Because Israel is routinely the victim of double standards — Will Zohran Mamdani ever make a personal cause of denouncing his native Uganda for criminalizing homosexuality? Or tell a human-rights malefactor like Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that he, too, isn’t welcome in New York? — it’s tempting for the Jewish state’s stalwart defenders, including me, to downplay its failings.
That goes especially when we see the country having to defend its legitimacy against scoundrels. Or when allegations made against it later prove sloppily reported or entirely unfounded. Or when the chorus of condemnation is loud enough already without lending our voices to it.
But anyone who cares about Israel’s well-being shouldn’t be silent about anti-Palestinian settler terrorism in the West Bank and the nothing-much-to-see-here policy of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister. That’s not only because the terrorism is a menace to Palestinian lives and property, or an affront to Jewish ethics, or a stain on Israel’s reputation — though it’s all those things. It’s also a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.
That’s the point of a public letter to President Trump, issued Sunday by Matan Vilnai, a retired deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, on behalf of an organization that includes hundreds of retired senior Israeli officers.
“Whereas our security agencies excel in dealing with Hamas and other West Bank Palestinian terror groups, they are severely constrained when it comes to Jewish terrorists,” the letter notes. “It is no secret that certain members of our current government orchestrate much of this chaos, including by shielding their followers — who are armed and driven by messianic impulses — from the law and its enforcement.”
“Unless arrested swiftly and decisively,” the letter bluntly warns, “escalating violence in the West Bank is poised to ignite the region and carries severe ramifications for both Israeli security and U.S. regional interests.”
That reality was again brought home last week, when extremist settlers went on a rampage in several Palestinian villages, reportedly setting fire to a home and two mosques, attacking a stonecutting factory and committing other acts of outright terrorism. That followed an incident in which four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed after a confrontation involving a group of Israelis who, without prior coordination, had trespassed into an area under Palestinian civil control.
This sort of episode has become routine. As The Times of Israel reports, “the I.D.F. recorded 867 incidents of nationalistic crime and settler violence in 2025.” That’s up from 682 the previous year.
Netanyahu’s answer to all this, as he told CNN’s Dana Bash, is that the violence is the work of about 150 “juvenile delinquents” and that he doesn’t accept “vigilantism.” But it’s preposterous to think that a government that can assassinate a Hamas leader in a Tehran guesthouse finds itself unable to contain a wave of Jewish thuggery. If the prime minister wanted to end the problem, he could. Like Bartleby, he would prefer not to.
That’s largely because his Likud Party depends on the parliamentary support of extremist settlers led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Netanyahu has learned to stay atop Israeli politics by never letting go of his right flank.
In an interview, Eran Shamir-Borer, who spent many years in the I.D.F.’s Military Advocate General’s Corps and is now with the Israel Democracy Institute (on whose advisory board I sit), listed for me the specific decisions by Netanyahu’s cabinet that have brought Israel to this pass. Chief among them is Defense Minister Israel Katz’s refusal to use administrative detention as a legal tool to rein in suspected Jewish terrorists. David Zini, the current head of Israel’s internal security service, avoids the term “Jewish terror” in favor of the euphemism “frictions.” And Ben-Gvir is himself a product of the same milieu that produced the rampaging settlers.
“Everyone hears the music,” Shamir-Borer said, “and it legitimizes this kind of conduct.”
That’s what makes Vilnai’s letter significant, particularly during the same week that the prime minister visits Washington to meet with Trump. Vilnai is no peacenik: He served in a previous Netanyahu government as the minister of home front defense and was one of the commandos who, 50 years ago this month, liberated Jewish hostages in the Entebbe raid. But like many other patriotic Israelis, he’s aghast at a government that prioritizes the prime minister’s political needs and his cabinet’s ideological obsessions over the rule of law.
There is an immediate danger in that the spiraling West Bank violence could easily produce a third intifada that an exhausted Israel can ill afford militarily or diplomatically, to say nothing of the human cost in both Israeli and Palestinian lives. There’s a still greater long-term risk that the Netanyahu government’s excuse making for Jewish lawlessness and terrorism leads to what the scholar and diplomat Michael Oren, in a prescient Commentary essay from 2009, called “the hemorrhaging of sovereignty.”
Any nation in which broad segments of the citizenry are either untouched or untouchable by the law — in Israel’s case, not just radical settlers and ultra-Orthodox draft shirkers but also Arab citizens badly underserved by law enforcement — is on the road to its own kind of Lebanonization. That’s where every group is a law unto itself and the state’s powers, including its monopoly on the use of force, wither.
I’ve written before that the purpose of Zionism — for which I’m a lifelong advocate — is Jewish self-rule: “Neither rule by others nor rule over others.” It’s why I still believe in a Palestinian state, even if the conditions for it are probably far off. It’s why I more fervently believe in a Jewish state, governed by law and recognizing limits. Under this Israeli government, that’s slipping away.
