Good Settler, Bad Settler | Defector

This article has been adapted from a piece published Nov. 16 on the author’s Substack page.

Last week, after masked settlers torched a mosque in Salfit, set fire to Palestinian trucks in Huwara, and beat farmers bloody during what the U.N. calls the worst olive harvest for settler violence across the West Bank since it began keeping track in 2006, things finally got bad enough that Israeli authorities felt compelled to issue strongly worded statements.

The IDF told Haaretz that the violent settlers are “fringe anarchist teenagers” who need “intervention from welfare and education institutions.” Army Chief Eyal Zamir called them a “criminal minority tarnishing a law-abiding public.” President Isaac Herzog said the attacks were committed by a “handful of perpetrators.” The head of the army’s Central Command, Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, complained about responding to an “anarchist fringe youth” that diverts resources from counterterrorism. Yesha Council Chairman Yisrael Ganz—who represents the settlers—condemned the “small group of extreme anarchists,” while Samaria’s regional council leaders denounced the “small band of rioters who travel from place to place with the intent to provoke unrest and behave violently.” Even the celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach decried “hooliganism and vigilante justice” by “a few rotten apples.” Prime Minister Netanyahu broke his silence last Monday, condemning the “handful of extremists” who “attempt to take the law into their own hands.”

Of course, these claims don’t match what’s happening on the ground.

It’s hard to square the idea of a “small band” of roaming extremists with the reality of eight attacks per day across the entire West Bank—from the Hebron Hills in the south to the Tulkarm Governorate in the north—launched from a network of outposts embedded in virtually every region of the occupied territory. Nor are the perpetrators exclusively young people. While it’s true that teenagers and children are often put on the front lines—some outposts even register as “foster homes” to recruit at-risk minors into the hilltop movement—the most violent settlers are often full-grown men. Yinon Levi, who shot and killed Awdah Hathaleen in Umm al-Khair, is 31. Ariel Dahari, a man I recently filmed clubbing a grandmother in Turmus’ayya, is in his twenties. The leader of the nearby outpost, Amishav Malt, who is known to orchestrate these attacks—the same man who waved his pistol at a group of Palestinian farmers and me shortly before an ambush—appears to be in his forties or fifties.

Then there’s the characterization of the violence itself. Saying these attacks “divert resources from counterterrorism” assumes, by definition, that the settlers carrying them out are not terrorists themselves. And that tracks: We know exactly how the state behaves when it does view something as terrorism. In Bethlehem earlier this month, the Shin Bet and IDF carried out coordinated raids across 15 sites, arrested 50 alleged Hamas operatives, seized weapons, and rushed the case materials to military prosecutors, claiming that they’d stopped an “imminent” attack. By contrast, in Turmus’ayya—where dozens of settlers launched a very real, not imminent, attack—it took three weeks to make a single arrest, even as authorities continue blocking Palestinians, activists, and journalists from reaching the olive fields where the violence is taking place. Calling the attacks “vigilante justice” suggests that the underlying cause is legitimate, and that the issue is merely that private citizens are taking on a role the state should handle. And Netanyahu’s condemnation of violent settlers for “taking the law into their own hands” endorsed this view, serving as a useful reminder that the state sees brutalizing Palestinians and stealing their land as its own job.

Meanwhile, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—who is actually in charge of law enforcement—did what he always does: said the quiet part out loud. Ben-Gvir declared that he was “proud” the police were not “harassing” Hilltop Youth members. “The days of police using the Hilltop Youth as a punching bag are over,” he said.

Still, the barrage of statements accomplished its goal: shoring up the false dichotomy between the “good settler” and the “bad settler,” in which the former supposedly represents the vast, responsible majority and the latter a tiny fringe. It also gave Israel’s allies the breathing room to maintain blanket support in the face of such heinous images. When asked about spiraling settler violence, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed to Herzog and the IDF’s “strong condemnations” as evidence that Israel was taking the issue seriously, while also making clear that the problem wasn’t the violence itself, but “some concern that events in the West Bank could spill over and undermine what we’re trying to do in Gaza.”

Following the arrest of Ariel Dahari—the man who clubbed the grandmother Um Saleh in Turmus’ayya—I wrote about the evolving relationship between the settlers and the state:

“It’s worth remembering that years ago, before settlers rose to the highest levels of government, the Israeli military often found itself chasing them around the hills of the West Bank, frustrated that they were trying to carry out ethnic cleansing on their own terms. Among those being chased were Smotrich and Ben Gvir themselves, back when they were fringe provocateurs rather than government ministers. Their freelance violence created instability the army had to contain, rather than the more orderly, state-sanctioned version of land theft carried out through official settlement building…

Dahari’s arrest is a faint echo of the old security establishment that sometimes found itself at odds with the settler movement—on tactics, if not intent. But this arrest, more than anything else, looks like an attempt to clean up a PR crisis caused by the video. Whether or not Dahari does real jail time, I have no illusions that it will lead to any real dismantling of the terror network in Turmus’ayya and beyond. The ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is—and always has been—a state-backed project, and a flicker of accountability here does nothing to change that.”

