As the Hard Right Fears Historic Defeat, Armed Settler Convoys in Tel Aviv Carry a Message - Israel Security
Early last week, a convoy of around 100 white trucks and SUVs driven by heavily armed men converged around defense headquarters in central Tel Aviv and blocked the streets.
The caravan – led by the heads of settlements' security squads – had set out from the West Bank. The menace telegraphed by the lines of white Toyota Hiluxes with covered truck beds at the entrance to Tel Aviv's main highway was almost surely intentional, as much as the jarring resemblance to Hamas' vehicles on October 7 was almost certainly unconscious.
Officially, the procession was a protest against the Shin Bet security service's detention of security-squad members from a northern West Bank settlement on suspicion of their participation in violent attacks on Palestinians near the village of Aqraba. The protesters' grievance was that this time they had been denied the impunity they were long accustomed to – that they were being treated "like terrorists," as one settler put it.
On paper, the settlement security-squad leaders are civilians who, with army approval and coordination, oversee the security of settlements and mobilize volunteers in the event of an attack, until military backup arrives. In practice, however, some settlement security squads have become part of the quasi-autonomous network of settler vigilante violence, supporting and sometimes participating in attacks on Palestinian civilians.
The protest, then, was not just against the Shin Bet's detention of security-squad members. It was also a gesture of resistance against any attempt by the Israeli authorities – to which these squads owe their mandate – to bring their actions under even the slightest modicum of control.
Above all, the armed convoy sent a message. It was a warning by the "State of Judea" – by the increasingly radical and unrestrained settler movement – to the heart of the defense establishment: The settlers are not afraid to oppose efforts to hold them accountable for their violence, including, if necessary, by extraordinary means.
One of the ominous signs of the times is that, as in the mid-'90s, a desperate and radicalized settler movement is brandishing its arms within Israel.
The settlers' display of force in Tel Aviv comes against the backdrop of spiraling violence in the West Bank and near daily attacks on Palestinian civilians and villages, as well as on Israeli and foreign activists. Last week, masked radical "hilltop youth" attacked a delegation of European diplomats in the West Bank; the day before, settlers attacked and injured Heidi Levine, a photojournalist working for The Washington Post.
As international pressure on Israel to clamp down on such violence has mounted, so, too, has the settler right's resistance to even a semblance of accountability. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has begun to flail in his bid to stay in power, recently cast doubt on the attack on the European diplomats. In doing so, he boosted the settler right's efforts to claim that widespread settler violence is a myth.
Now, less than a week before the general election, Israeli defense officials have warned of a potential blitz of settler violence in the West Bank – beyond the already unprecedented violence – especially if Netanyahu's right-wing, religious coalition loses.
The hard-line settler right appears to fear that it is at risk of a historic defeat, that parts of its project of large-scale outpost construction and confiscation of private Palestinian land might be undone. Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism party, is campaigning on the line that a government led by the anti-Netanyahu opposition will revive the Oslo Accords of the first half of the 1990s. There is no reason to think that, for Smotrich and his supporters, this _expression_ of fear is insincere.
At the same time, the security-squad convoy also illustrates the immense challenge of reining in the armed settler militias that operate with the tacit, and sometimes explicit, backing of Israeli forces on the ground.
That challenge will not go away even if there is a change in Israel's leadership. If anything, the settler right seems to be betting that acts of intimidation can deter a new government from setting policy in the West Bank.
For more than three decades, the radical right has threatened violence to defend its goal of occupying Greater Israel. At times it has made good on that threat, as in the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. One of the ominous signs of the times is that, as in the mid-'90s, a desperate and radicalized settler movement is brandishing its arms within Israel.
The settler convoy received little attention in a mainstream Israeli media distracted by the pseudo-events and sound bites of horse-race journalism. That, too, is a cause for worry. Where the radical settler right senses disinterest, ignorance or fecklessness on the part of the establishment, it also senses opportunity.
On social media, a call is circulating for another right-wing convoy; one is slated to drive Sunday night from south Tel Aviv to the center of town again, near defense headquarters. The question is what might be planned for Election Day – and, no less important, immediately after.