The End of Liberal Zionism

On the collapse of the liberal order, at home and abroad.

The settlers have a lot to celebrate these days. In the span of a single month, an unauthorized outpost overlooking Beit Sahour—on land once zoned for a Palestinian children’s hospital—was transformed from a handful of mobile homes into a state-sanctioned settlement: guarded by soldiers, connected by roads, publicly embraced by senior ministers, and folded into Israel’s newly redrawn map of the West Bank.

The pipeline from violent land seizure to official authorization has never run more smoothly. It’s only a matter of time before groups selling homes there are welcomed into synagogues across the U.S.

Even as the IDF itself reports a steep drop in Palestinian attacks in the West Bank—57 incidents in 2025, down from 258 the year before—it continues to claim a heightened risk of an October 7–style attack from a population it has largely disarmed, and from resistance groups it has systematically decimated. That claimed threat now justifies permanent deployments in Jenin and Tulkarm: new roads carved through refugee camps, buildings leveled, and residents treated as removable obstacles to “security”—all of it paving the way for resettling the north.

Meanwhile, the real growth curve is on the settler side: 867 Jewish attacks in 2025, a 27 percent increase from 2024, including 128 severe incidents—shootings, arson, and serious physical violence—up more than 50 percent year over year.

The settler pioneers, as their allies in government call them, are building new frontiers. A new outpost has popped up near Qusra—the deepest yet inside PA-controlled Area B—and it’s already been used as a base for settler attacks. Israeli forces have responded by tear-gassing the Palestinian village under siege.

To top it off, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir approved gun permits for residents of eighteen West Bank settlements this week, extending a firearms policy that has rapidly militarized civilian settlers.

In light of all this exciting news, the Knesset hosted an actual celebration. On Monday, MK Limor Son Har-Melech held a tribute ceremony for the Hilltop Youth—the loose moniker for the most violent settlers at the front lines of land seizure—billed as a “Great salute to the pioneers of the settlements, the hills and the farms.”

Among those honored was Daniella Weiss, the “godmother” of the settlement movement, who proudly tells anyone who’ll listen that she feels no empathy when Palestinian children are killed, and who closed her eyes when a reporter tried to show her my footage of a settler clubbing a Palestinian grandmother.

“I don’t believe in videos,” she said, which, let’s be honest, is quite funny.

Also in attendance at the Knesset ceremony was Elisha Yered, who was suspected of involvement in the murder of a Palestinian teenager in 2023. I highlighted Yered in my piece Good Settler, Bad Settler, documenting how he functioned as a central ideologue and organizer within the hilltop movement, bridging violent outpost builders with the senior politicians and ministers who protect and empower them.

Here is Yered on X after the ceremony, waxing poetic about how far the settlement movement has come—from state alienation to full embrace, and from the myth of “good” versus “bad” settlers to open unity (emphasis mine):

Just back now from a historic and moving event held today in the Knesset. An official tribute ceremony in the Knesset building to the pioneers of settlement, the hilltop outposts and farms, every minute of which was like a healing balm for the wounds of the past that refused to heal until this day.

Years of persecution, of scorn and contempt, of lack of recognition for the life’s work of those who stubbornly kept the ember alive, carved deep wounds also in the hearts of the toughest among the activists.

And after them came other years of awakening and breaking forward. The contempt was replaced by awe and support, but alongside them grew a disgusting selection by certain elements who tried to divide between the settlement movements, between the pioneers and their comrades, between those worthy of government support and those whose blood is fair game, between those carried on shoulders and those deserving of condemnation and hostile treatment.

And here came MK Limor Son Har-Melech, who from her very first day in office refused to toe the line with those who tried to sow division and discord, to divide and conquer. At the tribute and appreciation conference she launched today for all the pioneering movements, we sat there together. Activists from the hilltops alongside members of the Nahala movement, farm residents alongside veterans of the young settlement. Jews filling different roles in the campaign, but all fighting for the same goal and even joining hands many times.

The Knesset members and ministers who came to express their support and appreciation repeated the same message again and again. You are the ones on the front lines of settlement, pulling the State of Israel forward to its Zionist values that it forgot over the years. Every boy, woman or father sitting here—they are soldiers in every sense. And not just them, also members of the second circle and the supporting environment without whom nothing would have succeeded in happening.

