With the rise in settler violence, are Israel's far-right groups actually militias?

Hardened ideology

The violent settlers are inspired by some extremist clerics such as rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, who has advocated violence, incited racial hatred and called, in a 2009 book titled 'The King's Torah', for killing non-Jews, including children, if they posed a threat to the state of Israel and its people.

The Israeli internal security service, Shin Bet, has identified some of the far-right armed Jewish groups, who have claimed attacks in the two past decades against Palestinians and their properties in the occupied West Bank.

These Jewish supremacist groups include the Hilltop Youth, the Revolt, the Jewish Underground, Gush Emunim Underground, Lehava and Kach. They are committed to replacing the state with what they call a "Jewish kingdom."

Baruch Goldstein is a mass murderer and one of the public faces of these groups. In 1994, the Kach adherent killed 29 Palestinians and injured more than 100 in the Ibrahimi Mosque in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron during the month of Ramadan.

There are no official Israeli statistics for the number of affiliated members and supporters of these groups. The Israeli authorities say they are the exception not the rule and often condemn settler violence.

In 2020, an Israeli court issued three life sentences against Amiram Ben-Uliel, a settler himself, after being convicted of killing a Palestinian couple and their toddler (the Dawabsheh family) in 2015 by firebombs.

Mob violence or militias? 

But Palestinian and Israeli rights activists accuse the Israeli army, which occupies and controls the West Bank, of condoning the repeated settler attacks, and when arrests take place, the suspects are often let off.

"The military avoids confronting violent settlers as a matter of policy, although soldiers have the authority and duty to detain and arrest them," said the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B'Tselem) in a recent report.

"As a rule, the military prefers to remove Palestinians from their own farmland or pastureland rather than confront settlers, using various tactics such as issuing closed military zone orders that apply to Palestinians only, or firing tear gas, stun grenades, rubber-coated metal bullets and even live rounds.  Sometimes, soldiers actively participate in the settler attacks or look on from the sidelines."

In an analysis for The Washington Post, Hannah Bagdanov, a PhD candidate at the University of Notre Dame and a doctoral affiliate of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, raised the question whether these ultra-nationalist groups are "mobs or pro-government militias."

She rejects the media coverage of the settler attacks as "mob violence" and argues that her research suggests these were organised efforts and premediated attacks, rather than random outbreaks of violence.

The researcher says that many of the recent settler attacks appear to be premeditated and "the work of known extremist groups. That runs against definitions of mob violence, as mobs form spontaneously and lack a clear organisational structure."

With a new pro-settlement government in power, there are concerns that the occupied West Bank will experience an uptick in violence in the months to come. The line-up has taken Israeli politics to the far right.

The National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, had himself joined the now-banned far-right party Kach, which was designated by the United States and Israel as a terrorist organisation. Last year, he brandished a gun in the face of Palestinains during a tour of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem and once hung a poster of Baruch Goldstein at his home in the settlement of Kiryat Arba.