Netanyahu Fed the Extremists—Now They’re Coming for Him

Right, so first hey came for the Palestinians and have been doing so for decades with the backing of the army, but now they’ve come for the army itself. Israel’s settler project has long been the spoiled child of Zionism—pampered, protected, and praised, even as it torched homes, stole land, chopped down olive groves, blocked aid trucks and spilled blood. But spoiled children grow unruly when they go without discipline, when they’re told they are the chosen ones and demand they be treated differently. And now, in scenes so absurd they would be comical if they weren’t soaked in violence, Israel finds itself under attack by the very settlers it nurtured, that it gave everything to. Armed with biblical zeal and state-sanctioned arrogance, they’ve turned their fury inward—storming military bases, assaulting soldiers, and declaring war in effect on the hand that fed them. It’s not just poetic irony that settlers have now turned on the IDF; it’s the collapse of a supremacist dream under the weight of its own contradictions. Zionism is a Frankenstein’s Monster of a doctrine, cobbled together as the state of Israel as it was by external colonialist powers, that has acted like a monster for too long and now that monstrous nature is turning on its maker.
Right, so for decades, the Israeli state has cultivated, protected, armed, and lionised generation after generation of settlers, please come to Israel have this land, never mind who owned it first they’re Palestinian, they don’t matter kind of thing. These settlers, whose messianic zealotry has driven them to seize land, torch homes, and terrorise Palestinians with near-total impunity, the unrestrained nature of what these people believe in as their right, suddenly being told no however, has sent Israel into a tailspin. In a rather telling turn of events, the monster it created has turned on its maker. In the West Bank, the very settlers that successive Israeli governments have enabled are now launching open attacks not only on Palestinians but on the IDF now too. The violent insurrectionist behaviour seen in recent days is more than just rogue behaviour from a spoilt brat of a population though—it is the logical, grotesque conclusion of decades of Zionism's colonial supremacist project.
Over the past several days, Israeli settlers, most notably from the radical "Hilltop Youth" movement, have conducted an unprecedented series of attacks on Israeli soldiers and security installations. The tipping point appears to be the IDF's hesitant effort to restrain settler violence against Palestinians, its not like the IDF have put a lot of effort into it, but was enough to spark outrage among the settlers who view any accountability as betrayal. How dare you say no to us!
On Sunday night, dozens of settlers stormed a closed IDF security base north of Ramallah, the Central Command Brigade headquarters in Beit El. They set fire to military vehicles, vandalised equipment, and attacked soldiers with pepper spray. One battalion commander was assaulted and labelled a "traitor." Earlier in the week, settlers ambushed IDF reservists near the village of Kafr Malik, hurling projectiles and launching physical assaults. Graffiti reading "revenge" was scrawled onto IDF property, echoing the hate-fuelled vandalism usually directed at Palestinians.
These incidents followed an attack on Kafr Malik itself, where there are mixed reports around settlers killing at least three Palestinians – some reports say that the Palestinians were killed after the IDF intervened – but certainly the settlers are accused of torching homes, and engaging in violence that drew IDF involvement.
That alone was too much for the settlers it seems.
The scale of the backlash was unprecedented. As Euronews reported, dozens of settlers rampaged around a multi-million-dollar IDF security base, setting fires and destroying sensitive infrastructure. The brazenness of this action—against the very military that usually shields it and has shielded their colonisation efforts for decades—came as a shock to the Israeli system.
The Hilltop Youth, the spearhead of this violence, are an extremist, anti-state, ultra-nationalist faction of young settlers who believe they are fulfilling a divine commandment to claim all of "Eretz Yisrael," or The Land of Israel. Their ideology draws from Kahanism, an appalling right wing ideology that was espoused by the Kach Party and was so vile that Israel actually banned that Party more than 20 years ago and other strands of supremacist and religious Zionism in line with the beliefs of the likes of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, and as such the Hilltop Youth often regard even the Israeli government as insufficiently committed to Jewish domination of the land as they are and with the IDF acting for them, these extremist settlers view them with just as much disdain.
They are part of a broader settler movement which includes groups like the "Price Tag" militias, known for retaliatory violence against Palestinians and now, apparently, against Israeli soldiers as well. They reject the authority of the Israeli state when it interferes with their land seizure agenda. That these groups are now coordinating large-scale attacks against military infrastructure demonstrates a new level of organisation and ideological fervour, that the Israeli state has allowed to foment by giving them everything they’ve wanted for so long, that now they just want more and saying no to them now has elicited this spoilt brat reaction.
The attackers are often raised in ideological settlements, indoctrinated to view Palestinians as subhuman and the state as merely a tool to advance biblical prophecy. They do not respect the IDF as a state institution; they only respect it when it serves their ethno-religious goals. When the military deviates from that purpose, they respond with force as we’ve seen here.
This turn of events is not a bug in the Zionist system; it's a feature. For decades, the Israeli government has incentivised settler expansion with tax breaks, military protection, and legal immunity. Settlers have operated above the law, raiding Palestinian towns, torching olive groves, and murdering civilians while politicians from Likud and Religious Zionism parties looked away—or worse, cheered them on.
Now, as the IDF attempts minimal and symbolic interventions to curb international embarrassment, the settlers see betrayal and have acted as they see fit. Benjamin Netanyahu, who long courted the settler vote and depended on their political support, called the latest attacks "anarchic violence no civilised society can accept." Which is a stunning hypocrisy from a man who oversaw a government that legalised outposts and new settlements in the West Bank, emboldened extremists there, and there is the other matter of literally presiding over a 21 month long genocide in Gaza. Civilised societies aren’t led by men with arrest warrants out for them.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right National Security Minister and a settler ideologue himself, went further – unusually for him - labelling the attacks a "red line." The same Ben-Gvir, who has incited settler violence for years, has a criminal record himself for racist incitement and supporting terrorist groups, now calls for harsh punishments when that violence is turned on the IDF. When Palestinians are killed, he cheers. When soldiers are pepper-sprayed, he condemns. You can’t have it both ways, only apartheid states think this sort of thing is acceptable.