He then goes on to thank many members of the Israeli government who attended the ceremony.

Weiss is speaking into the mic. Yered is two to her left. The others are leaders of various settler factions. And a baby.

As I often say, I truly appreciate the settlers for their candor. They understand the assignment laid out from the earliest days of Zionism, and have no patience for the pretense of “peaceful coexistence.”

Here’s what I wrote in The Baffler about Bezalel Smotrich—the finance minister and de facto governor of the West Bank—who has done more than anyone to pave the way for the current explosion in settlement growth:

Smotrich has always understood the origin of the current propelling him. “I believe that the yearning of generations for this land, and the confidence in our ultimate return thereto, are the most profound driving forces of the progression of the Return to Zion which led to the establishment of the State of Israel,” he wrote in the 2017 plan. On the inconvenient reality of the land’s current inhabitants, he added, “The statement that the Arab yearning for national expression in the Land of Israel cannot be ‘repressed’ is incorrect. It worked fine for the State of Israel, and it needs to work in the same way for Judea and Samaria.”

For Zionism, Smotrich knows, the formula has never changed: the founding myth will drive you forward, force will deliver the promise.

And the end of my article in The Drift about Israel’s archaeological warfare:

Aharon Tavger, another settler archaeologist at Ariel University, contends that the law around the occupied territories has never made much sense. “If we accept the recognition of Israel — the Israeli state,” Tavger said, “because of the historical right, or the connection of the people of Israel to the land, there is no difference between Tel Aviv and Sebastia.” He continued, “And I can say even the opposite: The heartland of Israel, of the ancient Jewish land, is Judea and Samaria — the West Bank — much more than Tel Aviv.” The whole argument against excavating in the West Bank, in his view, raises a thornier question.

“In 1948, Israel also occupied territory,” he said. “So what’s the difference?”

This is not a story about excesses or deviations, but the logical extension of a project that has always depended on ethnic cleansing to sustain itself. The fantasy that liberal Zionism could restrain or civilize it has fully collapsed.

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Over the past several years, Democrats and liberal institutions in the United States have cheered on, amplified, and ultimately helped operationalize what had long been a far-right smear campaign against UNRWA, the largest aid agency for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, effectively equating it with Hamas.

On Tuesday, that campaign reached its logical conclusion, as Israeli bulldozers tore through its headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem, confiscating equipment, expelling guards, and raising an Israeli flag over the ruins. Israeli ministers arrived on site to celebrate. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called it “a historic day.”

Created in 1949, UNRWA exists to serve Palestinians displaced during Israel’s founding and, in doing so, to preserve their status as refugees. That role alone makes it intolerable to a political project committed not just to removing Palestinians from the land, but to erasing the fact that they were ever there. In recent years, UNRWA has functioned as a lifeline in both Gaza and the West Bank—running schools, clinics, food distribution, and basic infrastructure where no substitute exists. In Gaza in particular, dismantling UNRWA has meant dismantling the only system capable of delivering food at scale, directly leading to the starvation crisis last year.

In early 2024, Israeli officials alleged—without publicly verifiable evidence—that twelve UNRWA employees, out of a workforce of roughly 30,000, had participated in the October 7 attacks. A U.S. intelligence assessment later characterized those claims with “low confidence” and could not independently confirm them. Even so, the damage was already done. Major U.S. outlets—most notably The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—treated the accusations as credible breaking news, splashing them across front pages while burying caveats deep in the text. The timing was exquisite: the allegations broke just hours after the International Court of Justice found that Israel was plausibly committing genocide in Gaza.

Dozens of Western governments initially froze funding to UNRWA. Most quietly resumed it once the claims collapsed. The United States did not. Instead, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan spending bill that extended the UNRWA funding ban, backed by Democratic leadership including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.

That complicity continues to this day, including from presidential hopeful Rep. Ro Khanna, who, just last week, voted for a bill that defunded UNRWA while sending security assistance to Israel. Days later, he offered a textbook display of liberal hypocrisy by circulating a strongly worded letter condemning Israel’s actions in the West Bank. (In September, Khanna also signed onto a letter decrying “man-made mass starvation,” apparently without noticing what policies were helping produce it.)

