Israel’s Newest Legislator: West Bank Outpost Founder and Former Shin Bet Target
Zvi Sukkot was once suspected of setting fire to a mosque and was banned from the West Bank. Then he moved over to politics
In December of 2009, an incident took place in the West Bank that was considered unexpected, at least in those days. Unknown individuals set a mosque on fire in the Palestinian village of Yasuf and spray painted on its walls the words “price tag / regards from Effi.”
It was one of the first times the term “price tag” had been featured in a hate crime, and the incident generated condemnations and a demand that the police and Shin Bet take action against the extreme right.
One of the suspects arrested in the case, at the time a 20-year-old man, persistently denied involvement and exercised his right to silence in his interrogations. Two weeks later, he was released, and eventually the case against him was shut for lack of evidence.
Over 13 years have passed, and this week, the man who was once suspected of being the leader of the first underground organization to burn down a mosque in the West Bank became a member of Knesset.
The new member of Knesset is Zvi Sukkot, a familiar face among settlers who was number 16 on Religious Zionism’s election slate. For several years he was a target of the Shin Bet, until his attitude toward the State of Israel establishment softened. He shifted to political activity and now regularly works with the authorities. He has issued statements against violence, although he takes care to claim that there is no such thing as ”settler violence.”
Sukkot, 32, was born into an ultra-Orthodox family in the West Bank settlement of Betar Ilit and joined the “hilltop youth” – young extremists who establish isolated outposts and often attack and harass Palestinians – at the time of the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
He transferred to a yeshiva in the settlement of Yitzhar when he was 16. After some time there, he left in order to head the protest against the evacuation of the Amona outpost, alongside Avichay Buaron, who is now the Likud party’s representative in the Judea and Samaria District.
The Shin Bet had its sights on Sukkot even before his arrest on suspicion of torching the mosque in Yasuf, and when he was 18 an administrative order banning him from the West Bank was issued.
In 2011, Sukkot was interrogated on suspicion of involvement in setting fire to the car of the commander of a police station, against the background of the demolition of structures in the Alei Ayin unauthorized outpost. As in the case of the mosque arson, the case was closed.
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Around this time, Sukkot received orders barring him from the West Bank several times. The final one was issued in 2012, following intelligence that he was leading “covert and violent activity against Palestinians.”
According to a former security official familiar with the case, Sukkot continued to be a target of the Shin Bet until 2018. As for his arrests, Sukkot told Haaretz that they were wrongful and that they taught him that “the attitude of the police and the Shin Bet toward the settlers in Judea and Samaria [was] in need of improvement.”
Over the years, Sukkot supplanted his hilltop youth life with politics inside the country’s institutions. “He totally underwent a process of moderation and acknowledgment of state authorities in the past few years,” says a security official who knows him well.
Subsequently, Sukkot worked to raise awareness of torture of Jewish suspects in the arson murder of three members of the Dawabshe family in the Palestinian village of Duma. In the past few years, Sukkot has served as the director of the Otzma Yehudit party, headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir; assistant to Yossi Dagan, the head of the Shomron Regional Council in the West Bank; and the spokesman of Yitzhar, the radical settlement in which he resides.
He eventually left Otzma Yehudit and took part in the primary for the Religious Zionism party before the most recent election. He placed fifth on its election slate. Following Religious Zionism’s decision to run together with Otzma Yehudit and the Noam party, he was bumped down to number 16.
On Sunday, Smotrich announced his resignation from the Knesset under the so-called Norwegian Law, which allows ministers to continue serving in the cabinet without being members of the Knesset and thereby allow their seat to go to someone lower on their party slate, and Sukkot took his place.
Sukkot has refused to offer details on what he intends to focus on in the Knesset. He is not yet familiar with the tools that will be at his disposal, he says, but he cites the values on which he stands: Jews will be able to live wherever they want, and Israel needs to revoke citizenship from both Jews and Arabs who do not believe the country should be a Jewish state.
Asked how he would realize his vision of settlement, Sukkot points to a plan proposed by Smotrich called "the decisive plan," according to which some the West Bank is be annexed and settlements are to be enlarged in order to demoralize the Palestinians and encourage their emigration. The right to vote would not be given to those Palestinians who remained.
Changed ways?
Sukkot’s views have not changed much; now he just works differently. “People grow up,” he tells Haaretz. “Mainly, I realized that the way to fulfill my idealism was through the Knesset, in an organized way. In a democratic society, things are supposed to be determined in the Knesset and in the government.”
Even though Sukkot says he has changed his ways, he has taken part in several illegal activities in the past few years. In 2021, he was among the founders of the Evyatar outpost, built near the Palestinian village of Beita. After that, he was involved in creating an agreement saying that the settlers would leave Evyatar if the Civil Administration and government examined whether a settlement could be established there according to Israeli law, and return if the answer was yes.
The agreement was the object of widespread criticism in radical parts of the right wing, on the charge that it was a capitulation. There is currently a military presence at Evyatar, with entry forbidden to both Palestinians and Israelis. However, the coalition agreement between Likud and Religious Zionism states that the authorities will move ahead with the Evyatar agreement.
In April 2021, Sukkot was filmed assaulting the head of the local council of the Palestinian village of Sebastia, shoving and kicking him, as they were surrounded by soldiers. According to Sukkot, he had been driving through the Palestinian village in his car in order to get to the archaeological site inside of it and Palestinians threw stones at his car.