The Israeli government, particularly Defence Minister Israel Katz, is panicking. Katz announced an "urgent meeting" with security officials to address the settler violence against soldiers. This emergency session was convened just hours after settlers torched that IDF base—a symbol of how rapidly authority is eroding. Yet this reaction is a tacit admission of a deeper truth: the state is losing control over its own colonial machinery, because it has never tried to rein it in. The settlers have outgrown the leash, the stroppy children are pushing the boundaries now, Lord knows every parent knows that feeling.
Civil society figures, including opposition leader Yair Lapid, have called the perpetrators "Jewish terrorists." The label is an apt one. These settlers are no longer vigilantes operating under the state's blind eye; they are now domestic insurgents openly challenging the state’s monopoly on violence. For a nation that justifies everything it does in the name of "security," the contradiction is pretty blatant and very difficult to swallow for observers of the two faced regime.
The current spike in settler attacks against the IDF is undoubtedly triggered by the army's reluctant involvement in responding to settler violence against Palestinians and then suddenly appearing to do so. According to Middle East Eye and PBS News, the IDF was dispatched to Palestinian towns like Kafr Malik following settler rampages that killed multiple civilians. For the settlers, even a token IDF presence meant interference in their divine mission.
This underscores the moral implosion at the heart of Israel's West Bank strategy. The state created an environment where settlers could brutalise with impunity. It is now attempting to rein in its own creation, not out of principle, but because the optics are becoming impossible to defend internationally. The settlers see this for what it is: a betrayal of the original Zionist pact that empowered them.
This also highlights a fatal contradiction: the IDF, charged with "defending the Jewish people," must now decide whether that includes defending its own soldiers from Jewish terrorists. Every crackdown will alienate the settlers further; every hesitation invites more chaos.
Reactions within Israeli society are fractured. The far right sees this as a temporary lapse in judgment by their ideological kin. The centre and left condemn the attacks but continue to support the broader apartheid regime that made them possible. Israeli media coverage ranges from alarm to handwringing.
Importantly, there is little public appetite for a full crackdown. Many Israelis, conditioned to see settlers as patriots and Palestinians as enemies, view these incidents as unfortunate but understandable. This apathy or complicity ensures that any government action will be half-hearted and temporary because it is always going to lose them support.
Meanwhile, centrist commentators fear that a settler civil war could fatally damage Israel's already tattered international image and so could the bloated Western project of white supremacy in the Middle East end up being brought down from within by the very worst of those very supremacists?
Where do Palestinians fit in all this? Nowhere safe. If anything, this infighting portends even greater danger for them. Settlers, enraged by the IDF's interference, are likely to double down on their attacks against Palestinian communities. The IDF, eager to reassert authority, may escalate operations in both directions. Palestinian civil society sees this for what it is: not a reckoning, but just a rearrangement of the violence they’ve always had to endure.
Human rights groups have noted a disturbing trend as well: as settlers and soldiers clash, both parties are increasing aggression toward Palestinians in an attempt to reassert dominance. The occupied population, as always, becomes the collateral victim of Israeli power struggles.
This moment could be used to reframe international narratives about who the aggressors are. When settlers attack the military of their own state, it becomes harder to pretend they are simply "defending themselves." Yet the global silence remains deafening. They could censure or sanction these settler groups, but any agreement in Israel, would lose support amongst even the general populace.
This unprecedented backlash against the IDF by Israeli settlers reveals the collapsing internal logic of Zionist expansionism. It shows that the occupation is not just morally indefensible but functionally unsustainable. If the IDF cannot control its own settlers, who can? If Israel cannot police the supremacist ideologies it nurtured, what future awaits it?
This opens a window for critics to challenge Israel's occupation narrative. The very pillars of Israeli propaganda—security, order, civilization—are crumbling in real time now in the West Bank. A state that cannot prevent its own citizens from burning down military bases cannot credibly claim the moral high ground.
Israel’s Western allies must ask themselves: is this the partner they wish to defend on the world stage? A nation where religious extremists assault the military and torch state property while the government dithers? Well it always has been that, but now its becoming politically damaging for them too.
Are we therefore witnessing the early stages of a settler-state civil war? Possibly, I would suggest its early days, but Israel’s vulnerability to it cannot be denied. The signs are there: ideological divergence, violent confrontation, loss of centralised control. Religious-nationalist Zionism may eventually devour the secular state that enabled it. The Hilltop Youth and their ilk aren't just a problem for Palestinians; they are a ticking time bomb for Israel itself.
The attacks on the IDF are not just a rebellion against authority—they are a symptom of a supremacist ideology unbound by law, morality, or even loyalty. This is the endgame of decades of state-sponsored extremism: a fratricidal spiral where the children of Zionism no longer obey their elders.
In the meantime, Palestinians continue to bleed, settlers grow more emboldened, and the Israeli state discovers that power built on impunity inevitably collapses in on itself.
Whether this results in civil strife, international intervention, or deeper authoritarianism remains to be seen. What is clear is that the so-called guardians of Zion have lost control of their front-line fanatics—and the consequences will be felt by everyone under their reign, including themselves.
Regardless of this though, for Benjamin Netanyahu, the most important thing is staying in power and having failed to kick his corruption trial down the road much further, he needs another war, because as we know by now, it is his go to response when things go against him. But his latest attempt to kick start aggression with Iran – despite Iran having down some $20 billion of damage to Israel notwithstanding – has backfired on him. Get all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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