Here’s a remarkable exchange I had with Khanna last week, presented without comment:

The UNRWA precedent is now metastasizing. Israel has moved to shut down Doctors Without Borders clinics in Gaza, demanding staff lists, restricting speech, and barring supplies—explicitly citing the group’s use of words like “genocidal” as grounds for expulsion. Patients interviewed inside these facilities say that without these clinics, they will not survive. Amputees will lose access to physical therapy needed to walk again; burn victims will miss daily wound care that prevents infection and death; surgical wards performing dozens of operations a day will simply disappear. In a territory where Israel has already destroyed most hospitals, there is no backup system waiting to take over.

This is not an attempt to absolve Republicans. I take for granted that they will do what they have always done: inflict harm on brown people, wherever they are in the globe. What demands scrutiny are the “Good Liberals” who launder smears into respectable discourse, cast votes behind closed doors to codify them into law, and then retreat into moral language while the consequences unfold.

To be perfectly clear: countless mainstream Democrats and liberal institutions helped deliver Itamar Ben-Gvir one of his lifelong dreams—the destruction of the largest aid agency for Palestinians. That is whose team they’re on.

Whatever one thinks about Israel’s history, the comforting versions of that story no longer do any explanatory work. What matters is what Israel is today. The Israel that has thrown its full support behind the most violent settlers in the West Bank. The Israel that is dismantling critical aid networks for Palestinians just because it can. The Israel that, on Wednesday, violated the “ceasefire” for the umpteenth time by killing three Palestinian journalists in Gaza while they were documenting life in displacement camps.

In the United States, as we sink deeper into fascism, the way our bipartisan consensus on Israel intersects with this trajectory has become impossible to ignore. Figures like Jonathan Greenblatt, Bari Weiss, and Chuck Schumer have systematically downplayed the rise of literal Nazism on the American right in favor of targeting critics of Israel. (A Justice Department official who resigned in May put it plainly: “There was no interest in antisemitism unless it involved protests of Israel or the war in Gaza.”) Last week, Israel dispatched officials across the U.S. to pressure institutions into banning the term “West Bank” in favor of “Judea and Samaria.”

This is why, as I wrote last year, Trump was so savvy to deploy a crackdown on pro-Palestine activists as the vanguard of his assault on the Constitution, one that was facilitated every step of the way by Democrats. America’s unwavering support for Israel—the “beacon of democracy in the Middle East,” where millions can’t vote or claim basic rights—has long been one of its central contradictions. It was only a matter of time before an authoritarian cashed in.

It should come as no surprise, then, that ICE’s tactics increasingly resemble the IDF’s: executing civilians in broad daylight with impunity, blocking medical care, and issuing bald-faced lies about the circumstances of these killings. This is not to suggest that one is derivative of the other, but that this is what a fascist crackdown looks like, whether it’s carried out at home or abroad.

Today, support for Israel means support for a far-right, antidemocratic movement that is killing and displacing Palestinians and Arabs across the region, while feeding into the erosion of civil liberties here in the United States. And as if we needed further proof of that connection: On Thursday, Haaretz reported that U.S. authorities chartered a private jet owned by an Israeli-American businessman and close friend of Donald Trump to deport eight Palestinians living in the United States to the West Bank. Days earlier, Israel deported an American Jewish activist due to his “leftism,” citing as evidence a photo of him protesting against Nazis in Charlottesville.

The through-line is no longer subtle. A single political logic now runs from hilltop outposts to humanitarian strangulation, from Gaza to the West Bank, and straight into the heart of American institutions—where many of the same Democrats who maintain steadfast support for Israel now caution against the push to abolish ICE. This is the end of the story liberals told themselves: that power could be outsourced without consequence, violence compartmentalized, and moral language made to stand in for material reality. What remains is a single, expanding architecture of force. History will not be confused about who made that possible.

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A few final notes before I sign off:

• In case you missed it, I had what I thought was an excellent conversation with Mouin Rabbani about Israel’s endgame in the West Bank. You can watch it here.

• Columbia Journalism Review interviewed me about how I navigate the line between reporting and activism.

• I’ll be joining an online panel discussion on the West Bank hosted by the Arab Center Washington DC on January 29 at 10 a.m. EST. You can register here.

• And some rare good news: after a sustained global pressure campaign, Israel called off plans to demolish a youth soccer field in Aida Refugee Camp in the West Bank.

See you next time.