemesis of the Jews in the Old
Testament’s Book of Esther. Right-wing Israelis have often drawn
parallels between Haman and Arabs — enemies who seek the
annihilation of Jews. Goldstein woke early the next day and put on his
I.D.F. uniform, and at 5:20 a.m. he entered the Cave of the
Patriarchs, an ancient complex in Hebron that serves as a place of
worship for both Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried with him his
I.D.F.-issued Galil rifle. It was also the Muslim holy month of
Ramadan, and on that morning hundreds of Muslims crowded the hall in
prayer. Goldstein faced the worshipers and began shooting
[[link removed]],
firing 108 rounds before he was dragged down and beaten to death. The
massacre killed 29 Muslim worshipers and injured more than 100.

Baruch Goldstein, a doctor from Brooklyn who moved to Israel in 1983.
He opened fire in a mosque in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in
1994, killing 29 Muslim worshipers before he was dragged down and
beaten to death. His gravesite is now a place of pilgrimage for
ultraright settlers. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The killings shocked Israel, and the government responded with a
crackdown on extremism. Kach and Kahane Chai, the two political
organizations most closely affiliated with the Kahanist movement, were
outlawed and labeled terrorist groups, as was any other party that
called for “the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of
Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land.” Rabin, in
an address to the Knesset, spoke directly to the followers of
Goldstein and Kahane, who he said were the product of a malicious
foreign influence on Israel. “You are not part of the community of
Israel,” he said. “You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise.
You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism
spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”

 

Following the massacre, a state commission of inquiry was appointed,
headed by Judge Meir Shamgar, the president of the Supreme Court. The
commission’s report, made public in June 1994, strongly criticized
the security arrangements at the Cave of the Patriarchs and examined
law-enforcement practices regarding settlers and the extreme right in
general. A secret appendix to the report, containing material deemed
too sensitive for public consumption, included a December 1992 letter
from the Israeli commissioner of police, essentially admitting that
the police could not enforce the law. “The situation in the
districts is extremely bleak,” he wrote, using the administrative
nomenclature for the occupied territories. “The ability of the
police to function is far from the required minimum. This is as a
result of the lack of essential resources.”

In its conclusions, the commission, tracing the lines of the previous
decade’s Karp report, confirmed claims that human rights
organizations had made for years but that had been ignored by the
Israeli establishment. The commission found that Israeli law
enforcement was “ineffective in handling complaints,” that it
delayed the filing of indictments and that restraining orders against
“chronic” criminals among the “hard core” of the settlers were
rarely issued.

The I.D.F. refused to allow Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish
cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba
settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has
become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to
celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel
with “clean hands and a pure heart.”

Two men studying next to the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Behind
them, Israeli border police trainees on an educational trip entered
the cave.Credit...Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times

A CURSE OF DEATH

One ultranationalist settler who went regularly to Goldstein’s grave
was a teenage radical named Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would sometimes
gather other followers there on Purim to celebrate the slain killer.
Purim revelers often dress in costume, and on one such occasion,
caught on video, Ben-Gvir even wore a Goldstein costume, complete with
a fake beard and a stethoscope. By then, Ben-Gvir had already come to
the attention of the Jewish Department, and investigators interrogated
him several times. The military declined to enlist him into the
service expected of most Israeli citizens.

 

After the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a new generation of
Kahanists directed their anger squarely at Rabin for his signing of
the Oslo agreement and for depriving them, in their view, of their
birthright. “From my standpoint, Goldstein’s action was a wake-up
call,” says Hezi Kalo, a longtime senior Shin Bet official who
oversaw the division that included the Jewish Department at that time.
“I realized that this was going to be a very big story, that the
diplomatic moves by the Rabin government would simply not pass by
without the shedding of blood.”

The government of Israel was finally paying attention to the threat,
and parts of the government acted to deal with it. Shin Bet increased
the size of the Jewish Department, and it began to issue a new kind of
warning: Jewish terrorists no longer threatened only Arabs. They
threatened Jews.

The warnings noted that rabbis in West Bank settlements, along with
some politicians on the right, were now openly advocating violence
against Israeli public officials, especially Rabin. Extremist rabbis
issued rulings of Jewish law against Rabin — imposing a curse of
death, a _Pulsa Dinura_, and providing justification for killing him,
a _din rodef_.

Carmi Gillon by then had moved on from running the Jewish Department
and now had the top job at Shin Bet. “Discussing and acknowledging
such halakhic laws was tantamount to a license to kill,” he says
now, looking back. He was particularly concerned about Benjamin
Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, who were stoking the fury of the
right-wing rabbis and settler leaders in their battles with Rabin.

