Even as settler violence grows increasingly prominent abroad, Israelis seem somewhat ambivalent. According to a recent survey, 78% of the public call Judea and Samaria and a Palestinian state important or very important. But asked to prioritize, they rank it dead last: cost of living at 35%, haredi (ultra-Orthodox) conscription at 18%, the Iran war at 17%, judicial reform at 16%, and the future of Judea and Samaria at just 7%.
Before accusing Israelis of monstrous disregard, remember that in the Israeli political system they have only one vote to decide the prime minister, judicial reform, and security policy all at once. If you had only one dollar to invest, where would you place it?
Israelis will faithfully recite the cost of living – but as Naftali Bennett has discovered, to his dismay, they are not being honest. His comprehensive economic plan, released in early July, landed somewhere between negligible and nil. By contrast, the cost of living barely features in Gadi Eisenkot’s campaign, yet that hasn’t stopped the exodus from the one party to the other. The real number-one concern for Israeli voters has always been, and continues to be, security.
To an outsider, the correlation between settler violence and security looks weak, if not negative. The vigilantism rampant in the West Bank doesn’t make Israelis safer – but for a certain sector, cracking down on it represents the opposite. That is why the opposition hasn’t capitalized on the seeming "wild west" created, largely by government incompetence, 20 minutes from the capital. They will mention the issue when a particularly egregious event occurs, but don’t expect a poster reading “If he can’t secure Judea and Samaria, can he secure Tel Aviv.”
Such an ad would collide with two associations of settler violence, both of which the movement itself reinforces. In the Israeli political dictionary, the antonym of the settlements is the Palestinian state: Speak harshly of the movement’s excesses, and you are heard as lending a hand to the people trying to bring one about.
Settler violence tied to claims to Palestinian statehood
Meir Deutsch, director-general of the prominent settlement NGO Regavim, drew that connection explicitly not long ago, arguing that the “settler violence” narrative is a foreign-funded campaign engineered “to create the tool that will force the State of Israel to establish a Palestinian state.”
The second association is folded into that same charge: foreign. Regavim’s report casts the campaign as EU-financed and amplified by hostile voices abroad, and Deutsch points to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own acknowledgment that settler violence helped justify a partial American arms embargo in the middle of the war. To make settler violence a headline issue, then, is to risk sounding at once obtuse about the real threat and faintly foreign in one’s preoccupations.
All of this is built on a fundamental truth: Israeli elections run in only one direction – rightward.
That’s why the self-styled “right-wing defense minister,” Israel Katz, fired the head of IDF Central Command on live TV for continuing to hold a violent settler, Tal Yinon Dardik, in custody and why even now he flatly rejects reinstating administrative detention for what he insists are a “handful of Jewish rioters.” The stunt ended in a swift and humiliating walk-back, but it captures a broader perception on the Right: Taking on the campaign against settler violence is a winning cause.
If there is internal polling on the issue, it has not been leaked. The truth is no one knows how many votes such actions secure, but it certainly secures a flank.
Right-wing politicians rarely hesitate when red lines are clearly crossed: A direct assault on IDF troops, like the violence seen last April, triggers immediate outrage across the political spectrum, while an indefensible action against Palestinian civilians, such as the Jit rampage, forces even figures like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to disavow perpetrators as rogue “criminals” divorced from mainstream Zionism.
But when the focus turns to the daily friction, political calculus changes. Leaders find it far safer to dance around the problem than to risk getting launched leftward for stepping on a partisan landmine.
Settler violence won’t be the wedge issue of the election. It won’t even be a widely discussed one – it’ll feature in attacks on the government as second fiddle at best. Not because people think settlers are right, but because attacking them makes one sound left-wing.
The writer serves as the English director of the Ribo Center and the editor of Amit Segal’s newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel.