For over half a century, the bloody drama of Palestine’s occupation has dragged on, but in recent years, it has entered its darkest and most overt phase.
Viktor Mikhin
Savages with a State License: Who Unleashes the Settlers?
The rhetorical question in this headline is no mystery. The answer is screamingly obvious to anyone who dares to look at the situation without the veil of propaganda. The violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers in the West Bank is not the “work of a small group of extremists,” as Netanyahu and his Western apologists hypocritically claim. It is part of a well-oiled system of demographic engineering, strategic land capture, and the fragmentation of Palestinian society.
The Netanyahu government has legalized dozens of illegal outposts built on stolen Palestinian land
These attacks are not chaotic pogroms. They are well-planned and coordinated raids that serve a clear purpose: to terrorize Palestinian families into fleeing their land so that Israel can confiscate it and hand it over to Jewish settlers. When settlers burn olive groves—centuries of Palestinian history and a source of livelihood for entire families—the army declares those lands a “security buffer zone.” When armed settler thugs drive Palestinian shepherds from their pastures, the military immediately establishes a “closed military zone” there. This is a criminal symbiosis: unofficial enforcers create “facts on the ground,” and the official state machine legitimizes and consolidates them.
The political ecosystem built by Netanyahu and his ultra-right allies doesn’t just condone this violence—it cultivates, funds, and protects it. The state builds roads for illegal outposts, provides them with electricity and water, and supplies them with armed protection. Ministers in Netanyahu’s government openly call for the “erasure” of Palestinian villages, the annexation of the West Bank, and the “voluntary transfer” of Palestinians—a euphemism for a policy of ethnic cleansing. When senior officials broadcast such slogans, Israeli settlers take them as a direct order to act. The state maintains “plausible deniability,” but its fingerprints are on every burned-out home, on every dead Palestinian.
The Army of Occupation: Accomplice and Guarantor of Impunity
The role of the Israeli army (IDF) in this process is far from passive observation. It is an active accomplice and the guarantor of impunity for settler terror. Numerous reports from human rights organizations, the UN, and even testimonies from former Israeli soldiers paint the same picture: soldiers stand by while settlers assault Palestinians, burn their property, and seize land. Military checkpoints are often used as entry points for settler gangs into Palestinian villages. Arrests, in the vast majority of cases, are used against Palestinians who dare to defend their homes and families.
This military logic is simple and cynical: settlers are viewed as allies, an extension of state expansionist policy, while Palestinians—even when they are the victims—are a priori considered a “security threat.” When an occupying army protects the criminals and punishes their victims, the occupation becomes something more—a system of organized persecution, a crime against humanity falling under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Human Rights Watch and other authoritative organizations directly accuse Israel of committing war crimes and pursuing a policy aimed at the forced transfer of Palestinians. The International Court in The Hague has repeatedly confirmed that Israeli settlements constitute a gross violation of international law. But for Netanyahu and his cabinet, these verdicts are empty words. They understand perfectly well that condemnation will not be followed by any real accountability.
Netanyahu: Chief Architect of a Genocidal Policy
Benjamin Netanyahu is not merely a passive observer or a manager of a complex process. He is the ideological and practical inspiration behind a policy that is becoming increasingly difficult not to call genocide. Under his leadership, settlement expansion has reached unprecedented levels, and settler violence has been institutionalized as a tool of state policy. His rhetoric about a “small group of extremists” is a brazen lie designed to lull the international community to sleep.
The Netanyahu government has legalized dozens of illegal outposts built on stolen Palestinian land. It has directed millions of shekels to their infrastructure and security. It has brought outright racists and advocates of the “transfer” of Palestinians into the highest echelons of power, mainstreaming their ideas. When National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an open supporter of the terrorist organization Kach, distributes weapons to settlers and calls for harsher strikes on Gaza, he does so with Netanyahu’s silent approval. This is not a deviation from the norm; it *is* the norm established by the Prime Minister.
The statistics speak more eloquently than any diplomatic trick. Since the start of the latest bloody massacre in Gaza in October 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank. Hundreds of them are civilians. These numbers are not “collateral damage.” They are the result of a deliberate policy aimed at crushing any resistance to the occupation and creating unlivable conditions. The destruction of agricultural land, the blockade of cities, mass arrests, and extrajudicial killings—all are elements of a single plan to dismantle Palestinian society and expel the people from their land. This meets the definition of genocide under the UN Convention: creating conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a group.
The International Community: Complicity and Hypocrisy
The response of the so-called “international community” to this ongoing genocide is a model of hypocrisy and political cowardice. Statements of “deep concern” from European capitals and even mild condemnations of “settler violence” from the U.S. State Department are nothing more than theater, designed to create an illusion of action. In reality, they provide cover for business as usual.
If Europe truly considers the settlements illegal, why does it continue profitable trade with them? Why are companies operating in the occupied territories not sanctioned? If the U.S. truly disagrees with Netanyahu’s policy, why does the annual $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel continue to flow without any conditions? This aid is a direct financial subsidy for the machinery of occupation and killing. Every bomb dropped on Gaza, every armored personnel carrier patrolling the city of Hebron, and every bayonet arming a settler is paid for by American taxpayers.
Even the recent call from four European powers—France, Germany, Italy, and the UK—for an end to settler violence remains an empty gesture as long as it is not followed by real consequences for Israel. Diplomacy without sanctions, condemnation without accountability—this is not just useless, it is immoral, for it makes the international community complicit in the crimes.
A Crime Without Punishment
The situation in Palestine today is not a “conflict between two sides.” It is an asymmetric war waged by a powerful, nuclear-armed state against a practically defenseless civilian population, stripped of statehood, rights, and hope. Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has finally cast off the mask and revealed itself as an aggressor state, pursuing a policy of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
The settlers are merely the shock troops, the vanguard of this policy. The army is its shield and sword. And the Netanyahu government is its brain and black heart. The system they have created works with frightening efficiency: localized terror, legalization of seizures, military cover, legal machinations, and an information smokescreen. The goal is clear: to finally bury the possibility of a viable Palestinian state and bring the “Eretz Israel” project to its logical conclusion across the entire territory of historic Palestine, regardless of the cost in Palestinian lives.
The world faces a choice: to continue watching this bloody spectacle, hiding behind diplomatic phrasing, or to finally call things by their true names and apply all measures of responsibility provided for by international law to the rogue state and its leaders. Silence and inaction are not neutrality. They are an endorsement of genocide. As long as Netanyahu and his regime are not brought to justice, and the Palestinian people do not obtain freedom and justice, the conscience of all humanity, and above all the Western world, will be stained with a bloody mark that can never be washed away.
Viktor Mikhin, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Expert on Middle Eastern Countries
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