Shin Bet wanted to prosecute rabbis who approved the religiously
motivated death sentences against Rabin, but the state attorney’s
office refused. “They didn’t give enough importance back then to
the link between incitement and legitimacy for terrorism,” says one
former prosecutor who worked in the state attorney’s office in the
mid-1990s.

 

Shin Bet issued warning after warning in 1995. “This was no longer a
matter of mere incitement, but rather concrete information on the
intention to kill top political figures, including Rabin,” Kalo now
recalls. In October of that year, Ben-Gvir spoke to Israeli television
cameras holding up a Cadillac hood ornament, which he boasted he had
broken off the prime minister’s official car during chaotic
anti-Oslo demonstrations in front of the Knesset. “We got to his
car,” he said, “and we’ll get to him, too.” The following
month, Rabin was dead.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s minister of national security, during
a protest in 2009.Credit...Moti Milrod/Associated Press

CONSPIRACIES

Yigal Amir, the man who shot and killed Rabin in Tel Aviv after a
rally in support of the Oslo Accords on Nov. 4, 1995, was not unknown
to the Jewish Department. A 25-year-old studying law, computer science
and the Torah at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, he had been
radicalized by Rabin’s efforts to make peace with Palestinian
leaders and had connections to Avishai Raviv, the leader of Eyal, a
new far-right group loosely affiliated with the Kach movement. In
fact, Raviv was a Shin Bet informant, code-named Champagne. He had
heard Amir talking about the justice of the _din rodef_ judgments,
but he did not identify him to his handlers as an immediate danger.
“No one took Yigal seriously,” he said later in a court
proceeding. “It’s common in our circles to talk about attacking
public figures.”

Lior Akerman was the first Shin Bet investigator to interrogate Amir
at the detention center where he was being held after the
assassination. There was of course no question about his guilt. But
there was the broader question of conspiracy. Did Amir have
accomplices? Did they have further plans? Akerman now recalls asking
Amir how he could reconcile his belief in God with his decision to
murder the prime minister of Israel. Amir, he says, told him that
rabbis had justified harming the prime minister in order to protect
Israel.

Amir was smug, Akerman recalls, and he did not respond directly to the
question of accomplices. “‘Listen,” he said, according to
Akerman, “I _succeeded_. I was able to do something that many
people wanted but no one dared to do. I fired a gun that many Jews
held, but I squeezed the trigger because no one else had the courage
to do it.”

Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, at
a court appearance in 2004.Credit...Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images

The Shin Bet investigators demanded to know the identities of the
rabbis. Amir was coy at first, but eventually the interrogators drew
enough out of him to identify at least two of them. Kalo, the head of
the division that oversaw the Jewish Department, went to the attorney
general to argue that the rabbis should be detained immediately and
prosecuted for incitement to murder. But the attorney general
disagreed, saying the rabbis’ encouragement was protected speech and
couldn’t be directly linked to the murder. No rabbis were arrested.

Days later, however, the police brought Raviv — the Shin Bet
operative known as Champagne — into custody in a Tel Aviv Magistrate
Court, on charges that he had conspired to kill Rabin, but he was
released shortly after. Raviv’s role as an informant later came to
light, and in 1999, he was arrested for his failure to act on previous
knowledge of the assassination. He was acquitted on all charges, but
he has since become a fixture of extremist conspiracy theories that
pose his failure to ring the alarm as evidence that the murder of the
prime minister was due not to the violent rhetoric of the settler
right, or the death sentences from the rabbis, or the incitement by
the leaders of the opposition, but to the all-too-successful efforts
of a Shin Bet agent provocateur. A more complicated and insidious
conspiracy theory, but no less false, was that it was Shin Bet itself
that assassinated Rabin or allowed the assassination to happen.

Avishai Raviv (right), the Shin Bet operative known as Champagne, in
1987. Raviv was charged in 1999 with not preventing Rabin’s
assassination. He was later acquitted.Credit...Moshe Shai/Flash90

Gillon, the head of the service at the time, resigned, and ongoing
inquiries, charges and countercharges would continue for years. Until
Oct. 7, 2023, the killing of the prime minister was considered the
greatest failure in the history of Shin Bet. Kalo tried to sum up what
went wrong with Israeli security. “The only answer my friends and I
could give for the failure was complacency,” he wrote in his 2021
memoir. “They simply couldn’t believe that such a thing could
happen, definitely not at the hands of another Jew.”

