Israel election pressure fuels settlement push as West Bank violence surges

Last week, the United Nations warned that attacks by Israeli settlers – often carried out alongside Israeli forces – and the creation of illegal settlements and outposts had hit “an all-time high”. The uptick comes as members of Israel’s hard right seek to ratchet up the political temperature ahead of the crucial polls. It also follows a parliamentary term during which Israel moved to entrench control over the West Bank deeper within the machinery of the state, shifting authority from military administration to civilian institutions, accelerating settlement planning and expanding infrastructure. However, the Religious Zionist Party of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – the man widely credited as pushing the settler project to the forefront of Israeli political debate – is suggested by numerous opinion polls to be far from certain to even meet the electoral threshold for the post-election Knesset. This has prompted what analysts describe as a desperate scramble to promote the settlement mission while consolidating the support of the settler minority that Smotrich grew up within. Speaking at a meeting of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party in late July, Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz boasted that, under the governing coalition and Smotrich’s supervision, Israel had approved the establishment of 104 illegal settlements and some 160 settlement farms in the West Bank since coming to power in 2022, according to Israeli media. In August of last year, Smotrich announced the creation of the E1 settlement project, linking occupied East Jerusalem with the existing settlement of Maale Adumim, located several kilometres to the east – a proposal which, Smotrich bragged, “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”.