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Olmert: Israel is running a state-funded campaign of settler terrorism in West Bank

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Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. [Photo by BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images]

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has accused the Israeli government of directly organising, funding and protecting Jewish terrorism in the West Bank. Writing in Haaretz yesterday, Olmert — who served as prime minister from 2006 to 2009 — issued what he called “unprecedented and harsh accusations against an Israeli government and the defence establishment.” 

“The fight against Jewish terrorism in the West Bank must advance to the next stage and be waged with greater determination,” said Olmert. “The daily terrorism that is managed, directed, encouraged and supported by the Israeli government can no longer be tolerated.”

Olmert dismissed the Israeli government’s attempts to portray settler violence as the work of isolated individuals. “What is happening across the West Bank today is not the work of ’70 kids from broken homes’,” he wrote, in a direct rebuke of a claim previously made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Nor are these the crimes of a small, anomalous minority among settlement residents, as some leaders of the settler movement often contend.”

According to Olmert, “The State of Israel is conducting an organised, systematic, state-funded campaign of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

READ: Israeli opposition leader warns country’s foreign relations being damaged amid tensions with allies

Olmert named the architects of the Israeli terror campaign directly. “At the forefront of this campaign are the prime minister, Defence Minister Israel Katz and the rest of the cabinet.” He identified ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich as driving forces, describing their pursuit of “full annexation of the West Bank without their Palestinian inhabitants remaining there” as tantamount to a policy of expulsion.

The former prime minister documented the daily texture of this violence: “pogroms, children and adults injured in and outside their homes, fields and property set ablaze, and large-scale theft — especially of cattle and sheep, the primary source of livelihood for many residents.”

Most strikingly, Olmert implicated Israel’s security apparatus as an active participant in terrorism campaign against Palestinians: “The Israel Police are, in practice, partners in what is taking place in the West Bank. They do not attempt to prevent these acts, despite their duty to do so. In many cases, security forces actively assist Jewish terrorists — and, remarkably, it is almost always the Palestinian victims who are arrested, rather than the perpetrators.” 

Olmert added that IDF soldiers, both conscripts and reservists, had been directly involved in violent attacks on Palestinians, reducing the army’s standard denial to “a hollow ritual.”

Olmert also turned his fire on the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service, which he said possessed the tools to confront Jewish terrorism but had chosen not to deploy them, a failure he described as “longstanding” and unacceptable. “There is no convincing explanation for why the Shin Bet is not using the tools at its disposal to confront the rampant Jewish terrorism in the West Bank,” explained Olmert.

READ: Illegal settler violence against Palestinians in occupied West Bank rises by 25% in 2025:

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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