 

THE SASSON REPORT

In 2001, as the Second Intifada unleashed a wave of Palestinian
suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, Ariel Sharon took office
as prime minister. The struggling peace process had come to a complete
halt amid the violence, and Sharon’s rise at first appeared to mark
another victory for the settlers. But in 2003, in one of the more
surprising reversals in Israeli political history, Sharon announced
what he called Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza, with a plan
to remove settlers — forcibly if necessary — over the next two
years.

The motivations were complex and the subject of considerable debate.
For Sharon, at least, it appeared to be a tactical move. “The
significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace
process,” his senior adviser Dov Weisglass told Haaretz at the time.
“And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of
a Palestinian state.” But Sharon was also facing considerable
pressure from President George W. Bush to do something about the
ever-expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank, which were a
growing impediment to any regional security deals. In July 2004, he
asked Talia Sasson, who had recently retired as the head of the
special tasks division in the state attorney’s office, to draw up a
legal opinion on the subject of “unauthorized outposts” in the
West Bank. His instructions were clear: Investigate which Israeli
government agencies and authorities were secretly involved in building
the outposts. “Sharon never interfered in my work, and neither was
he surprised by the conclusions,” Sasson said in an interview two
decades later. “After all, he knew better than anyone what the
situation was on the ground, and he was expecting only grave
conclusions.”

It was a simple enough question: Just how had it happened that
hundreds of outposts had been built in the decade since Yitzhak Rabin
ordered a halt in most new settlements? But Sasson’s effort to find
an answer was met with delays, avoidance and outright lies. Her final
report used careful but pointed language: “Not everyone I turned to
agreed to talk with me. One claimed he was too busy to meet, while
another came to the meeting but refused to meaningfully engage with
most of my questions.”

Sasson found that between January 2000 and June 2003, a division of
Israel’s Construction and Housing Ministry issued 77 contracts for
the establishment of 33 sites in the West Bank, all of which were
illegal. In some cases, the ministry even paid for the paving of roads
and the construction of buildings at settlements for which the Defense
Ministry had issued demolition orders.

Several government ministries concealed the fact that funds were being
diverted to the West Bank, reporting them under budgetary clauses such
as “miscellaneous general development.” Just as in the case of the
Karp Report two decades earlier, Sasson and her Justice Ministry
colleagues discovered that the West Bank was being administered under
completely separate laws, and those laws, she says, “appeared to me
utterly insane.”

Talia Sasson delivering a report on unauthorized Jewish settlements in
2005. Her report found that it “was state and public agencies that
broke the law, the rules, the procedures that the state itself had
determined.”Credit...Flash90/EPA

Sasson’s report took special note of Avi Maoz, who ran the
Construction and Housing Ministry during most of this period. A
political activist who early in his career spoke openly of pushing all
Arabs out of the West Bank, Maoz helped found a settlement south of
Jerusalem during the 1990s and began building a professional alliance
with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the Israeli ambassador to the
United Nations and would soon go on to his first term as prime
minister. Years later, Maoz would be instrumental in ensuring
Netanyahu’s political survival.

“The picture that emerges in the eye of the beholder is severe,”
Sasson wrote in her report. “Instead of the government of Israel
deciding on the establishment of settlements in the territories of
Judea and Samaria, its place has been taken, from the mid-1990s and
onward, by others.” The settlers, she wrote, were “the moving
force,” but they could not have succeeded without the assistance of
“various ministers of construction and housing in the relevant
periods, some of them with a blind eye, and some of them with support
and encouragement.”

This clandestine network was operating, Sasson wrote, “with massive
funding from the State of Israel, without appropriate public
transparency, without obligatory criteria. The erection of the
unauthorized outposts is being done with violation of the proper
procedures and general administrative rules, and in particular,
flagrant and ongoing violation of the law.” These violations, Sasson
warned, were coming from the government: “It was state and public
agencies that broke the law, the rules, the procedures that the state
itself had determined.” It was a conflict, she argued, that
effectively neutered Israel’s internal checks and balances and posed
a grave threat to the nation’s integrity. “The law-enforcement
agencies are unable to act against government departments that are
themselves breaking the law.”

But, in an echo of Judith Karp’s secret report decades earlier, the
Sasson Report, made publicly available in March 2005, had almost no
impact. Because she had a mandate directly from the prime minister,
Sasson could have believed that her investigation might lead to the
dismantling of the illegal outposts that had metastasized throughout
the Palestinian territories. But even Sharon, with his high office,
found himself powerless against the machine now in place to protect
and expand the settlements in the West Bank — the very machine he
had helped to build.

