Are Israeli settlers out of control in the West Bank?

0:02This is a global production. We have seen basically more and more license given explicitly to these settlers to basically do what they want in these areas of the West Bank. It makes it almost impossible for an Israeli government to deliver a two-state solution. And that is the long-term strategy of Netanyahu and Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, that they just don't want it to be a possibility. Bitzalel Smotrich, the finance minister, racing ahead with a policy basically of depopulating the West Bank, a kind of ethnic cleansing. See so-called settlers. Who are they? Who are they exactly? And what are they hoping to achieve?

0:41This reality reflects a double standard that we must address today. When speaker after speaker refers to settler violence, it is an insult to thousands of years of continuous Jewish history in the land of Israel. Jews have never been and will never be settlers in Judea and Samaria. That is Israel's ambassador to the UN taking issue with the description of Jewish settlers as Jewish settlers in a land that Palestinians have lived in for centuries. We're not hearing much about it this summer, but the situation in the West Bank increasingly feels like anarchy with Israeli settlers besieging Palestinian families in their homes.

1:32Can anything be done to make Israel obey international law? Welcome to The News Agents.

1:42The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And the land that is being contested here, the West Bank, nothing to do with Gaza. Gaza is a completely different strip of land that doesn't have any common borders with the West Bank. The West Bank is the West Bank of the Jordan River, which until 1967 was Jordanian. It was Jordanian controlled and the centres of population were Arab, Arab Muslim, Arab Christian, Hebron, Janine, Ramallah and places like that, which is where the bulk of the Palestinian population were based after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. And in recent years, what has happened is that following the 1967 invasion, there was a move by certain groups of very ideological zealots, I think is not an unfair description of people who wanted to take over this land.

2:41And they would call it Judea and Samaria as if it was something back from the Old Testament days that rightly still belonged to Israel, even though that if there was to be peace with the Palestinians, this was the centre of Palestinian population. And increasingly, under Benjamin Netanyahu's government, a blind eye, maybe even more than that, encouragement has been given to these settlers to take over more and more land in the West Bank. And what we've seen in the past few days, few weeks, is an upsurge in settler violence. Indeed. And as the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu, supported by his far right allies in his cabinets, have become more and more extreme, especially in the way of October the 7th.

3:28and over the last few years, we have seen, as John says, basically more and more license given explicitly to these settlers to basically do what they want in these areas of the West Bank, where traditional Israeli governments have tried to constrain. And this is really getting worse, especially over the last year and even over the course of this summer. And we're now, over the last few days, seeing a situation where Israeli settlers are besieging two Palestinian families in their homes in the occupied West Bank. The families are saying that they're running out of supplies, they're running out of food, international human rights groups urging the authorities to step in.

4:05Today, Israeli security forces have been reported to have withdrawn from the Jewish settler outpost in the village of Kusra, which is near Nablus, after clashes with these extremist settlers. and if you take the bigger view according to UN figures 76 Palestinians including 18 children have been killed in the West Bank this year by Israeli forces or settlers same time three Israelis including one civilian have been killed in confrontation with with Palestinians and since January 2023 127 Palestinian communities in the West Bank have experienced full or partial displacement, including 47 that have been entirely displaced, affecting more than 6 ,000 Palestinians.

4:50That's according to the UN. And as John says, these are people and families who, in many cases, have lived on this land for generations, and their displacement is clearly, explicitly illegal under international law. Yeah, the UN and international courts say that what you have at the moment in the West Bank is a military occupation of that land, and therefore you cannot build settlements on land that you are occupying militarily. But the other thing about this, and this is the bigger picture of it, is that Benjamin Netanyahu, unlike a number of prime ministers who preceded him, doesn't want the two-state solution.

5:29He wants to do everything possible to undermine the idea that there will be a two state solution of an Israel and a viable Palestinian state living side by side. And what is the best way to undermine the idea of a Palestinian state is you drive the Palestinians from that land that they have lived on for, as you say, decades, centuries. And therefore, it becomes even more difficult because if you go to the West Bank now, you can be suddenly driving along. And it is a biblical landscape. It is an extraordinary place. And then you suddenly come across this newly built township that has got thousands of settlers in it, Israeli settlers.

