[News] Why we shouldn’t call colonial Israeli settlers ‘terrorists’

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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<https://mondoweiss.net/2026/08/why-we-shouldnt-call-israeli-colonial-settlers-terrorists/?ml_recipient=196865653554022144&ml_link=196865613401950067&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2026-08-26&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation+-+8am>
Why we shouldn’t call colonial Israeli settlers ‘terrorists’
Inès Abdel Razek
August 25, 2026
------------------------------
[image: image.png]

A Palestinian man inspects burnt scrap cars after an attack by Israeli
settlers in the town of Huwwara in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, November
21, 2025. (Photo: Mohammed Nasser/APA Images)

On August 9, dozens of Israeli settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes
in Qusra
<https://mondoweiss.net/2026/08/besieged-by-israeli-settlers-and-cut-off-from-the-outside-world-palestinian-families-on-a-west-bank-hilltop-refuse-to-leave/>,
south of Nablus. They blocked residents from leaving safely, cut water and
electricity, damaged water pipes, and prevented food and other essential
supplies from reaching the families inside. Days later, U.S. Ambassador to
Israel Mike Huckabee — a longstanding supporter of the Israeli colonial
enterprise — called those responsible “Israeli terrorists,” echoing the
growing use of the term in the mainstream media and by human rights groups,
the UN, and diplomatic circles.

For Palestinians who have endured over a century of systemic settler
colonial violence, this rhetorical shift may be tempting to welcome as a
step toward accountability. But embracing the “terrorism” framework would
ultimately harm our cause and our people.

Settler colonial violence is, of course, real and terrifying, but
“terrorism” is the wrong framework for understanding and confronting it,
because it was designed to serve imperial designs and make settler violence
look like an aberration. In this way, the label of “Israeli terrorism”
often misleadingly characterizes settler violence as confined to the
Israeli far right, even though it’s the product of a broad Israeli
consensus and a systemic feature of Israel’s colonial regime.
*The origins of the ‘terrorism’* label

The terrorism framework did not emerge from positive or emancipatory
values, but has been exclusively weaponized against oppressed and
marginalized peoples in the service of imperial agendas. While in the
1960s, the terrorism framing was used by western imperial interests against
anti-colonial struggles (Algeria, South Africa, Vietnam, to name a few),
the post 9/11 global “terrorism” narrative shifted to focus on a new
“global enemy” — Islamic fundamentalism — and used to justify military
occupations and atrocities across the world under the banner of the “War on
Terror.” More dangerously, it was used to build a legal arsenal encroaching
on people’s rights and freedoms, undermining the rule of law and peoples’
sovereignty under the cover of legality.

Palestinians know intimately what this framework enables. For decades, the
“terrorism” label has been used to criminalize the Palestinian liberation
movement, from designating much of the Palestinian political spectrum as
“terrorist,” to carrying out colonial violence under the guise of
“counterterrorism” — assassinating, imprisoning, and torturing Palestinians
in Jenin, Tulkarem and across Palestine. The same framework has been used
to stifle Palestinian civil society, including through Israel’s designation
of six leading Palestinian organizations as “terrorist” organizations
<https://mondoweiss.net/2021/10/israel-labels-leading-palestinian-human-rights-groups-terrorist-institutions/>.
And today, the language of counterterrorism has been used to justify the
genocide in Gaza against 2.2 million Palestinians.

The Zionist regime even uses the counterterrorism framework to punish
Palestinians victims of the settlers’ violence. Case in point, the day
after a group of armed settlers attacked Palestinian residents of the
village of Til
<https://mondoweiss.net/2026/07/palestinians-brace-for-sweeping-israeli-offensive-across-the-west-bank-following-settler-raid-that-resulted-in-the-deaths-of-4-palestinians-and-2-israelis/>
(framed as “confrontation” by the mainstream media), the Israeli army
announced a “counterterror” operation
<https://mondoweiss.net/2026/07/how-palestinians-in-the-west-bank-became-so-vulnerable-to-israeli-settler-terror/>
in the entire Northern West Bank.

There is a reason why terrorism has no agreed-upon definition under
international law. It is a political tool whose meaning has been shaped by
those with the power to wield it. A framework built and weaponized by
imperial powers against colonized peoples cannot become the tool through
which we dismantle colonial violence.

Another danger of embracing the “terrorism” label for settlers is that it
exceptionalizes their violence, turning masked settlers who kill
Palestinians, burn their homes, and attack their villages into a violent
fringe — “bad apples” supposedly detached from an otherwise legitimate
Israeli state and Zionist establishment.

But this violence is neither marginal nor new. Armed Zionist militias
carried out expulsions, massacres, and attacks on Palestinian communities
long before the establishment of Israel, culminating in the Nakba of
1947–48 and continuing through the occupation that followed the June 1967
War. Today’s settler violence belongs to this same continuum of
dispossession.

