The Settler Intifada

The brewing anger of Israeli Jews living east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49 / “West Bank”) started in May of 2021 principally from two events: a Palestinian-American terrorist shooting three people and killing one, and the Israeli government failing to enforce its own laws.

Palestinian-American Muntasir Shalabi, age 44, did a drive buy shooting in E49 and killed a teenager and injured two other 19-year old boys on May 2, 2021. He was sheltered by Palestinians for a few days but was ultimately captured and sentenced to life in prison. His home, in the wealthy West Bank town of Turmus Ayya, was demolished in June despite American protests.

The fact that a well-off American citizen would commit such an outrageous act of terrorism in shooting three unarmed young men standing on a road, undermined any narrative that terrorism is a matter of poverty and opportunity as opposed to an evil ideology. Israelis also saw that the new American Biden administration was going to be much more supportive of Palestinians than the Trump administration had been over the prior four years.

Just a week after the terrorist attack, the Israeli government decided to not enforce its own laws and allowed Palestinian Arab squatters to remain in homes in Sheikh Jarrah and continue to not pay their Jewish landlords any rent. The political-terrorist group Hamas launched missiles from Gaza over the threat of the squatters’ evictions, and West Bank Arab support for killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel immediately began to climb.

The message that violence trumps Israeli laws was internalized by both Palestinians and Israelis.

*While Gazans always favor killing Israeli Jews, West Bank Arab support started to climb in May 2021 and escalated much further in the fall of 2022.*

While West Bank Arabs had always committed terrorist attacks, the Israeli Jews in the area did little in terms of revenge.

Consider the heinous Arab murders of the Fogel family in 2011, in which the parents and three children were stabbed to death – including an infant. The Jewish residents mourned the event but did not commit revenge attacks.

That slowly started to change with young Jews living in hilltop settlements committing “price tag” attacks in which small groups would attack Palestinian Arabs in proportion to those whom Arabs had previously attacked. The extremists would sometimes also attack Israeli soldiers for failing to protect the Jewish communities in E49.

The uptick in vigilante attacks started in 2021 and 2022, as new Palestinian terrorist groups emerged in E49. In September 2021, the Jenin Brigades was formed, the Nablus Brigades in May 2022, and the Lions’ Den in August 2022. These West Bank terrorist groups led a series of mass casualty attacks between March 22 and May 5, 2022 which spread from major Israeli cities of Be’er Sheva, Bnei Brak and Tel Aviv to a smaller border town of Elad and the E49 city of Ariel. Jews on both sides of the 1949 Armistice Line did not feel safe, which helped bring down Naftali Bennett’s short stint as prime minister in June.

Things would get worse between August and October, as the Lions’ Den became a force of terror, and Israeli forces went on the offensive to mitigate the mayhem. E49 Jews stepped up their activity, taking matters in their own hands as well.

*Terrorist attacks in the West Bank according to Tor Wennesland, Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process* (no data for June)

The Lions’ Den became very popular in the West Bank and polls showed that Palestinians did not want the Palestinian Authority to rein in the group. In his September 2022 address to the United Nations, PA President Mahmoud Abbas essentially said that the Oslo Accords were dead (21:30) and was abandoning security coordination with Israel. At the end of his talk (45:00), Abbas discussed the “hero martyr Nasser Abu Hamid,” heaping praise on the terrorist convicted of killing seven people, who was the founder of the West Bank terrorist group Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

These events helped usher Benjamin Netanyahu back to being Prime Minister with a more right-wing coalition in December. Yet despite the new right-wing government, Arab violence against Jews continued to increase and become more lethal, even as the United Nations looked away and vilified “Settler violence.”

*Palestinian terrorist attacks were increasingly fatal in 2023.*

The Israeli Jews living in E49 have become exasperated and are starting to engage in massive revenge attacks.

In February 2023, after Palestinian Arabs shot and killed two Jewish men who were driving in their car, hundreds of settlers burned dozens of cars and homes in Nablus. Netanyahu urged them to calm down, that “when blood is boiling and the spirit is hot, don’t take the law into your hands.”

In June 2023, the dynamic repeated after Palestinian terrorists killed four Jews in a restaurant and gas station. Hundreds of settlers went to Turmus Ayya – the hometown of the May 2021 terrorist – and burned dozens of cars and homes.

To be a Jew in the West Bank is to be a target, of both Arab violence and UN condemnation for simply living. The poisonous legacy of the Arab intifadas has infected the mindset of settlers, as they see an Israeli government unable to stop the murders of innocent Jews driving in cars, eating in restaurants, standing on a road or sleeping in their beds. As the provocations become incessant, the attacks of E49 Jews may naturally morph from retaliatory in nature to constant.

Israel reacted to the First Palestinian Intifada of 1987 by helping create Palestinian political institutions as part of the Oslo Accords. It reacted to the poorly named “Second Intifada” / Palestinian Pogroms of 2000-2004 which were directed by Palestinian leadership, by erecting a security barrier near the 1949 Armistice Line with Transjordan.

This uprising is being launched by nearly half a million Jews living in E49/West Bank. It remains to be seen if their actions will remain restricted to reactive attacks, and what actions the Israeli government and PA will be.