As an anthropologist, I study taboos, their origins, and the biases that lie behind them. I believe there is now an urgent need to challenge the taboo around “settler violence.”
The liberal Jewish world today finds itself in a kind of ongoing identity crisis. On the one hand, it feels that the Israel with which it learnt to identify – in the wake of the Holocaust and the emergence of the Jewish state in 1948, which seemed to offer every Jew a kind of secular redemption – is slipping away. On the other hand, since October 7, it has witnessed the largest explosion of antizionist hate in recent history. Liberal Jews have been subjected to a staggering avalanche of propaganda, libels, disinformation, and outright insanity directed at them as “Zionists.”
From within that space, a certain compromise formation becomes attractive. Take “Bibi”, take “the settlers”, but do not take our precious Zionism – our bare minimum commitment to the existence of a Jewish state somewhere in the historic land of Israel. The antizionists may hate us, but we can join hands in opposing the far-right zealots who have captured our homeland. And so the otherwise irreconcilable divide between us seems, for a moment, to fall away.
The traumatic encounter with the other, who hates you simply for who you are, disappears. We can go on pretending that they treat us as equals. They are simply expressing their opinion about “the settlements.”
There is an irony in this position that mirrors the irony of the Oslo Accords themselves: the belief that a compromise exists to be made with people who do not believe in compromise; that ethnically cleansing your own people can somehow satisfy those who chant, “We don’t want two states, we want ’48,” alongside “by any means necessary.”
The facts have been laid out elsewhere by legal scholars including Eugene Kontorovich and Natasha Hausdorff, by research organisations such as Regavim, and by Israeli commentators such as Gadi Taub. Their work points to serious problems in the way incidents of “settler violence” are classified, reported, and interpreted. UN statistics systematically misrepresent the phenomenon, while many confrontations are instigated by foreign agitators and far-left activists who work closely with terrorists. But the basic logic is simple: if the vast majority of crimes in the West Bank are in fact committed by Arabs, then a global campaign depicting its Jewish inhabitants as collectively violent is straightforwardly racist.
On November 23, 2023, Mahmoud al-Habbash, senior adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said: “The violence of armed settlers in the West Bank against Palestinians will explode the situation and lead to an attack greater than that of October 7.” The Economist has since featured an article claiming that Israel is “flirting with the next intifada” – victim blaming for an event that has not happened yet, or, put differently, a threat.
Jewish communities in the diaspora are woefully unprepared for what may follow. The next intifada would likely unleash another global wave of antizionist libel and hysteria, leading to further attacks on diaspora Jews. In the West Bank, a mass-casualty attack on “far-right religious settlers” would be far easier for antizionists to justify than the October 7 massacres, committed in large part against left-wing peace activists living within the Green Line.
Recognising that there is an organised campaign around “settler violence” – and recognising its function in justifying a future intifada against Israeli civilians – is not the same as denying that some criminal acts occur. But the concession is ultimately meaningless, since criminal acts occur everywhere, and the rates of Jewish crime in the West Bank are not exceptionally high. The performance of self-condemnation has become an obligatory ritual, not a genuine assertion of moral principle.
Rather than an exception, the “settler violence” accusation emerges from the same political ecosystem behind other inflammatory campaigns against Israel: antizionist activist groups variously linked to Fatah, the PFLP, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other terrorist organisations; far-left Israeli NGOs such as Yesh Din and B’Tselem, the latter of which advances the genocide libel from the premise that Israel is a settler-colonial state; and the UN, which does much the same. It’s the same actors, with the same intentions, doing the same antizionism.
The desire of left-wing Israelis not to live in a halachic state – with mandated religious observance, overly stringent status rules, or government-imposed gender segregation – is perfectly reasonable. The notion that antizionists – from lunatics such as Francesca Albanese to the latest member of the cultural elite penning a piece for The New Yorker, both explicitly calling for the removal of hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews from the West Bank – are somehow allies in that struggle is not.
Polarisation within the Jewish world – between left and right, secular and religious – blurs the line between an internal political argument and an external campaign of incitement. Many liberal Jews already regard the Israeli right as responsible for some of the country’s gravest political failures. So when antizionists take those same Israelis and recast them as embodiments of cruelty – through racist and violent imagery, such as the now-famous L’Espresso cover depicting a religious settler in the most unflattering light, with online iterations showing him with blood dripping from his teeth and clutching a Paleolithic bone axe – the instinct is often to avert one’s eyes. To object too forcefully would seem to compromise one’s standing on the liberal side of the argument. Yet evading the antizionism only makes them look less credible to the non-Jewish public.
Recognising the existence of antizionism does not mandate any particular policy response. It means focusing one’s vision and analysis on the behaviour of antizionists themselves, rather than on Israel’s supposedly endless moral flaws – real, imagined, or somewhere in between.
When an anthropologist hears about a small group of people doing something strange, different, and determined – while simultaneously being demonised by many others – their ears prick up. I am interested in understanding who the religious settlers are and why they believe it is in Israel’s interest to establish deep outposts in Judea and Samaria. Everyone knows that the Oslo Accords cannot last forever, and that some new arrangement will eventually be required if peace is to be reached.
In a recent piece for Tablet, I reported on how international media showed zero curiosity about who the settlers were, their side of the story, and their account of the confrontations that took place on August 29, 2026, in Qusra and Jalud in the Benyamin region of the West Bank. The lack of interest in the other side’s account conflicts with anthropological ethics, journalistic standards, and juridical principle all at once.
We must condemn acts of violence and crime even when committed by “settlers.” We must also demand accurate and nuanced reporting and journalism, scrutinise malevolent actors, and refuse racial stereotyping. No person should be assumed to be a criminal because they are a “settler” – and no antizionist should be assumed to be a neutral critic.
It is essential to listen to and think with others – not to “support settler violence,” whatever that means, but to support the human beings who are under a constant campaign of demonisation. That means challenging all those who continue to dehumanise others under the guise of moral principle – and recovering the capacity to see the human being beyond every type of polarisation.
Adam Louis-Klein is the Founder of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ)
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