6:09Who is going to be the prime minister who says, right, OK, we've done a deal. There's going to be a two state solution. You're out of here. It makes it almost impossible for an Israeli government to deliver a two state solution. And that is the long term strategy of Netanyahu and Smotrich and Ben Gavir, that they just don't want it to be a possibility. And so you are left with this situation where there are thousands of Israeli settlers and settlements that have been built up that are quite elaborate now, that are very ideological and a long way, I would say, from much of Israeli mainstream opinion.

6:46and they are something of a law unto themselves where it feels as though the IDF, the Israeli Defence Forces, are kind of either powerless or don't want to act or are under political pressure not to get involved because Netanyahu is quietly approving of what is happening. I think it's completely right. And we talk a lot about Netanyahu, but the key figure in all of this, according to all the reporting that I've read and people who know his Israeli politics very well, is Smotrich himself, the finance minister. And the thing about Smotrich is this is a guy, he does not disguise what he wants to do.

7:21It's not like he's not pretending that this isn't happening. He's not pretending he doesn't want it to happen. He has been completely explicit. He wants to bury the idea of a Palestinian state, a two-state solution, as you say, John, explicitly via the means of aggressive Israeli settlement in historic Palestinian land. He is, to his credit or discredit, however you want to put it, completely clear about that. He's not being dishonest about it. And this is what feels new, right, about this moment in Israeli, but also global politics. Because we know everything that happens in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Israel just ricochets across global politics.

7:59This is what feels different. Since 1967, successive Israeli governments have allowed settlement. You know, as you say, settlement building isn't new. But there are three things which make this different. We're seeing so many more settlements. We're seeing strategic infrastructure, the Israeli state actively trying to bring it in, building roads, building highways, assisting in terms of settlement and then the administrative integration into Israel itself in defiance of international law. So this is what feels, this isn't just a case of just building a few more settlements in the West Bank, which has happened before, however unpleasant or difficult that will have been.

8:35This is about basically dismantling what could be Palestine piece by piece. And that is what is qualitatively different about this new type of Israeli government. And you see many Palestinian families and indeed Israeli civilians in the IDF caught in the middle of it. Yeah, I think I first went to report in Israel, the late 1980s at the time of the first intifada and stayed at this hotel in Jerusalem, iconic hotel called the American Colony, which was a hospital back in the day. And it's where the journalist tends to say, and it's in Arab East Jerusalem. And when I first went there, Arab East Jerusalem was Arab.

9:17And you go back the last time I went back there, which was probably, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago. No, more recently, when Donald Trump was president was the last time I went. You see it now as an entirely almost Jewish settlement area and the Arabs have been driven away from it. And you can see it. You just chart the changes over the years, the extent to which the Arab population has been marginalised. marginalised. And I think two factors are in play here about why now? Why is this happening now? One is that I think that all the eyes of the world are on the Gaza Strip and the Board of Peace and what is happening there and whether Hamas are going to disarm and whether the Israelis are going to pull out of the land that they've occupied following October the 7th.

10:03So no one's been focusing that much on what's been happening in the Gaza Strip. And the second factor in all of this is the proximity of the Israeli general election and Smotrich needing to shore up support among the most extreme elements of Israeli society. And therefore him saying, go for it, guys. This is your moment. Yeah, indeed. And although, of course, the irony being, as you said, John, all of our focus is on Gaza and Trump's focus is on Gaza. And Trump is largely turning a blind eye to all of this. He's given the Israelis enormous latitude and the Netanyahu government enormous latitude.

