In defence of Israel's Jewish settlers in the West Bank

Submitted by Joseph Massad on Mon, 09/21/2026 - 17:28 The UK, France and Canada have banned trade with the settlements while sparing the state that built, armed and rewarded them

Israeli settlers, some holding sticks, scuffle with left-wing activists as Israeli soldiers intervene at an outpost near the Palestinian village of Jannatah, south of Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, on 25 August 2026 (Ilia Yefimovich/AFP) Off

Stark and vehement condemnations of Jewish settlers in the West Bank (but not in East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights) have been piling up in western quarters.

Earlier this month, the UK, France and Canada - among the main sponsors of Israel's genocide in Gaza - banned trade with Jewish settlements in the West Bank, finally joining a boycott that Spain, Ireland and other countries opposed to the genocide had begun long before. Trading in settlement products was itself a violation of international law all along.

Even the uber-Christian Zionist US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, visited the West Bank to condemn settler violence as an "act of terror", except that he opposes the European boycott as "discrimination against the Jewish people" and accused British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, himself Jewish and a Zionist, of "Jew hate".

Meanwhile, the European countries and Canada, announcing boycotts of the West Bank Jewish settlements, will continue to import products from the Jewish settler-colony of Israel itself.

Israel responded with its usual hubris and rage at the UK, announcing a ban on 11 British MPs entering any Israeli-controlled territories and closing the British consulate in Jerusalem.

What is this all about? Why are Europeans and Canadians suddenly ganging up on Jewish settlers in the West Bank? What have settlers done that is so terrible as to elicit such vigorous condemnation and boycott?

The boycotters cite increasing settler violence (which means earlier settler violence was not sufficient to elicit a boycott). They also base the boycott on the International Court of Justice's 2024 advisory opinion, which found Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory - the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza - unlawful.

However, Israeli occupation and Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank, and Syria's Golan Heights have been declared contrary to international law for more than half a century. As early as November 1967, UN Security Council Resolution 242 emphasised the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by war and called for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied that year.

Why are these poor settlers unfairly bearing the brunt when they are but junior players in this massive oppression?

The settlements were declared to have no legal validity in Resolution 446 of March 1979, while Resolution 465 of March 1980 described Israel's settlement policy as a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Indeed, the UK and France both voted for Resolutions 242 and 465, while France voted for Resolution 446 and the UK abstained.

The 2024 ICJ advisory opinion simply reinforced and expanded on these UN resolutions but made no new ground on the illegality of the settlements.

Moreover, the violence committed by the Israeli army against West Bank Palestinians (let alone Palestinians in Gaza and East Jerusalem) far exceeds that of the much-maligned Jewish settlers. The army expelled 300,000 Palestinians in 1967 and has killed thousands since, while the settlers have at most killed dozens and expelled hundreds more.

Yet no boycott of Israel, or at least of its army, has been announced, leading one to conclude that Israeli army violence is not a serious offence that merits penalties.

Why are these poor settlers unfairly bearing the brunt of the repercussions when they are but junior players in the massive oppression that the Zionist movement and the Israeli state and military have visited on the Palestinian people since the 1880s?

Biblical claims

Jewish settlers, organised into military gangs before May 1948, and the Israeli army thereafter, not only expelled close to 800,000 indigenous Palestinians and killed 13,000 during the 1947-1949 Zionist conquest of Palestine, but also engaged in biological warfare.

They poisoned Palestinian village wells with typhoid and dysentery bacteria, a war crime overseen by the settlers' leader, David Ben-Gurion.

If today's West Bank Jewish settlers invoke the Bible to explain their conquest of the West Bank, so have the so-called "secular" Jewish settler-leaders of Israel, both before and after 1967. It was Ben-Gurion who did not tire of reminding us that "God promised [Palestine] to us".

It was also Ben-Gurion who referred to "the Arabs" as "Amalek" in 1956. The Israeli military likewise took the name for its 1948 operation to poison Palestinian wells, "Operation Cast Thy Bread", from a biblical verse in Ecclesiastes.

Israel's military operations in 1948 named after biblical figures included "Operation Nachshon", "Operation Yiftach" and "Operation Yoav", among others. Its military continues to borrow operation names from the Bible, including "Operation Rising Lion" for the 2025 war against Iran and "Pillar of Defense" for the 2012 war on Palestinians in Gaza.

Even Israel's weapons have biblical names, including "Jericho" ballistic missiles and "David's Sling" missiles. Its tanks are named "Merkava", meaning chariot, a reference to the book of Ezekiel.

It is true that settlers deliberately contaminated wells and water supplies in Palestinian villages in the 2000s by throwing dirty nappies and other contaminants into them. Yet they did not contaminate them with biological agents developed in Zionist laboratories, as Ben-Gurion did in 1948.

While today's Jewish settlers commit relatively small pogroms, the Zionist settlers committed horrific massacres in 1948, let alone the ongoing genocide in Gaza, unequalled by anything the much less violent Jewish settlers are doing today.

Like the Jewish settlers of pre- and post-1948 Israel, the post-1967 Jewish settlers, especially American settlers, make the same biblical claims as Ben-Gurion, that God gave them "Judea and Samaria", rather than advancing new ones.

Selective punishment

The Israeli army has already killed upwards of 1,200 West Bank Palestinians since its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza began on 7 October 2023, a quarter of them children.

In 2026 alone, the Israeli army and Jewish settlers have killed close to 100 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 19 children. Of these, 23 were killed during settler attacks. Meanwhile, the Israeli army has carried out the massive destruction of several West Bank refugee camps and expelled their inhabitants in the last few months alone.

Britain's settlement trade ban is cosmetic. For it to work, it must sanction Israel Jonathan Cook Read More »

It is the Israeli government and military, not the settlers, who have destroyed the possibility of a so-called two-state solution, so dear to the Europeans and Canadians, who justified their boycott of the settlements as a way to defend this "solution".

It is the government and army who are the actual decision-makers behind Israeli expansionism and colonisation. The settlers are merely their foot soldiers, yet it is they who are being unfairly penalised by the boycotters.

This is a grave injustice, which must be opposed and remedied immediately.

If European and Canadian sponsors of Israel's occupation and genocide, along with those who oppose both, want to be just and end Israel's Jewish supremacist regime and its colonisation of Palestinian land, then it is the state of Israel that should be punished, not a few hapless settlers who would be powerless without that state's full backing.

The 12-country decision to ban trade with the settlements will have no economic impact on the Jewish settler-colony at all and will not stop Jewish colonisation. Such trade is minuscule compared with the massive trade these countries conduct with Israel.

Only a blanket categorical boycott of the genocidal Israeli state and all its organs would achieve such results.

And that would only be fair to the settlers.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Occupation Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0