 

All of this was against the backdrop of the Gaza pullout. Sharon, who
began overseeing the removal of settlements from Gaza in August 2005,
was the third Israeli prime minister to threaten the settler dream of
a Greater Israel, and the effort drew bitter opposition not only from
the settlers but also from a growing part of the political
establishment. Netanyahu, who had served his first term as prime
minister from 1996 to 1999, and who previously voted in favor of a
pullout, resigned his position as finance minister in Sharon’s
cabinet in protest — and in anticipation of another run for the top
job.

Avi Maoz helped found a settlement south of Jerusalem during the 1990s
and began building a professional alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu.
Years later, Maoz would be instrumental in ensuring Netanyahu’s
political survival.Credit...Amir Cohen/EPA, via Shutterstock

The settlers themselves took more active measures. In 2005, the Jewish
Department of Shin Bet received intelligence about a plot to slow the
Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by using 700 liters of gasoline to blow
up vehicles on a major highway. Acting on the tip, officers arrested
six men in central Israel. One of them was Bezalel Smotrich, the
future minister overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank.

Smotrich, then 25, was detained and questioned for weeks. Yitzhak
Ilan, one of the Shin Bet officers present at the interrogation, says
he remained “silent as a fish” throughout — “like an
experienced criminal.” He was released without charges, Ilan says,
in part because Shin Bet knew putting him on trial might expose the
service’s agents inside Jewish extremist groups, and in part because
they believed Smotrich was likely to receive little punishment in any
case. Shin Bet was very comfortable with the courts when we fought
Palestinian terrorism and we got the heavy punishments we wanted, he
says. With the Jewish terrorists it was exactly the opposite.

When Netanyahu made his triumphant return as prime minister in 2009,
he set out to undermine Talia Sasson’s report, which he and his
allies saw as an obstacle to accelerating the settlement campaign. He
appointed his own investigative committee, led by Judge Edmond Levy of
the Supreme Court, who was known to support the settler cause. But the
Levy report, completed in 2012, did not undermine the findings in the
Sasson Report — in some ways, it reinforced them. Senior Israeli
officials, the committee found, were fully aware of what was happening
in the territories, and they were simply denying it for the sake of
political expediency. The behavior, they wrote, was not befitting of
“a country that has proclaimed the rule of law as a goal.”
Netanyahu moved on.

Settlers planting trees near an illegal settlement called Mitzpe Yair,
in the South Hebron hills, as a way of claiming
territory.Credit...Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times

PART III.

A NEW GENERATION

 

The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the
virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from
spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more
radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or
insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic
Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the
total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his
grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he
made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.

Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to
establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in
place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a
religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime
minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth
“genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing
to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for
Israel’s future.”

A former member of Hilltop Youth, who has asked to remain anonymous
because she fears speaking out could endanger her, recalls how she and
her friends used an illegal outpost on a hilltop in the West Bank as a
base to lob stones at Palestinian cars. “The Palestinians would call
the police, and we would know that we have at least 30 minutes before
they arrive, if they arrive. And if they do arrive, they won’t
arrest anyone. We did this tens of times.” The West Bank police, she
says, couldn’t have been less interested in investigating the
violence. “When I was young, I thought that I was outsmarting the
police because I was clever. Later, I found out that they are either
not trying or very stupid.”

The former Hilltop Youth member says she began pulling away from the
group as their tactics became more extreme and once Ettinger began
speaking openly about murdering Palestinians. She offered to become a
police informant, and during a meeting with police intelligence
officers in 2015, she described the group’s plans to commit murder
— and to harm any Jews that stood in their way. By her account, she
told the police about efforts to scout the homes of Palestinians
before settling on a target. The police could have begun an
investigation, she says, but they weren’t even curious enough to ask
her the names of the people plotting the attack.

 

In 2013, Ettinger and other members of Hilltop Youth formed a secret
cell calling itself the Revolt, designed to instigate an insurrection
against a government that “prevents us from building the temple,
which blocks our way to true and complete redemption.”

During a search of one of the group’s safe houses, Shin Bet
investigators discovered the Revolt’s founding documents. “The
State of Israel has no right to exist, and therefore we are not bound
by the rules of the game,” one declared. The documents called for an
end to the State of Israel and made it clear that in the new state
that would rise in its place, there would be absolutely no room for
non-Jews and for Arabs in particular: “If those non-Jews don’t
leave, it will be permissible to kill them, without distinguishing
between women, men and children.”

This wasn’t just idle talk. Ettinger and his comrades organized a
plan that included timetables and steps to be taken at each stage. One
member even composed a training manual with instructions on how to
form terror cells and burn down houses. “In order to prevent the
residents from escaping,” the manual advised, “you can leave
burning tires in the entrance to the house.”