10:36He has said that he would not back formal annexation, although what's happening is we'll never get necessarily to the point of formal annexation. It will just potentially happen fragment by fragment, piece by piece. But of course, the irony is as much he might want to focus on that and getting his peace deal over the line. If the West Bank does completely destabilise, then that will itself destabilise his efforts with Hamas in Gaza, because although they are run separately and there are different Palestinian authorities involved, inevitably there are connections between the two. And indeed, we saw a top UN official telling the UN Security Council last night on Tuesday that the West Bank is at breaking point and everything that we're seeing from it, even though it's not getting tons of coverage, indicates that that is on the money.

11:17Well, we're joined now by Noga Tonopolsky, who is a journalist who covers everything that is going on based in Jerusalem, covers everything that's going on over on LBC and keeps an eye for us as well. Naga, thanks so much for joining us. What's the latest on what we're hearing in terms of these clashes now between the IDF and the settlers and obviously Palestinians who live there? Look, I'm first of all reluctant to call them clashes because what we're seeing really is kind of daily concerted attacks against Palestinian residents of the West Bank. And And that's simply what's happening. I'm not one usually to use language that sounds very extreme, but this is government-sponsored violence against a population that lives there and that belongs there.

12:12In recent days, we've seen very specific kinds of attacks. For two days now, for example, a Palestinian family from the Christian town of Khusra has been kept out of their homes while kind of groups of bandits, armed marauding settlers who have received arms from this government and who are in one way or another protected or somehow shielded by, I don't want to say exactly IDF soldiers, though they are de facto IDF soldiers. But we're talking about specific, I would say, companies that have been formed in order to protect illegal outposts in the West Bank. So we're talking about a sort of anarchy in which, though, the Israeli government has been supportive of efforts to basically remove from their lands Palestinian.

13:15This event of the last two days, literally, a Palestinian family was assaulted, was forced out of their home, and a group of armed settlers set up camp basically in their front yard. These kinds of events and worse are happening every single day. Now, today, finally, with a delay of 48 hours and with significant public pressure, the army finally did send, if I'm not mistaken, border police to simply get these people the hell out of the front yard of a family that owns their own property. And then after the army removed these people and left, they came back and started blocking the access road to this home with rocks.

13:58I'm describing a form of anarchy, and that really is what's happening in the West Bank, but with a lot of violent and evil intention from powerful parts of this. You say anarchy, but this has got the support implicitly and sometimes explicitly of the IDF. It's a bit more complicated than that. If we could take a step back, I think I could give a little bit of context. Next, this particular Israeli government, including the prime minister, is extremely radical and extreme. And this is a government that in many ways has declared itself lawless. The Israeli government under Prime Minister Netanyahu has openly said many times now that it will not adhere to Supreme Court rulings, has made illegal appointments.

14:54And what we're seeing unfold in the West Bank is part of a general policy of taking over levers of power. Legally or illegally, it doesn't much matter. The IDF is, I'm not trying to make excuses at all for the IDF. I'm just trying to explain a situation. The IDF is right now, first of all, severely understaffed, and secondly, under a kind of political pressure of sort of bullying by the top political echelons in this country that's very difficult to describe. But to give you an even more accurate description of what's happening to the Israeli army, I want to quote the chief of staff who at this point in public, in writing, has said four times that if the government doesn't change policies, the army, and I quote, will collapse in on itself.

15:55That's the situation right now of the Israeli army. And so what we're seeing are all of these kind of bands, companies, I'm not even sure what to call them. They're called like local security committees. These are not exactly soldiers, but they wear soldiers' uniforms, and they have received arms handed out to them by a combination of the two most messianic, nationalist, and lawless ministers in Netanyahu's government, you know, the infamous Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Benvir, one of whom is Minister of Finance but also has a very important role as a deputy minister of defense, and the other one who is the minister for national security.

16:39They believe that the entire West Bank belongs to Jews. They couldn't care less about the law, and they have made it their business over the past close to four years now, three and a half years, to arm to the teeth these bandits, group of marauding, violent settlers who they represent, and who in the case of Benghira, they explicitly used to belong to. Who are, because obviously the issue of West Bank settlement is a longstanding one and there's been a longstanding flashpoint of international law. And yet over the past 12 months or so, and even over the past few months, it seems that this has become even more intense and even more of a problem.

