Who truly faces an existential threat?

“What I saw today is the existential threat to the State of Israel,” former Mossad director Tamir Pardo stated after a visit to Palestinian villages that have been targeted by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. However, dismissing Zionist history to selectively focus on settler violence absolves Israel of the role it gives to settlers – a direct participation in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Settler violence started before the Nakba, and it suited Israel’s purpose to encourage it.

But of course, Pardo’s concern is not the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The concern is that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in which settlers participate under state protection, does not jeopardise Israel’s existence.

Pardo said that Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank reminded him of “the events that happened against Jews in the last century.” However, before the Holocaust, and even before Israel’s colonial enterprise was established,  Zionism had already opted for forced transfer. Manachem Ussishkin, chairman of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) from 1923 to 1941, told journalists in Jerusalem in April 1930, “If there are other inhabitants here, they must be transferred to some other place. We must take over the land. We have a great and nobler ideal that preserving several hundred thousands of [Palestinian] Arabs fellahin [peasants].”

Even if Pardo is calling out Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank, and now there seems to be a difference between settler violence and extremist settler violence since a segment of settlers are being labelled extremist, the focus should turn to the colonised Palestinian population. It is Palestinians who have been facing an existential threat, and it was not brought on only by extremist settlers in the occupied West Bank.

What supports the extremist settlers in a colonial enterprise? Colonialism itself. Who participates in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians? The entire settler-colonial population. Zionism depended on settler presence, just as Israel does now.

Without settler presence, Israel would face an existential crisis as the demography would change significantly. Extremist settlers – the most visible segment of Israel’s colonial society – are functioning just as colonial violence requires them to. 

One cannot disagree with settler violence without disagreeing what Israel stands for. If such fragmented reasoning carries weight in Israeli society, then settlers are refusing awareness of their own role in supporting Israel’s colonial enterprise – be it through passive presence or active violence. The same goes for Israeli officials for whom only one part of Israel’s colonial enterprise is problematic. Israel created its own problem through the Zionist ideology. The extremist settler violence that is making news headlines now came decades later.

Israeli settler violence against Palestinians is not an existential threat to Israel. It reinforces what Israel stands for and how it maintained its existence since the 1948 Nakba. 

In Gaza, Palestinians face an ongoing genocide which the international community preferred to watch in real time rather than halt, while in the occupied West Bank, Palestinians face settler and collaborator violence from Israel and the Palestinian Authority’s security services. An existential threat exists in Palestine’s reality, not in Israel’s imagination.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260430-who-truly-faces-an-existential-threat/