The Revolt carried out an early attack in February 2014, firebombing
an uninhabited home in a small Arab village in the West Bank called
Silwad, and followed with more arson attacks, the uprooting of olive
groves and the destruction of Palestinian granaries. Members of the
group torched mosques, monasteries and churches, including the Church
of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the banks of the Sea
of Galilee. A police officer spotted Ettinger himself attacking a herd
of sheep belonging to an Arab shepherd. He stoned a sheep and then
slaughtered it in front of the shepherd, the officer later testified.
“It was shocking,” he said. “There was a sort of insanity in
it.”

Meir Ettinger, grandson of Meir Kahane and a Hilltop Youth leader,
after his arrest in 2015. He was released from administrative
detention, with some restrictions, after 10 months.Credit...Ariel
Schalit/Associated Press

Shin Bet defined the Revolt as an organization that aimed “to
undermine the stability of the State of Israel through terror and
violence, including bodily harm and bloodshed,” according to an
internal Shin Bet memo, and sought to place several of its members,
including Ettinger, under administrative detention — a measure
applied frequently against Arabs.

The state attorney, however, did not approve the request. The U.N.
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented
323 incidents of violence by settlers against Palestinians in 2014;
Palestinians were injured in 107 of these incidents. By the following
year, the Revolt escalated the violence by openly advocating the
murder of Arabs.

The Shin Bet and the police identified one of the prominent members of
the Revolt, Amiram Ben-Uliel, making him a target of surveillance. But
the service failed to prevent the wave of violence that he unleashed.
On the night of July 31, 2015, Ben-Uliel set out on a killing spree in
a central West Bank village called Duma. Ben-Uliel prepared a bag with
two bottles of incendiary liquid, rags, a lighter, a box of matches,
gloves and black spray paint. According to the indictment against him,
Ben-Uliel sought a home with clear signs of life to ensure that the
house he torched was not abandoned. He eventually found the home of
Reham and Sa’ad Dawabsheh, a young mother and father. He opened a
window and threw a Molotov cocktail into the home. He fled, and in the
blaze that followed, the parents suffered injuries that eventually
killed them. Their older son, Ahmad, survived the attack, but their
18-month-old toddler, Ali, was burned to death.

It was always clear, says Akerman, the former Shin Bet official,
“that those wild groups would move from bullying Arabs to damaging
property and trees and eventually would murder people.” He is still
furious about how the service has handled Jewish terrorism. “Shin
Bet knows how to deal with such groups, using emergency orders,
administrative detention and special methods in interrogation until
they break,” he says. But although it was perfectly willing to apply
those methods to investigating Arab terrorism, the service was more
restrained when it came to Jews. “It allowed them to incite, and
then they moved on to the next stage and began to torch mosques and
churches. Still undeterred, they entered Duma and burned a family.”

Ahmad Dawabsheh, the sole survivor of the arson attack by Amiram
Ben-Uliel that killed his parents and younger brother, at the house in
Duma where the murders occurred, which has been left
untouched.Credit...Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times

Shin Bet at first claimed to have difficulty locating the killers,
even though they were all supposed to be under constant surveillance.
When Ben-Uliel and other perpetrators were finally arrested,
right-wing politicians gave fiery speeches against Shin Bet and met
with the families of the perpetrators to show their support. Ben-Uliel
was sentenced to life in prison, and Ettinger was finally put in
administrative detention, but a fracture was spreading. In December
2015, Hilltop Youth members circulated a video clip showing members of
the Revolt ecstatically dancing with rifles and pistols, belting out
songs of hatred for Arabs, with one of them stabbing and burning a
photograph of the murdered toddler, Ali Dawabsheh. Netanyahu, for his
part, denounced the video, which, he said, exposed “the real face of
a group that poses danger to Israeli society and security.”

Amiram Ben-Uliel speaking to his wife from behind a glass pane during
a hearing in Israel in 2020. He is currently serving multiple life
sentences.Credit...Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty
Images

AMERICAN FRIENDS

The expansion of the settlements had long been an irritant in
Israel’s relationship with the United States, with American
officials spending years dutifully warning Netanyahu both in public
and in private meetings about his support for the enterprise. But the
election of Donald Trump in 2016 ended all that. His new
administration’s Israel policy was led mostly by his son-in-law,
Jared Kushner, who had a long personal relationship with Netanyahu, a
friend of his father’s who had stayed at their family home in New
Jersey. Trump, in a broader regional agenda that lined up perfectly
with Netanyahu’s own plans, also hoped to scuttle the nuclear deal
with Iran that Barack Obama had negotiated and broker diplomatic pacts
between Israel and Arab nations that left the matter of a Palestinian
state unresolved and off the table.