17:24Who are these people you're describing as bandits, these so-called settlers? Who are they? Who are they exactly? And what are they hoping to achieve? These are the most extremist margins of the Israeli Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Your question is very profound, actually, because, of course, like any crisis that comes to the fore, it does have very deep and wide roots. a succession of Israeli governments over the past, I think, 60 years now have either by benign negligence or through ideology or whatever, through laziness, have simply sort of let this situation in the West Bank fester and grow.

18:10But this Netanyahu government, you're right, is a completely different universe. This is a government whose aim is, and it's stated overtly by many ministers, to kick out all the Palestinians who live in the West Bank and take it over for Jewish settlement. Full stop. It's explicit. And we have to understand, I keep going back to Prime Minister Netanyahu, because while, you know, for much of his decades in public, he has presented himself as a sort of right-wing reasonable source, presentable in international circles. He is behind all of this. Netanyahu, with one word, could fire any of the ministers who are engaged in illegal activity.

18:57And I almost said worse. It's not worse, but as bad, who are fueling these paramilitary groups in the West Bank that are destroying Palestinian life in the West Bank. I want to add also destroying Christian life in the West Bank, but they're also destroying the Israeli army. And I think that that is a point that is very often lost when we're giving kind of breaking news coverage about another disaster in the West Bank. Yeah. So help us with this. I mean, look, there is a general election in Israel later this year in October. Should we look at the proximity of that election and the upsurge in violence in the West Bank as somehow linked?

19:42100%. Absolutely 100%. Among other things, what we're looking at right now is very extremist people who hold immense power in their hands. I'm speaking again about the ministers and the government and who are racing against the clock. The polls all show them losing in the next elections, this Netanyahu coalition. Netanyahu behind the scenes, something that's barely covered in the foreign media, is making every possible effort to take control of the elections, to manipulate them, trying to limit who can vote. There's a whole series behind the scenes there, even efforts by Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud party to postpone the elections.

20:28None of these have flourished. But what we're also seeing is a government that is basically, I mean, I don't know how to put it, but trying to loot and take control of every single thing it can ahead of a possible electoral loss. And there's another aspect to this. Bitzal el-Smotrich, the finance minister, has become very unpopular over the last three years, in part because he's had to straddle different extremist religious populations regarding the draft to the Israeli army. So the people who voted him in are very right-wing religious people who serve in the army, and those who serve alongside him in the government and who have demanded an exemption to the draft for the people they represent, a different ultra-Orthodox population, have forced him to support these efforts.

21:23and somehow he had almost lost everything. He was not passing the basic electoral threshold in any poll until this immense escalation of violence started. And what we're seeing in his case, he's obviously doesn't explain everything, but in his case, we're seeing a minister who realized that if he could prove to those who voted him in that he's taking over the West Bank, that he's racing ahead with a policy basically of depopulating the West Bank, a kind of ethnic cleansing. And if he even smirks and jokes about it in public, that at least some of the extremists would come back to him. And he has succeeded in this.

22:04At least the latest polls that are publicly available show that as this violence has crept up, his popularity has crept up. And now in most of the polls of the last few weeks, he is passing the electoral threshold. Nogha, been so insightful and so interesting, if chilling. Thanks so much for your time.

22:47his government in a really unusual way. Stay with us.

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24:06I don't want to see the early release of any, uh, prisoners. I want them to serve their sentence. but particularly those guilty of the more serious crimes and that includes those involved in the killing of PC Andrew Harper and I feel for Andrew's family. So that's Prime Minister talking to our LBC colleague Henry Riley yesterday about this story which in domestic political terms anyway is dominating the summer or this early to mid part of August anyway which is about the release of PC Andrew Harper's killers, who will be, as current plans stand, they will be incorporated into the early release scheme, which was a Starmer era policy, which Burnham has amended, but not to include people who have committed manslaughter.

