Despite State-Backed Israeli Settler Violence, the Palestinians Will Persevere
It would seem that the Israeli settlers are out of control. Their violent actions have either been encouraged by the Israel Defense Forces or Israeli government, or protected by the former and quietly supported by the latter. This support exists as they set homes on fire, attack Palestinian residents, and destroy their olive trees in the West Bank. Such terrorist activity is rarely penalized in the country’s justice system because the state supports the policy of mass expulsion of the Palestinians from the West Bank.
Last Friday in Tal, four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed after there was an ISIS-like incursion into the Palestinian village. A Palestinian living in one of the attacked homes grabbed a settler’s rifle and shot two Israelis before being killed by the IDF. In response to this act of self-defense, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has advocated for turning the West Bank into Beit Hanoun, a city in Gaza that Israel destroyed during its genocide. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for “intensive counterterrorism operation[s]” and for settler outposts to expand in the West Bank.
The ISIS-KKK-like terrorist settlers reacted by torching mosques and setting fire to homes in villages, attacking an ambulance transporting a patient, and firing live ammunition at Palestinian residents. This comes on the heels of Israeli settlers detaining US Rep. and 2028 presidential hopeful Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in early July when he visited a Palestinian village that had been destroyed by settlers.
In the wider context, Israeli settlers and the IDF have killed nearly 1,200 Palestinians, including 250 children, in the West Bank since the genocidal war on Gaza after October 7. Making matters worse, Israeli terroristic violence by settlers has increased by 63% in the first half of 2026 compared with the second half of 2025. They may seem unhinged, but it is the far-right government that has fueled this level of violence.
The appearance of the Israeli settlers being out of control is a sleight of hand. They are working, like the KKK did under state governments in the American South, under the auspices of the Israeli government.
With horror, in the ashes of the failed Iraq War, ISIS drove masses of people from their homes across wide swaths of Iraq and Syria during the mid-2010s in the hope of reestablishing an Islamic state that was far more brutal than any Islamic caliphate throughout history. The creation of Israel was similar, in the hope of establishing a long-lost Jewish state in historic Palestine via ethnic cleansing of roughly 750,000 people. Both ISIS and Zionist-Israeli forces and settlers have,........
