There is a growing sense that something is beginning to shift. An increasing number of Israelis – on television panels, across social media, and even in online comment sections – appear genuinely disturbed by what has come to be known as “settler violence.”
Some have even grown tired of settlers who, in their view, bring disaster upon themselves while dragging Israeli soldiers into the consequences of their actions.
This change is encouraging in itself, yet it contains a fundamental paradox. The settler carrying a rifle or throwing a Molotov cocktail may provoke outrage, but he represents only one form of violence – and not the most pervasive or consequential one – embedded in Israel’s settlement enterprise.
The very existence of Israeli settlements in the West Bank constitutes a form of structural violence against Palestinians, and that reality faces virtually no opposition within Israel’s Jewish public.
This phenomenon deserves a name: settlerism. It is, in effect, the dominant political ideology in Israel today. Every major Jewish political party supports, directly or indirectly, the continued settlement of the West Bank.
Even the platform of The Democrats, a party that defines itself as left-wing, mentions the need to combat “settler terrorism” but stops short of addressing the elephant in the room. In fact, there is currently no major Jewish political party that challenges the very premise of maintaining Israeli settlements in the occupied territory.
Nearly all Jewish Israelis will vote in the next election – as they did in the previous ones – for parties that support the settlement enterprise through its expansion, funding, and political legitimacy.
Settlerism is not expressed only at the ballot box.
It is also reflected in countless ordinary, everyday choices that sustain the settlement project: purchasing olive oil or wine produced in settlements; attending festivals, sporting events, or cultural activities held in occupied territory; studying at Ariel University; or participating in what may be the greatest taboo of all – mandatory military service in an army that governs millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and is widely regarded as a civic and moral obligation.
Yet there is one basic fact that most Israelis prefer to ignore: there is no settlement without violence. This is true not only of notorious outposts or extremist hilltop communities, but also of settlements considered part of Israel’s political mainstream, such as Ofra, Efrat, and Ma’aleh Adumim.
The re-establishment of the settlement of Sa-Nur in the northern West Bank illustrates how settlements affect the lives of nearby Palestinians. In May 2025, Israel’s security cabinet approved the reconstruction of Sa-Nur, which had been evacuated during the 2005 disengagement.
The government allocated hundreds of millions of shekels to the project, and less than a year later, the first Israeli families moved in during a ceremony attended by government ministers and members of parliament.
But away from the attention of the Israeli public, another story unfolded.
In late December 2025, before a single settler had taken up residence, a large military force was deployed to the future settlement site. Two months later, Muhammad Badad, the mayor of Jaba – the neighboring Palestinian town – told me that during the two decades in which Sa-Nur stood empty, the Israeli military had rarely entered the town.
“Since the end of December,” he said, “soldiers have been coming in almost every day. Over the course of three or four consecutive nights, around 200 people, including me, were detained. We were taken for interrogations with the Shin Bet [Israel Security Agency] and then released. Since then, soldiers have entered roughly 70% of the homes in the town.”
These nighttime raids were not aimed at arresting suspects. They were demonstrations of military force, accompanied by intimidating interrogations conducted by Israel’s internal security service, designed to prepare the ground for the return of Israeli settlers.
Settlerism vs democracy
Sa-Nur was rebuilt on 65 dunams of land designated as “state land.” Yet it is surrounded by thousands of dunams belonging to Palestinian residents of nearby villages, land used for homes, businesses, and agriculture.
Even before settlers arrived, the military issued seizure orders for approximately 650 dunams of privately owned Palestinian land – ten times the size of the settlement itself – to construct a security fence and an access road reserved exclusively for Israelis.
In practice, these measures dramatically expand the settlement’s footprint while cutting Palestinian landowners off from thousands of additional dunams of farmland.
In February 2026, the mayor of Jaba warned: “All of our agricultural land is at risk. We won’t be able to enter it, cultivate it, or plant crops. Even the businesses along the road are in danger.”
“For now,” he added, “there isn’t settler violence here, but we’ve seen what has happened everywhere else in the West Bank. We are deeply afraid. We have lost hope of living peacefully and quietly because the settlers are returning. We know we are going to suffer.”
Sa-Nur demonstrates that long before acts commonly labeled as “settler violence” occur, Israeli settlements already inflict profound harm on Palestinian human rights. Settlements depend on the large-scale appropriation of Palestinian land, while the presence of Israeli civilians in occupied territory inevitably requires an expanded military presence.
The army’s “routine” operations intensify systems of control and coercion, restrict Palestinians’ freedom of movement, and deny them sovereignty over their private space and time. These are all forms of violence.
Multiply this reality by the hundreds of settlements and outposts scattered throughout the West Bank, and what emerges is not a series of isolated incidents but a system of everyday structural violence directed against millions of people.
Settlerism stands in direct opposition to democracy. It preserves and deepens a military regime that rules over people who have no political rights, no meaningful control over their own lives, and no ability to vote for the government that determines their future.
Through broad public support for the settlement enterprise, Israeli governments continue to advance policies of settlement expansion, coercion, and the fragmentation of Palestinian space in the West Bank. Their objective is to confine Palestinians to increasingly restricted and disconnected enclaves while taking control of more land.
Israel’s next elections will undoubtedly be decisive for those seeking to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But settlerism is not Netanyahu’s ideology alone. It is a broad Jewish-Israeli consensus, shared even by many who present themselves as an alternative to the current government.
For that reason, expressing outrage at the sight of a settler wielding a club is not enough. Meaningful change requires acknowledging responsibility for the settlement enterprise itself – for the institutional mechanisms of coercion and dispossession that sustain it, and for the continued subjugation of an entire people under military rule.
Settlerism is not inevitable. Do not stand by.
The writer is head of research at Yesh Din and co-author of the report “Maximum Territory, Minimum Population.”