If there were any questions about the new administration’s position
on settlements, they were answered once Trump picked his ambassador to
Israel. His choice, David Friedman, was a bankruptcy lawyer who for
years had helped run an American nonprofit that raised millions of
dollars for Beit El, one of the early Gush Emunim settlements in the
West Bank and the place where Bezalel Smotrich was raised and
educated. The organization, which was also supported by the Trump
family, had helped fund schools and other institutions inside Beit El.
On the heels of the Trump transition, Friedman referred to Israel’s
“alleged occupation” of Palestinian territories and broke with
longstanding U.S. policy by saying “the settlements are part of
Israel.”

This didn’t make Friedman a particularly friendly recipient of the
warnings regularly delivered by Lt. Gen. Mark Schwartz, the three-star
general who in 2019 arrived at the embassy in Jerusalem to coordinate
security between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.
A career Green Beret who had combat deployments in Afghanistan and
Iraq and served as deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations
Command, the military task force with authority over U.S.
counterterrorism special missions units, Schwartz wasn’t short on
Middle East experience.

 

But he was immediately shocked by the landscape of the West Bank:
settlers acting with impunity, a police force that was essentially
nonexistent outside the settlements and the Israeli Army fanning the
tensions with its own operations. Schwartz recalls how angry he was
about what he called the army’s “collective punishment” tactics,
including the razing of Palestinian homes, which he viewed as
gratuitous and counterproductive. “I said, ‘Guys, this isn’t how
professional militaries act.’” As Schwartz saw it, the West Bank
was in some ways the American South of the 1960s. But at any moment
the situation could become even more volatile, resulting in the next
intifada.

Schwartz is diplomatic when recalling his interactions with Friedman,
his former boss. He was a “good listener,” Schwartz says, but when
he raised concerns about the settlements, Friedman would often deflect
by noting “the lack of appreciation by the Palestinian people about
what the Americans are doing for them.” Schwartz also discussed his
concerns about settler violence directly with Shin Bet and I.D.F.
officials, he says, but as far as he could tell, Friedman didn’t
follow up with the political leadership. “I never got the sense he
went to Netanyahu to discuss it.”

Friedman sees things differently. “I think I had a far broader
perspective on acts of violence in Judea and Samaria” than Schwartz,
he says now. “And it was clear that the violence coming from
Palestinians against Israelis overwhelmingly was more prevalent.” He
says he “wasn’t concerned about ‘appreciation’ from the
Palestinians; I was concerned by their leadership’s embrace of
terror and unwillingness to control violence.” He declined to
discuss any conversations he had with Israeli officials.

Weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo traveled to Israel for a trip that delivered a number of gifts
to Netanyahu and the settler cause. He announced new guidelines
requiring that goods imported to the United States from parts of the
West Bank be labeled “Made in Israel.” And he flew by helicopter
to Psagot, a winery in the West Bank, making him the first American
secretary of state to visit a settlement. One of the winery’s large
shareholders, the Florida-based Falic family, have donated millions to
various projects in the settlements.

During his lunchtime visit, Pompeo paused to write a note in the
winery’s guest book. “May I not be the last secretary of state to
visit this beautiful land,” he wrote.

 

A SETTLER COALITION

Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to become prime minister for an
unprecedented sixth term came with a price: an alliance with a
movement that he once shunned, but that had been brought into the
political mainstream by Israel’s steady drift to the right.
Netanyahu, who is now on trial for bribery and other corruption
charges, repeatedly failed in his attempts to form a coalition after
most of the parties announced that they were no longer willing to join
him. He personally involved himself in negotiations to ally Itamar
Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious
Zionism Party, making them kingmakers for anyone trying to form a
coalition government. In November 2022, the bet paid off: With the
now-critical support of the extreme right, Netanyahu returned to
office.

The two men ushered into power by this arrangement were some of the
most extreme figures ever to hold such high positions in an Israeli
cabinet. Shin Bet had monitored Ben-Gvir in the years after Yitzhak
Rabin’s murder, and he was arrested on multiple charges including
inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He won
acquittals or dismissals in some of the cases, but he was also
convicted several times and served time in prison. During the Second
Intifada, he led protests calling for extreme measures against Arabs
and harassed Israeli politicians he believed were insufficiently
hawkish.

Then Ben-Gvir made a radical change: He went to law school. He also
took a job as an aide to Michael Ben-Ari, a Knesset member from the
National Union party, which had picked up many followers of the Kach
movement. In 2011, after considerable legal wrangling around his
criminal record, he was admitted to the bar. He changed his hairstyle
and clothing to appear more mainstream and began working from the
inside, once saying he represented the “soldiers and civilians who
find themselves in legal entanglements due to the security situation
in Israel.” Netanyahu made him minister of national security, with
authority over the police.

