US Press
Israeli ex-generals tell the Times settlers are carrying out ethnic cleansing
Image credit: Turmus Ayya, occupied West Bank — Wikimedia Commons / Amerhaddad, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
Original Reporting
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A growing number of retired Israeli generals, intelligence chiefs and former prime ministers now describe what settlers are doing in the occupied West Bank as ethnic cleansing carried out with their own government's backing, The New York Times reported on 31 August.
The paper's account rests on named men who spent their careers inside the institutions they are now describing.
Brigadier General Ephraim Sneh, a former health minister who once governed the West Bank as head of the civil administration, told the Times: "This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply." Major General Eyal Ben-Reuven, a former commander of Israel's ground forces who led a division in the West Bank, said: "This, what the settlers are doing here, is the real threat to Israel," adding that it concerns him more than Iran, Gaza or Lebanon.
Brigadier General Asaf Agmon compared what he saw to the displacement of Jews in Europe and said that "once a society behaves this way, that society is doomed." Moshe Ya'alon, the former defence minister and chief of staff, described the ideology of the extreme settler right as "Mein Kampf in reverse." Brigadier General Nehemia Dagan put it shortest: "We have lost ourselves, and we have lost this fight."
The letter and the numbers#
The Times reported that more than 200 prominent Israelis signed a letter in June calling on the government to stop harming Palestinian civilians.
Among the signatories were two former prime ministers, more than thirty retired major generals and brigadier generals of the army and air force, former directors of the Mossad and the Shin Bet, rabbis, a Nobel laureate and one of the country's leading novelists.
The letter used both terms — "Jewish terrorism" and "ethnic cleansing" — and went past the familiar charge of lax enforcement to name a deliberate government policy under which the army, the Shin Bet and the police knowingly cooperate with what is happening.
The figures in the report will be familiar to readers here and are worth restating as the Times set them out: settlers have carried out thousands of attacks since October 2023; more than 3,200 Palestinians were driven from their homes in 2024, roughly double the previous year's rate; injuries from settler attacks ran at about one every three days in 2020 and reach three a day in 2026; more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 2023, and 67 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians there since 2023.
Named places#
The reporting moves through places this paper has covered. At Hamamat al-Maleh in the northern Jordan Valley a school was demolished and the community was gone by March. At Qusra, where a siege of three families has run since 9 August, settlers attacked homes over the weekend, among them the home of an American citizen.
A farmer named Bashar Eid, injured in a settler attack, can no longer reach his land.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who long dismissed the violence as the work of a handful of youths, issued a firmer statement after the weekend attacks at Qusra, framing the damage in terms of the settlement movement's reputation and Israel's standing.
The Israeli military told the Times it does not support violent groups, that its mission is to protect all residents, and that soldiers who take part in attacks violate their orders.
Retired Major General Yaakov Or, who runs tours of the West Bank for Israelis, told the paper what he tells the people who come with him: speak out, or be complicit.
