I generally align with Israel in its conflicts against groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. While I don’t wholeheartedly admire the current Israeli government or the Zionist creed, Israel tends to uphold liberal democratic values far more than its adversaries, and a victory by those adversaries would be a disastrous outcome. Consequently, I have even argued that hostage exchanges with groups like Hamas are misguided, since they promote further terrorism.
Yet it is crucial to recognize that not every Israeli action is just, and that Palestinian Arabs also deserve basic human rights. This is one of those moments where those points must be underscored. In recent years, settlers on the West Bank have repeatedly attacked Palestinians living there, aiming to push them off their land. These actions are profoundly unjust, amounting to ethnic cleansing and serious violations of private property rights. They also reveal the broader danger posed by ethno-nationalist claims to exclusive control over territory.
The Times of Israel (a center-right Israeli publication) offers a useful overview of the latest settler violence:
Mahmoud Tubasi has not lived in his home in the village of Jalud, south of Nablus, since late July, after he fled during weeks of settler violence…
Tubasi built the house roughly seven years ago on land owned by his family on the village’s outskirts. The property sits in Area B, where, under the Oslo Accords, Israel retains security control while the Palestinian Authority handles civilian matters….
For nearly seven years, he and his family, including his two children and grandchildren, lived there peacefully, he said. But in April, about four months ago, settlers began targeting the home, first setting it on fire and then laying siege to Tubasi and his family.
On July 22, after his pleas for help went unanswered, the family fled. Observing from afar, Tubasi has since seen settlers moving around his home….
In recent years, settler extremists in the West Bank have intensified campaigns of harassment and violence aimed at driving Palestinians from their homes, sometimes displacing entire communities….
Over the three years from January 2023 through April 2026, some 5,900 people in the West Bank were displaced from their homes due to settler violence, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in early July.
The figure includes mostly Bedouins (and some Palestinian farmers) living in what the UN defines as “communities.” According to the UN, 45 such communities were completely displaced and another 72 were partially displaced.
In some cases, settlers subsequently established illegal outposts on land where the displaced communities had lived.
The UN is far from a neutral observer when it comes to Israel. But even if the actual number of people expelled from their homes is only a fraction of the UN’s estimate, it remains extraordinarily troubling.
I rarely agree with Mike Huckabee, a staunch social conservative and the Trump Administration’s ambassador to Israel. Yet he is correct to label these violent settlers as “terrorists” and to demand that the Israeli government halt their activities. As conservative (and generally pro-Israel) New York Times columnist Bet Stephens notes, the right-wing coalition government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has largely turned a blind eye to these actions because his rule depends on the support of far-right parties backing the violent settlers.
The settlers’ actions are reprehensible for several reasons. Most obviously, they attempt to expel Palestinian Arabs from their land solely on the basis of ethnicity. Such ethnic cleansing is unjust. Moreover, the seizure of homes, farms, and other property is a blatant violation of private property rights. Private property is an essential human right in itself and a fundamental component of liberty and autonomy more broadly. Palestinians are equally entitled to these rights.
The settlers argue that their actions are justified because Jews are the rightful, exclusive owners and sovereigns of the area and therefore have the right to exclude and expel members of other groups. This kind of ethno-nationalist claim to exclusive territorial rights is not unique to Israeli settlers. Various nationalist movements make similar assertions—including, of course, many Arab and Palestinian nationalists.
But the ubiquity of such claims cannot validate them. In my book Free to Move, and in other writings, I have argued that racial and ethnic claims to exclusive territorial rights are inherently unjust for reasons similar to why racial and ethnic discrimination is unjust in other contexts: race and ethnicity are morally arbitrary traits that should not determine what rights people possess, including where they are allowed to live and work.
Additionally, historical claims that one group has a right to exclusive rule over a given territory falter when we remember that nearly every inhabited area has hosted multiple ethnic and racial communities over time. Thus, no one can claim that history alone makes them the exclusive owners. This is plainly true of Israel and the West Bank: Jews have lived there for millennia, but so have Arabs and other groups.
Most people are not willing to go as far as I do in rejecting ethnic territorial claims. Yet even those who accept such historical arguments to some extent should acknowledge that it is unjust to ethnically cleanse people who have lived there for decades or centuries. Their historical claim to living there is as legitimate as anyone else’s.
I readily acknowledge that my arguments imply Jews should not be barred from living in the West Bank, as many Palestinian nationalists would prefer. They should indeed be allowed to reside there if they choose, but they should not have the right to seize Palestinians’ land and other private property by force.
One might defend the violent settlers by arguing that their actions are not as grave as those of Palestinian terrorists, notably Hamas. It is true that, at least to date, the Israeli settlers have not murdered, raped, or tortured civilians on a scale comparable to Hamas, particularly during the horrific October 7 attack.
But that fact alone does not justify the settlers’ violence, which largely targets innocent civilians who happen to be Arabs living on land the settlers want to seize. “Not as bad as Hamas” cannot be the standard by which this is judged. You can be less bad than Hamas and still be a terrorist criminal.
In 2020, the Israeli Supreme Court struck down a government policy aimed at expropriating Palestinian property for transfer to Israeli Jews (drawing on some of my own writings on takings and property rights, which is relevant here as well). Some of what I wrote then remains applicable to the current situation:
Jews, including my own ancestors, have long suffered from unjust property expropriations at the hands of both European and Arab Muslim governments (as well as far harsher persecutions). Israel should not engage in similar injustices against others. The fact that this case was not on the same scale as the expropriations endured by Jews is notable, but it’s no excuse.
At the same time, it is worth noting that Israel has an independent judiciary that checks some of its government’s unjust policies, as it did in this case. The same cannot be said for most of Israel’s adversaries.
Regrettably, the present Israeli government has not demonstrated the same commitment to liberal values as the Israeli Supreme Court did in 2020. Indeed, among its missteps, that government has sought to undermine judicial review, partly to advance a “tyranny of the majority.” Israel must improve, and the United States and other Western states should apply pressure toward that end, all while keeping in view that there remains a significant moral gap between Israelis and their adversaries.