Smotrich also moved into public life after his 2005 arrest by Shin Bet
for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
He made Shin Bet’s Jewish Department a frequent target of criticism,
complaining that it was wasting time and money investigating crimes
carried out by Jews, when the real terrorists were Palestinians. His
ultraright allies sometimes referred to the Jewish Department as
Hamakhlaka Hayehudit — the Hebrew phrase for the Gestapo unit that
executed Hitler’s Final Solution.

Ben-Gvir (left) and Smotrich attending a special session at the
Knesset to swear in a new right-wing government in 2022.Credit...Amir
Cohen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In 2015, while campaigning for a seat in the Knesset, Smotrich said
that “every shekel invested in this department is one less shekel
invested in real terrorism and saving lives.” Seven years later,
Netanyahu made him both minister of finance and a minister in the
Ministry of Defense, in charge of overseeing civilian affairs in the
West Bank, and he has steadily pushed to seize authority over the
territory from the military. As part of the coalition deal with
Netanyahu, Smotrich now has the authority to appoint one of the senior
administrative figures in the West Bank, who helps oversee the
building of roads and the enforcement of construction laws. The 2022
election also brought Avi Maoz to the Knesset — the former
housing-ministry official whom Talia Sasson once marked as a hidden
hand of Israeli government support for illegal settlements. Since
then, Maoz had joined the far-right Noam party, using it as a platform
to advance racist and homophobic policies. And he never forgot, or
forgave, Sasson. On “International Anti-Corruption Day” in 2022,
Maoz took to the lectern of the Knesset and denounced Sasson’s
report of nearly two decades earlier, saying it was written “with a
hatred of the settlements and a desire to harm them.” This, he said,
was “public corruption of the highest order, for which people like
Talia Sasson should be prosecuted.”

Days after assuming his own new position, Ben-Gvir ordered the police
to remove Palestinian flags from public spaces in Israel, saying they
“incite and encourage terrorism.” Smotrich, for his part, ordered
drastic cuts in payments to the Palestinian Authority — a move that
led the Shin Bet and the I.D.F. intelligence division to raise
concerns that the cuts would interfere with the Palestinian
Authority’s own efforts to police and prevent Palestinian terrorism.

Weeks after the new cabinet was sworn in, the Judea and Samaria
division of the I.D.F. distributed an instructional video to the
soldiers of a ground unit about to be deployed in the West Bank.
Titled “Operational Challenge: The Farms,” the video depicts
settlers as peaceful farmers living pastoral lives, feeding goats and
herding sheep and cows, in dangerous circumstances. The illegal
outposts multiplying around the West Bank are “small and isolated
places of settlement, each with a handful of residents, a few of them
— or none at all — bearing arms, the means of defense meager or
nonexistent.”

It is the settlers, according to the video, who are under constant
threat of attack, whether it be “penetration of the farm by a
terrorist, an attack against a shepherd in the pastures, arson” or
“destruction of property” — threats from which the soldiers of
the I.D.F. must protect them. The commander of each army company
guarding each farm must, the video says, “link up with the person in
charge of security and to maintain communications”; soldiers and
officers are encouraged to cultivate a close and intimate relationship
with the settlers. “The informal,” viewers are told, “is much
more important than the formal.”

 

The video addresses many matters of security, but it never addresses
the question of law. When we asked the commander of the division that
produced the video, Brig. Gen. Avi Bluth, why the I.D.F. was promoting
the military support of settlements that are illegal under Israeli
law, he directly asserted that the farms were indeed legal and offered
to arrange for us to tour some of them. Later, a spokesman for the
army apologized for the general’s remarks, acknowledged that the
farms were illegal and announced that the I.D.F. would no longer be
promoting the video. This May, Bluth was nonetheless subsequently
promoted to head Israel’s Central Command, responsible for all
Israeli troops in central Israel and the West Bank.

In August, Bluth will replace Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, who during his
final months in charge of the West Bank has seen a near-total
breakdown of law enforcement in his area of command. In late October,
Fox wrote a letter to his boss, the chief of Israel’s military
staff, saying that the surge of Jewish terrorism carried out in
revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks “could set the West Bank on fire.”
The I.D.F. is the highest security authority in the West Bank, but the
military’s top commander put the blame squarely on the police —
who ultimately answer to Ben-Gvir. Fox said he had established a
special task force to deal with Jewish terrorism, but investigating
and arresting the perpetrators is “entirely in the hands of the
Israeli police.”

