Supporters of Israel’s decades-old settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territories have been quick to welcome Donald Trump’s recent U.S. election victory and what they clearly expect will be a boon to their aim of formally annexing the West Bank.  

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, was confident enough to put a date on the aspiration during a Monday news conference in Jerusalem.   

“The year 2025 will, with God’s help, be the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Jewish biblical name for the West Bank.  

Smotrich added he intends to work with “the new administration of President Trump, and with the international community” toward that goal.  

For Palestinians still clinging to hope that the occupied territories including East Jerusalem will one day form the basis for a Palestinian state, it’s one more thing to worry about on an already bleak horizon.  

Dror Etkes, an Israeli researcher and anti-settlement activist, said the Palestinians are right to worry, given the rate of settlement expansion during Trump’s first presidency along with the makeup of the current Israeli government. 

Elected two years ago, the government is the most right-wing in Israel’s history and includes extremist settlers in its cabinet. 

“They’re going to annex a very, very big part of the West Bank, I assume,” said Etkes. “Where [Israeli settlements] are today and where they want Israelis to be in the future.” 

Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in 1967. Successive Israeli governments since have allowed Jewish settlements to expand and flourish on Palestinian land.  

The settlements are widely considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.  

Today, there are a half-million Jewish settlers in the West Bank alone, some living in large settlement blocs, others in smaller remote ones or in “outposts.” Some settlers live there for economic reasons, others because they believe they have a divine right to the land.  

Violence against Palestinians by extremist settlers has been on the rise in recent years, spiking even more in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel.  

“Vicious. This is the word,” said Etkes, describing what he calls a well-organized, well-funded campaign aimed in particular at Palestinian herding communities.

“Targeting one community after the other. And once you are getting rid of one community, you go to the next one. And to the next.”  

There have been more than 1,400 attacks, many of them increasingly violent, by Israeli settlers against Palestinians over the past year, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. 

Mohammad Hureini, a 20-year-old Palestinian activist in the village of At-Tuwani tries to ensure his father is never alone when out grazing their animals, he told CBC in a September interview at his family home.

“I’ve been really afraid to face settlers over the past period,” he said. “People are becoming more and more crazy.”  

At-Tuwani lies south of Hebron and in the shadow of Ma’on, a settlement notorious for the extremists who live there and in a nearby outpost.  

For nearly two decades, Palestinian children have had an Israeli army escort while on their way to school. 

Hureini said At-Tuwani residents face near-daily harassment. “It became a crime if you water your trees. If you work your land,” he said.  

He said his father is accompanied by himself, one of his brothers, or Israeli and international “solidarity” volunteers when he’s with his herd or tending to their land. 

Hureini’s cousin was shot in the stomach by a settler just days after violence began in October 2023. Video of the incident shows an armed settler opening fire and his cousin falling to the ground, while an armed figure in military fatigues looks on.  

Zakaria Adra survived, but his attacker was never charged. It’s not clear if the man in army fatigues was a soldier or not.  

That’s a growing problem in the West Bank, according to observers who say it’s hard to differentiate between the Israel Defence Forces and what it called “local community defence forces,” which the IDF trains and equips.

Local defence force numbers have swelled since October 2023. These are often made up of hardline settlers who have volunteered as reservists to replace Israeli troops normally stationed in the West Bank but are now fighting in Gaza or Lebanon. 

Critics call them militias.  

Who is a soldier, who is a settler?

Hagit Ofran, settlement watch director for the Israeli organization Peace Now, said the blurred line is extremely problematic.

“With the way that settlers and soldiers are working together, and the fact that you cannot know if the person in front of you is a settler who is now on reserve duty and a soldier, or a settler who happened to have the uniform in his closet and is now wearing [it].”  

CBC News journalists experienced the phenomenon first-hand while filming an interview with Hureini outside his family home in September. 

An armed man dressed in military fatigues but with no recognizable insignia approached from the direction of the settlement outpost in a buggy-like vehicle, from which he emerged to demand our passports. 

He refused to present identification or to accept our Israeli government-issued press cards in place of our passports. Soon, more armed men in military dress arrived.  

Hureini surrendered his ID, and told us he knew the “settler-soldier” as someone who regularly harassed At-Tuwani residents.  

A standoff ensued during which a Palestinian-Israeli colleague working with us was detained by the armed men and taken away in a vehicle.

After having been driven off in the direction of the settlement, he was eventually released on the side of a road where our crew was able to collect him. He’d been ordered to report to a police station the next day and forbidden from returning to the area for two weeks.  

It was a mild taste of what many Palestinians are faced with every day.  

Asked to comment on the incident, the IDF said the man demanding passports was an army reservist and was entitled to do so. 

“The intensity of the harassment, and the distance that the army is keeping the Palestinians away from their lands became much bigger because of this new phenomenon of [the] regional defence units,” said Peace Now’s Ofran.  

She said hundreds of Palestinian families have fled settler violence over the past year.    

‘You’re always afraid’

Residents of Zanuta, a herding village south of At-Tuwani, fled en masse in October 2023. This summer, an order from Israel’s Supreme Court gave them permission to return. 

But when they tried to move back in September, they found their homes had been destroyed along with the local council building and a school built with funding from the European Union.  

The Israeli court order stated that they be given army and police protection, but residents say they didn’t get it.  

“You’re always afraid,” 52-year-old shepherd Shafik Suleiman told us in September, saying the settlers had come back to harass them right away. “If you’d come an hour ago you would have seen settlers here.”

He showed us a video of a man driving his quad vehicle through their animals. He said the man was Yinon Levi, head of an outpost called the Meitarim farm located just across the valley from Zanuta.  

Levi is one of 11 extremist settlers sanctioned by Canada, accused of inciting and perpetrating violence against Palestinians and their property.  

Outposts are small settlements usually consisting of one or two structures or even tents. They are used by hard-liners as a base from which to extend control over more land.  

Even Israel considers the outposts illegal — at least technically.  

Palestinians and settlement watch groups say despite its own laws, the current Israeli government broadly supports them and will one day connect them to infrastructure including electricity and water.  

Nearly 70 outposts have been green-lit for government funding over the past year according to settlement watch groups, a way of “regularizing” them. Meanwhile, 43 new outposts have been established.  

In the end, the residents of Zanuta abandoned their attempt to repopulate their town.  Even with the court order allowing them to return, they were not given permission to rebuild damaged buildings.  

Coupled with ongoing threats from Meitarim farm, Zanuta’s mayor said it was no longer sustainable.   

“Unfortunately, the settlers still attack us,” said Fayez Tell, adding the Oct. 7 attacks and the Gaza war that followed have given cover to Israelis determined to annex the West Bank. 

“The settlers have … permission to do anything,” he said. 

Back in At-Tuwani, Hureini says his chosen path remains one of activism, non-violent resistance to the theft of Palestinian land. 

“Even though I’m still under the same, you know, rule as a man carrying a gun,” he said. “Because this occupation doesn’t  [care] if you are having a gun or not. You are the same target.  

“We have no power in our hand except to just be in the land, on the ground and let them see that we still will not go out from here.”