Israeli West Bank settler tells BBC attacks on Palestinians are justified as revenge

Israelis in the West Bank are still subject to Israel’s civilian law and enjoy widespread freedom of movement, while Palestinians are subject to Israel’s military occupation and military courts, and are tightly restricted by road closures and checkpoints – a system described by some prominent human rights groups as “apartheid”.

Israel has rejected that label as “absurd and distorted”.

Asked about the Palestinian residents of the West Bank, Shimon laid out three options: live quietly under Israeli rule and ownership of the land; voluntarily emigrate to other Arab or Muslim nations; or “if you don’t want to make peace with us, and you don’t want to get out, I don’t have a choice: I must kill you, and I kill you all,” he said.

This vision from one radical settler seems strikingly close to a plan outlined by Israel’s now-Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, in a blueprint published in 2017, before he joined the government.

In it, he presented a plan for the West Bank in which Palestinians would be told to give up any struggle for a Palestinian state and live quietly under Israeli rule. Those who had “difficulty letting go of national ambitions” could leave the territory, he said at the time, and those who stayed and continued armed struggle against Israel would be killed by Israel’s armed forces.

More recently, while in government, he has pushed for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the re-settlement of Israelis there, and has described Palestinian identity as “an invention”.

One Palestinian living within sight of Havat Gilad told me she watched the outpost from her window constantly, for signs of an imminent settler attack.

Many Palestinians we spoke to said they felt unprotected – that Israel’s occupying army was focused on protecting Israeli settlers, that their own security forces were absent, and that the international community had abandoned them.

“It’s a very bad situation,” one told me. “Europe is busy, America is occupied with Iran, China doesn’t care, Russia is fighting Ukraine, the UN are finished and the Arabs have internal problems. We don’t know what we can do.”

From Havat Gilad, the nearest Palestinian villages are less than a mile away, but the landscape here is divided by Israeli law, Israeli power and mutual hostility.

Additional reporting by Oren Rosenfeld and Rebecca Hartmann