And, he wrote, they aren’t doing their jobs.

‘ONLY ONE WAY FORWARD’

When the day came early this January for the Supreme Court to hear the
case brought by the people of Khirbet Zanuta, the displaced villagers
arrived an hour late. They had received entry permits from the
District Coordination Office to attend the hearing but were delayed by
security forces before reaching the checkpoint separating Israel from
the West Bank. Their lawyer, Quamar Mishirqi-Assad, noting that their
struggle to attend their own hearing spoke to the essence of their
petition, insisted that the hearing couldn’t proceed without them.
The judges agreed to wait.

The villagers finally were led into the courtroom, and Mishirqi-Assad
began presenting the case. The proceedings were in Hebrew, so most of
the villagers were unable to follow the arguments that described the
daily terrors inflicted by settlers and the glaring absence of any
law-enforcement efforts to stop them.

Palestinian villagers at the Israeli Supreme Court in January. They
are among the residents of six villages in the West Bank asking the
Israeli government to enforce the law there.Credit...Peter van
Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times

The lawyers representing the military and the police denied the claims
of abuse and failure to enforce the law. When a judge asked what
operational steps would be in place if villagers wanted to return, one
of the lawyers for the state said they could already — there was no
order preventing them from doing so.

The next to speak was Col. Roi Zweig-Lavi, the Central Command’s
Operations Directorate officer. He said that many of these incidents
involved false claims. In fact, he said, some of the villagers had
probably destroyed their own homes, because of an “internal
issue.” Now they were blaming the settlers to escape the
consequences of their own actions.

Colonel Zweig-Lavi’s own views about the settlements, and his role
in protecting them, were well known. In a 2022 speech, he told a group
of yeshiva students in the West Bank that “the army and the
settlements are one and the same.”

In early May, the court ordered the state to explain why the police
failed to stop the attacks and declared that the villagers have a
right to return to their homes. The court also ordered the state to
provide details for how they would ensure the safe return of the
villagers. It is now the state’s turn to decide how it will comply.
Or if it will comply.

By the time the Supreme Court issued its rulings, the United States
had finally taken action to directly pressure the Netanyahu government
about the violent settlers. On Feb. 1, the White House issued an
executive order imposing sanctions on four settlers for “engaging in
terrorist activity,” among other things, in the West Bank. One of
the four was Yinon Levi, the owner of Meitarim Farm near Hebron and
the man American and Israeli officials believe orchestrated the
campaign of violence and intimidation against the villagers of Khirbet
Zanuta. The British government issued its own sanctions shortly after,
saying in a statement that Israel’s government had created “an
environment of near-total impunity for settler extremists in the West
Bank.”

Yinon Levi in a meeting at the Knesset in February, shortly after the
United States imposed sanctions against him in connection to
“escalating violence against civilians in the West
Bank.”Credit...Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

The White House’s move against individual settlers, a first by an
American administration, was met with a combination of anger and
ridicule by ministers in Netanyahu’s government. Smotrich called the
Biden administration’s allegations against Levi and others
“utterly specious” and said he would work with Israeli banks to
resist complying with the sanctions. One message that circulated in an
open Hilltop Youth WhatsApp channel said that Levi and his family
would not be abandoned. “The people of Israel are mobilizing for
them,” it said.

American officials bristle when confronted with the question of
whether the government’s actions are just token measures taken by an
embattled American president hemorrhaging support at home for his
Israel policy. They won’t end the violence, they say, but they are a
signal to the Netanyahu government about the position of the United
States: that the West Bank could boil over, and it could soon be the
latest front of an expanding regional Middle East war since Oct. 7.

But war might just be the goal. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime
minister, said he believes that many members of the ultraright in
Israel “want war.” They “want intifada,” he says, “because
it is the ultimate proof that there is no way of making peace with the
Palestinians and there is only one way forward — to destroy them.”

Additional reporting by Natan Odenheimer.

Top photograph: A member of a group known as Hilltop Youth, which
seeks to tear down Israel’s institutions and establish ‘‘Jewish
rule.’’ Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York
Times.

Read by Jonathan Davis

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Engineered by David Mason

PETER VAN AGTMAEL is a Magnum photographer who has been covering
Israel and Palestinian territories since 2012. He is a mentor in the
Arab Documentary Photography Program.

Ronen Bergman [[link removed]] is a staff
writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest
book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s
Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about
Ronen Bergman [[link removed]]

Mark Mazzetti [[link removed]] is an
investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national
security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book
about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti
[[link removed]]

* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Violence
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* Terrorism
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* lawlessness
[[link removed]]
* extremism
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