But if you really want to understand this dynamic—not as I describe it, not as Israeli officials spin it, but as the settlers themselves understand it—look no further than a remarkable Hebrew-language article published Nov. 13 in Arutz Sheva, the settlers’ flagship media outlet: Hills, farms and everything in between: putting the settlement map in order. It’s written by Elisha Yered, a 22-year-old far-right activist who has rapidly become one of the most influential ideologues of the hilltop movement that builds illegal outposts on Palestinian land.

In August 2023, Yered and another settler were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the fatal shooting of 19-year-old Qusai Jamal Maatan during a settler raid on the Palestinian village of Burqa. Israeli Members of Knessets and Ministers sprang to his defense, with Ben-Gvir declaring he should be rewarded. Within days, Yered was released from custody.

But Yered is far from “fringe.” He served as the official spokesperson for Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har-Melech, a member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition and a close political ally of Ben-Gvir. He has helped establish and fundraise for illegal outposts across the West Bank and is deeply embedded in the networks that link settlers to the ministers who oversee Israeli law enforcement. Here is the Times of Israel on his arrest:

“I suggest security services direct their efforts toward dealing with the nests of terror instead of chasing after [settlers] who hold on to our land with devotion,” added [MK] Son Har-Melech.

Somewhat undercutting the settlers’ position, an unidentified security source told Ynet that Yered “has been heating things up in the area for a long while, also leading to a rise in Palestinian terror and rock throwing.”

The outlet noted that Yered had in the past called for the “erasure” of Palestinian villages on social media as well as for “revenge…with blood” for attacks, saying if security forces did not do so, “brave Jews” would.

In his article, Yered opens by brushing aside the official narrative that frames the recent violence as the work of “fringe youth.” In his telling, every faction of the settler movement—from the young men who torch olive groves to the leadership of the regional councils to the state authorities behind them—operates along a shared continuum, coordinating informally and formally despite tactical disagreements. The idea that these actors are isolated from one another, he suggests, is either naive or deliberately misleading.

He then dives into the internal debate that has shaped the modern settler movement, over whether Jewish sovereignty in the West Bank should be advanced through authorized state-backed settlement construction or through unregulated land seizures carried out by “vigilantes.” For decades, the Israeli security establishment, aligned with the former approach, tried to rein in the hilltop movement—raiding their outposts, confiscating equipment, issuing administrative orders—but the settlers kept pushing forward. Eventually, the state gave up.

Beginning about a decade ago, Yered writes, Israeli authorities decided it was easier to accommodate settler ambitions than to clash with them. They began approving “coordinated” outposts—usually a trailer or tent placed on state land, often just outside the fence of an existing settlement—and turned a blind eye as more remote hills were seized by their less disciplined counterparts.

At first, Yered writes, the state’s red line was absolute: No construction outside the settlement fences. Then the unofficial deal became Fine, but don’t push too deep into the open areas. Then, Fine, as long as it’s on state land. Then, Fine, survey land too. Eventually Fine, anywhere in Area C. And now, he says, the limits have expanded again—into Area B, supposedly under full Palestinian civil control. To prepare for this next phase, Yered describes how his network has mapped the most “breakable” zones in Area B, drafted settlement blueprints and territorial corridors, and assembled dedicated groups to carry out the work. The movement, he boasts, has already established seven new outposts in these mapped locations in the past few months alone.

To state the obvious, Yered’s language is not that of a “fringe group.” It’s the language of a political actor confident that the state will eventually ratify whatever facts it creates on the ground.

And why wouldn’t he be confident? Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has spent the past two years fast-tracking the retroactive legalization of dozens of illegal outposts and expanding existing settlements to absorb the surrounding “neighborhoods” settlers built without approval. In other words, the violent settlers function as the spearhead of official policy.

Yered’s argument is also revealing for what it says about the division of labor between the “good settlers” and the “bad settlers.” In his telling, the authorized farms—the legal settlements—and the “unauthorized” hills—the illegal outposts—depend on one another. The state-approved settlers can only operate because the hilltop youth push the boundaries outward, absorbing the initial blowback and expanding the horizon of what the government later deems tolerable.