He says that he began to chase the stone throwers and the head of the council arrived and blocked his path. “As far as I recall, he attacked me and shoved me,” he says, adding that not all of the incident was filmed.
In February 2022, Sukkot was part of a group that erected several temporary structures in the Negev Desert and declared the establishment of an outpost named Ma’aleh Paula, which was dismantled only a few hours later.
Sukkot was held for interrogation on suspicion of illegal construction and trespassing, and released shortly afterwards. His weapon was confiscated for about a month, until the court in Be’er Sheva instructed the police to return it.
In an interview with the Arutz Sheva website, Sukkot said that on the day before the outpost was established, some police officials tried to make contact with him and he refused to cooperate with them. He also described what preceded the event: “We told everyone by phone to arrive not far from Nevatim, and about 20 police cars were waiting there, all around Nevatim. As a matter of fact, we went to the Rahat area, but we sent our guys to Nevatim, where the police jumped on them and detained them. While they were detaining them at Nevatim, we built everything in the Rahat area.”
In May, a video was posted online in which Sukkot was seen taking down a Palestinian flag on the main road in the West Bank village of Hawara. Other settlers, as well as soldiers, were filmed removing Palestinian flags hanging in Hawara and other Palestinian villages following the video.
This led to increased friction in the area and an increase in the frequency of stones being thrown at settlers’ cars. The military then seized five buildings in Hawara – with soldiers hanging Israeli flags from one of them – and blocked many roads in the village.
Until July, Sukkot was editor of the weekly Shabbat leaflet Gilui Da’at, which is identified with the far right. Furthermore, in the past few months Sukkut has organized trips by settlers to natural springs and streams that Palestinians are accustomed to visiting in Area C, the part of the West Bank under full Israeli military and administrative control.
Visits to these sites are permitted for both Palestinians and Israelis. The visits he organized were coordinated with the military, which sent soldiers to guard the settlers. Following one of these visits, Sukkot tweeted that the settlers were enacting “the redemption of Nahal Yitav” – the Hebrew name for Wadi Auja – and that “the military is demonstrating governance.”
‘Major damage to the ideological right’
The transition from hilltop youth to working inside state institutions has made Sukkot an outcast among some in the extreme right, who now believe he’s working against them. He was dismissed as the spokesman of Yitzhar last February after having condemned violence against security forces on several occasions. Some in the settlement claim that was not the reason for his dismissal, however.
Prior to his dismissal, after having spoken to the media and criticizing an assault on a Border Police unit that was dismantling a structure in an outpost, several dozen residents of the settlement signed a petition in which they said that they “totally renounce[d]” his statements in regard to the hilltop youth.
The petition claimed that the condemnation paved the way for violence against settlers and displayed “severe confusion about the relationship between friend and enemy.” Another letter condemning him was issued after Sukkot hosted then-lawmaker Yair Golan of Meretz as his home for a segment on Channel 13.
Ahead of his campaign in the Religious Zionism primary, Sukkot spoke in an interview about his activity in the hilltop youth, telling Gilui Da’at last August that “we were a gang of kids who didn’t care what people would say, and we would do what needed to be done, including going to jail.”
In the same interview, he said, “over the years you grow up and you ask, ‘who said that what you are doing is the most correct and effective thing?’ You don’t go in a single day from being a hilltop youth to someone who advises the head of the local council and who meets with defense establishment officials.” If the government makes a decision that his community disagrees with, “we will fight as much as possible, but we won’t blow everything up,” he said.
Sukkot told his interviewer that when he came out against violence committed by extremists against soldiers, “it bothered some of the people who were my good friends in the past.” It wasn’t hard to find criticism of him in recent months. Meir Ettinger, considered one of the most influential figures among the hilltop youth, tweeted in August: “In my humble opinion, Zvi Sukkot will turn out to do major damage to the ideological right.”
Elisha Yered, a resident of the unauthorized outpost of Ramat Migron who also wrote in the pamphlet formerly edited by Sukkot, tweeted about him: “It’s very logical that we would not want to see in the Knesset someone who, when he was in a minor public position of spokesman of a settlement, waged a war of destruction against the hilltop activists, supported and encouraged the police persecution of them, and tried to thwart any attempt of a public struggle and raising awareness of the persecution.”
Yered now serves as spokesman for Otzma Yehudit lawmaker Limor Son Har Hamelech. A resident of the Kumi Ori outpost, Ariel Danino, accused Sukkot on Twitter of “succeeding in giving us the label of people who want to murder soldiers.”
“It bothered them that I, as spokesman of Yitzhar, came out against violence,” Sukkot told Gilui Da’at in August. “ I say what I believe: violence is unacceptable and violence against soldiers and the security forces is an act that shouldn’t happen.”
As for the Otzma Yehudit caucus, which he left, Sukkot said, “I did not feel at home there. … On the personal level, a more pragmatic place was right for me.”
Sukkot may have been trying to show pragmatism a few weeks ago when he came to two demonstrations in Tel Aviv against the government, seeking to talk with protesters. “In the face of incitement and scare tactics on a large scale, we came simply to speak about everything,” he wrote on Twitter. “We have only one people.”