Israeli Settler Violence Continues Under American Neglect
Israeli Settler Violence Continues Under American Neglect
The U.S. continues transferring aid to Israel even as it flouts American redlines in the West Bank.
The House Appropriations Committee released its spending bill for Fiscal Year 2027 covering national security, the Department of State, and related programs, which—among other appropriations—approved $3.8 billion for Israel, following the terms of a 10-year U.S.-Israel memorandum of understanding.
At the same time, the Israeli government continues to promote and protect violent campaigns of state-backed terror against Palestinians in ways that are so extreme that more and more Western and former Israeli officials are condemning it.
The latest official to do so was Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, who criticized his own government in ways that are increasingly punished as thought crimes throughout the West.
“My mother is a Holocaust survivor,” Pardo told reporters, while on a tour of Palestinians villages raided by Israeli settlers. “What I saw here today reminded me of events that happened in the last century in a very developed country—the same phenomena directed there against Jews. And I feel ashamed to be a Jew here today.”
His assessment follows February remarks from Israel’s former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who, echoing the determination of Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem, said that “the ideology of ‘Jewish supremacy,’ which has become dominant in the Israeli government, resembles Nazi racial theory.”
In the United States, liberal pro-Israel members of congress like Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) have recently issued their own denunciations of settler violence, with the Times of Israel worrying that rampant Israeli state-backed terror is “harming Israel’s standing in the US.”
But, as Rabbi Arik Ascherman, argued in Haaretz this past month, “public condemnation of settler violence hasn’t changed anything on the ground.” Ascherman, an American-Israeli human-rights activist, writes that, despite increased condemnation from Western and former Israeli officials, “there is a continuation—if not escalation—of the daily violence supported more and more directly and blatantly by Israeli security forces. The collusion is beyond anything I have seen in the 30 years that I have led Israeli human rights NGOs.”
Like Ascherman, Jasper Nathaniel, an American journalist who reports from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, is skeptical that recent condemnations will lead to any policy changes.
“Liberal Israelis understand that these videos of feral-looking settlers are bad for Israel, they know that it’s bad PR. That is why you get occasional condemnations,” Nathaniel told The American Conservative. “The question is, do Israelis actually care about the project—taking over the West Bank? The polling on that is unequivocal. Support for the settlement movement is going up. They think of the movement as their bullet-proof vest, and a way to prevent another October 7.”
Data from Pew has found the view that settlements enhance Israeli security has steadily become more popular with Jewish Israeli adults each year, rising from 18 percent in 2013 to 49 percent in 2024.
After Israel and the U.S. launched a war against Iran on February 28, 2026, Israel’s security cabinet secretly approved the establishment of 34 new settlements in the West Bank in direct defiance of the U.S. government’s supposed policy against Israeli annexation.
As Israeli settlements have spread across the West Bank, so has the settler violence that accompanies them. Settlers, Jasper writes, “establish illegal outposts under army protection, from which settlers launch pogroms on vulnerable Palestinian communities, often with military escorts, in an effort to terrorize them into leaving.”
In an interview, Jasper says the scale and brutality of attacks has worsened significantly in recent years. “There’s no question that there’s been an increase in settler violence after the new cabinet came in, and after October 7,” he said. He added that local reporters who cover Israel’s occupation have noted a further spike since the Iran War began. Historically confined to Area C, where Israel exercises full military and civil control, they are now pushing with increasing confidence into Areas B and A.
While other reporting suggests Israeli violence has “escalated” under the cover of the Iran War, Jasper noted that settlers “don’t need the cover of the Iran War or the genocide, they will behave this way regardless.” But when Israel is at war, the Israeli public “stops caring about settler violence.”
Recent Israeli attacks Nathaniel has documented confirm a pattern of settler violence carried out with full military protection and with complete impunity for Israeli perpetrators.
On April 21, 2026, a Jewish settler perpetrated a school shooting in broad daylight, killing the 14-year-old Aws Hamdi Al-Nassan (whose father had been killed by settlers seven years earlier) and the 32-year-old Jihad Abu Naim. Video footage from the incident shows the settler pausing to take various sniper-style shooting positions while targeting schoolchildren on a hillside overlooking the Al-Mughayyir Boys’ Secondary School.
Nearly two weeks later, the shooter has not been arrested. The IDF claims the settler perpetrated the school shooting in self defense.
Two months earlier, on February 18, a masked settler armed with an M16 shot and killed 19-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam, a Philadelphia native, during a raid on the Palestinian shepherding village of Mukhmas. Rather than intervening, the soldiers accompanying the settlers fired tear gas and stun grenades at residents. After the attack, settlers walked off with more than 300 sheep and goats under military watch. Abu Siyam is at least the seventh American killed by Israeli settlers or soldiers in the West Bank since October 7. No one has been arrested in any of those cases.
On October 19, 2025, Jasper was present when a mob of Israeli settlers ambushed Palestinian olive farmers in a village outside Ramallah populated largely by Palestinian Americans. Settlers attacked farmers with stones and clubs, set cars on fire, and beat a grandmother named Um Saleh unconscious, striking her motionless body again before moving on. Israeli soldiers, who had promised Jasper and the farmers protection, abruptly sped away in their jeep, leaving them stranded with the mob. No one has been arrested.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has warned foreign governments that “if you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation, and we will kill you.”
Yet American journalists like Nathaniel know that—despite the billions of dollars in aid and diplomatic protection their government provides Israel, and pronouncements made by officials like Hegseth —when they travel to the West Bank to cover Israeli violence against Palestinians, they are risking their lives to do so, and understand that if they are harmed by Israelis, those responsible will face no consequences whatsoever.
“After the big attack, I was alerted to the fact that my name and face were being shared in Settler telegram channels,” Nathaniel tells The American Conservative. “I’m not so sure what to do about it.”
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