Nor do settlers act outside the state. Their violence operates alongside —
and is enabled and protected by — the military, police, courts, and other
state institutions that dispossess Palestinians. They facilitate the
demolition of homes, the seizure of land, restrictions on water access and
freedom of movement, the imprisonment of Palestinians, and the forcible
displacement of communities. Settlers are not an aberration from this
system, but are among its agents.

The 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque massacre
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/thirty-years-after-baruch-goldsteins-massacre-his-followers-are-now-carrying-out-a-genocide/>
illustrates this clearly. American colonial settler Baruch Goldstein
murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers and was condemned by the Israeli
government at the time as an extremist. Yet in the massacre’s aftermath, it
was Palestinians in Hebron who were subjected to collective punishment for
a massacre they did not commit. The “extremist” could be disavowed while
the colonial system around him was strengthened.

Today, calling violent settlers “Israeli terrorists,” or insisting that
figures like Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir “do not
represent us” performs a similar function. While such rhetorical evolution
is celebrated in Western establishment circles as a welcome widening of the
Overton window, it does not arise from “miraculous epiphanies” driven by
“moral urgency,” to paraphrase Mohammed El Kurd’s *Perfect Victims*
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/02/palestine-and-politics-of-anti-appeal-an-interview-with-mohammed-el-kurd/>
.

On the contrary, it allows Western governments and Israel’s supporters to
distance themselves from the most visible brutality without confronting the
system they continue to support. The selective sanctioning of a handful of
“extremist settlers” — sanctions that can be imposed and removed according
to political convenience — follows the same logic, offering the appearance
of accountability while leaving support for the broader system intact. The
“terrorist” label becomes a convenient smokescreen: remove the bad apples,
and the system itself can remain unquestioned.
*Not a right-wing issue*

Framing settlers as “terrorists” reinforces another convenient fiction:
that the violence of occupation belongs to Israel’s extremist far right,
rather than reflecting a much broader political consensus.

While there are differences in rhetoric, pace, and strategic vision within
Israeli politics — the so-called “left” favoring a more gradual and
internationally palatable approach, while the far right openly advocates
accelerated annexation and erasure — these differences obscure a large
consensus within Israeli Jewish society calling for Palestinian
dispossession and continued Israeli control. The divide is often less over
the underlying project than over how aggressively and how visibly to pursue
it.

This illusion is particularly visible during the current Israeli election
campaign, as Western governments once again cling to the hope that ousting
Netanyahu could restore Israeli institutions and reopen the path to
“dialogue.” Yet Israeli politicians themselves repeatedly expose the limits
of this distinction. When the UK condemned the E1 settlement plan, Foreign
Minister Gideon Sa’ar defended the Jewish people’s right to live throughout
the “Land of Israel,” invoking the Balfour Declaration as having recognized
that right. In June, Netanyahu again rejected Palestinian statehood between
the Jordan River and the sea, while Smotrich openly advances annexation in
support of the Greater Israel vision. Even within the supposedly centrist
opposition, positions on Palestinian land and settler violence reveal far
more continuity than the language of “extremists” suggests.

Calling the most visible settlers and far-right politicians “terrorists”
helps preserve this illusion. It allows Western governments to imagine that
the problem lies with Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, or a radical settler fringe —
and that removing them could restore a more acceptable Israel — rather than
confronting the structures that have sustained Palestinian dispossession
for decades.
*Erasing the Palestinian right to resist*

Finally, the terrorism framework reinforces the fiction of “two sides.”
Once a few government figures and settlers are framed as “terrorists,”
their violence can easily be mirrored against Palestinian armed resistance:
Israeli terrorists on one side, Palestinian terrorists on the other.
Colonization is thus recast as a tit-for-tat conflict between two
equivalent violent actors, erasing the profound imbalance of power between
colonizer and colonized and denying Palestinians’ right to resist.

This false symmetry has concrete political consequences. When the EU
sanctioned violent West Bank settlers, it simultaneously added Hamas
figures to the same sanctions framework, as though condemning settler
violence required an equivalent Palestinian target. The result is precisely
the “both sides” logic the terrorism framework reproduces: an equivalence
between the violence of an occupying power and the resistance of an
occupied people.

The inconvenient reality is that decades of international impunity are the
central reason why the colonial settlers’ movement has reached such levels
of unleashed violence today. Calling settlers “terrorists” offers another
escape from that accountability: it isolates individual perpetrators while
leaving intact the system that arms, protects, and enables them.

I believe the “terrorism” label should not be used for any group, globally.
West Bank settler violence is state-backed settler colonial violence. It is
part and parcel of a century-long Zionist settler colonial project.
Confronting this violence means confronting the institutions, policies, and
structures that produce it — not simply the individuals who carry it out.
Call it what it is.
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