24:53And that is the case for two of Andrew Harper's killers. And this would obviously be difficult politics anyway, because there will always be edge cases with any scheme like this. but this one feels especially acutely difficult for the prime minister because he's facing what is basically an unprecedented mass action really or call from police chiefs across the country to block the early release of pc harper's killers as unions are warning his emergency to plan to create more space in jails is going to cause confusion or lead to prisoners being freed by mistake but this particular letter signed by 50 police leaders across the uk including every chief constable everyone in england and wales is calling on andy burnham to do everything in his power to stop the killers benefiting from this program that as i say starma era program designed to free up prison space saying that there was a profound strength of feeling across policing that this should not happen what i find so interesting about this is that if you hear that pc harper's family have lobbied petitioned said this shouldn't happen you understand it If the police federation, the union representing police officers says this shouldn't happen, that is part of, you know, the sort of pressure groups in this country, their democratic right to raise issues.

26:17I've never heard of police constables acting in concert like this as a sort of pressure group on a piece of policy on prisoner release. It's the police chiefs, the chief constables of all these different constabularies are meeting the Home Office, are meeting number 10 on a regular basis. They have got lines of communication where they can make their representations felt and understood and heard. But to act as a pressure group when you are the chief constables responsible for holding law and order really is an extraordinary place to be. It's like civil servants getting a new government and lobbying against the government's policies that they've just been elected on when their job is to enact the policies that the government have stood on a platform for.

27:08And early prisoner release is something that the government, for better or worse, is introducing. I find it strange and unusual that police chiefs are acting in concert, doing a right round. Let's get signatures for this letter. But yeah, I mean, the closest precedent I can think of is involving budgets and so on, you know, budget process and so on, where sometimes they write letters to the chancellor, open letters. I think there was one to Rachel Reeves in the previous budget. Slightly different. I agree. One sort of expects that from almost every part of the public sector. That's not unusual.

27:39It's like the armed forces saying we need more money. You know, everyone says that. I think it's uncomfortable on a few levels. And look, preface it by saying two things. first of all as you say john i i can completely understand why the family of pc harper my word they must be going through hell like they must be going through hell and i was listening to an interview with with one of the relatives yesterday uh you know she was saying that you know they already had it on the back of their mind that you know they were going to get out at some point having to deal with this and the will they won't they you know is he gonna are they going to be subject to it are they not it must bring it all back it must be a nightmare i also obviously preface it with with saying i i do understand um and sympathize enormously you know the police i mean i've reported like you have you know from so many you know riots and and sort of public all the things bloody hell they they are that i actually they don't get the credit they deserve they are incredibly nearly always in my experience they're incredibly professional obviously there are bad apples and all that sort of stuff and there are big institutional problems as well but you know your average officer does you know incredible work and they do run into the face of danger and i can we rightly do as a state as a government when there is a murder of a police officer or crime against a police officer those people the perpetrators are typically treated more harshly because there is a sense of that and the sense that the state itself has been attacked and that is has to be sanctioned appropriately and actually often more harshly um than other occasions however i think this is very politically uncomfortable i think it's very politically uncomfortable for a couple of reasons first of all what the police are basically arguing here is you're creating a hierarchy of victimhood i mean if you're sat out there and and you're you're a relative of someone who was also a victim of manslaughter and you're sat there thinking my dad or my mom or my best friend or whatever their killers are going to be released as part of this scheme but i don't have 50 chief constables to speak out for me i don't have the whole of the institutional force of the police and the whole of the press willing to listen to them to speak out for me.

29:42Why should my pain not be treated as seriously as that? Why should my relatives' killers be released and they not? Notwithstanding what I've said about the bravery of police officers. Also, quite frankly, it feels this is a moment of deep, you know deep politics high politics and it feels uncomfortable for me for the police particularly with the new prime minister to be so actively lobbying in concert in this way however well intentioned they are and i'm sure they are well intentioned but that is the effect and thirdly as well briefly like what i'm sort of sick about with this debate like and the way that it's covered in some places it's as if like andy burnham or keir starmer had loads of great options the tories are not scrutinised nearly as much as they should.