As he puts it, the outposts that began as “three young men” have become settlements with dozens of families, while what once began with lone trailers “now proudly emerge in large numbers, receiving official protection from the military.” On the ground, Yered writes, there is “fruitful cooperation” between the two camps—from “assistance in security incidents and firefighting,” to logistics, to regular ideological gatherings.

We saw a perfect demonstration of that cooperation recently. The “good settler” interviewed by the BBC, Amichai Luria, lives in Shiloh, one of the movement’s most respectable, government-backed settlements—across the olive fields from Turmus’ayya—a place frequented by U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee. Luria’s winery relies on grapes grown on Palestinian land seized by the “bad settlers.” When he was asked about the brutal clubbing of Um Saleh on that very same land, he dismissed it as nothing more than “an attempt to make the Jews look bad.”

“It’s amazing to me how people talk about these rare occasions [when] people misbehave,” he said. “Oh, some people were trying to pick olives and some Jews came and bothered them. Give me a break. There are more muggings on the main street in London than there [are] here… Most of the Arabs, if they could, would follow Hamas or Hezbollah. Very, very, very few want to coexist or live in peace, and at the first opportunity they have, they’re going to wipe us out… The future is very simple. Hopefully the army will wake up, hopefully people will understand that we have to prepare ourselves, that they’re coming for us.”

The best defense is a good offense, Luria suggests—and Yered would seem to agree: “Reality is never static,” he writes. “Either you advance forward or you retreat.”

Then comes the theological core. All talk of “containment boundaries,” “state land,” and “survey land,” Yered argues, is ultimately a distraction. The land was promised to the Jews by God. No one has permission to surrender a single dunam. Those who do the work of seizing it—often violently—are not anarchists but divine pioneers fulfilling a prophecy, even if the state publicly scolds them for it.

It ends, fittingly, with Yered offering a salute to the same “youth” the Israeli government claims to be battling: “I don’t know if you feel it on the hill,” he writes, “but you have tremendous public support… everywhere from the people of Israel.”

Three months ago, Yered hosted Ben-Gvir and the commander of the West Bank police district—Deputy Commissioner Moshe Pinchi—for a friendly tour of a brand-new illegal outpost Yered helped establish. They sat together, listened to settlers’ complaints, and posed for photos that Yered then posted online.

Pinchi—furthest on the left in the above photograph—is the same official who, after my video of the Turmus’ayya attack went viral, said the image had “kept him up at night.” The officials now condemning settler violence are the very same ones celebrating its architects—and supplying the scaffolding that lets them keep building.

The Israeli government has spent the past three years aligning itself structurally and ideologically with the settlement movement: transferring West Bank governance from the military to civilian ideologues, fast-tracking outpost legalizations, pouring billions into settler roads and housing, dismantling nearly every bureaucratic brake that once slowed expansion, and even arming the most notoriously violent settlers. Now, while the world fixates on headline-grabbing violence, quiet policy shifts continue to accelerate beneath the surface. Just last week, the Knesset advanced a bill granting major new tax breaks to West Bank settlements deemed “under threat,” a designation made by the IDF Central Command—and one inseparable from the very dynamics of encroachment that produce those threats. The deeper a settlement pushes into Palestinian land, the more “dangerous” its surroundings become, producing a circular logic in which expansion manufactures the “insecurity” that then entitles it to further state support.

The Yesha Council, which represents the settlers, praised the bill’s advancement, saying it “joins the revolution led by Minister Bezalel Smotrich in recent years in Judea and Samaria, which effectively consolidates Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank.” One day later, they joined the chorus condemning the “small group of extreme anarchists.”

On Monday, the IDF’s Central Command—led by Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, who last week dismissed the attackers as “fringe anarchist youth” and is nominally overseeing the crackdown—approved Smotrich’s plan for 10 new settlement jurisdiction zones in the northern West Bank, part of a broader government push to convert illegal outposts into formal settlements. In practice, it turns the very violence he claims to be policing into state-sanctioned progress, rewarding the perpetrators with new jurisdiction and legitimacy.

The state and the different settler factions may quarrel over timing, optics, and methodology, but they agree on the destination. The “fringe anarchists” push past the map, the respectable settlers move in, then the state later incorporates the gains. The security establishment condemns the violence on television and then protects the outposts that emerge behind it.

There are certainly still elements within the Israeli government and security establishment who object to the most violent settlers, and even to settlement expansion. But what Yered’s piece makes clear is that unless there is a meaningful faction within Israel determined to dismantle the entire settlement project in the West Bank—and there is not—then there is no meaningful opposition to its continued growth and all the violence that comes with it. The “good settler” and the “bad settler” are two sides of the same coin, and there is no supporting one without the other.