These Generals Fought for Israel. Now They See 'Jewish Terrorism' as the Threat

 Maj. Gen. Eyal Ben-Reuven spent his life fighting for Israel. He survived the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when his platoon was nearly wiped out, then went on to command a division in the West Bank and lead Israel’s ground forces in the 2006 war against Hezbollah.

But in recent months, he has returned to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, touring the territory with retired generals and former Israeli officials like himself. He has walked through the remains of a Palestinian school looted by Israeli settlers, and listened to Palestinian shepherds and farmers describe being tortured by settlers who seize their livestock and land.

Now, General Ben-Reuven says he has an entirely different understanding of the risks facing Israel today.

“This, what the settlers are doing here, is the real threat to Israel,” he said, his eyes welling with emotion. “This is more concerning to me than Iran, Gaza or Lebanon.” 

Other former high-ranking Israeli officials touring the West Bank with him shared the same indignation.

“This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply,” Ephraim Sneh, a retired brigadier general and former minister of health, said of Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

Asaf Agmon, a retired Air Force general, went even further, comparing it to what some Israelis’ forebears endured in the Holocaust — not in the scale of the violence, he explained, but in the effort to erase the Palestinian presence from much of the West Bank.

“Once a society behaves this way,” he said, “that society is doomed.”

Since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, when as many as 1,200 Israelis were killed, war has consumed Israel: first with Hamas, leaving Gaza in ruins and tens of thousands dead. Two rounds of fighting with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Two campaigns against Iran.  Since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, when as many as 1,200 Israelis were killed, war has consumed Israel: first with Hamas, leaving Gaza in ruins and tens of thousands dead. Two rounds of fighting with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Two campaigns against Iran. 

But in the shadows of those conflicts, a quieter front has emerged in the West Bank. Armed Israeli settlers, emboldened by the most right-wing government in the nation’s history, raid and torch Palestinian homes, mosques and villages with seeming impunity, openly trying to drive them out of the territory.

Israel’s top military commander in the West Bank has warned that the violence risked setting the territory ablaze. Settlers have waged thousands of attacks in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023, injuring thousands of Palestinians, according to the United Nations. More than 3,200 Palestinians have been displaced by settler attacks this year alone — double the rate of last year.

As the pace of violence climbs, the U.N. says, the number of Palestinians injured in settler attacks has risen from an average of one every three days in 2020 to more than three per day in 2026.

The retired generals condemning this violence are part of a small but rapidly expanding array of influential Israelis, including many from the upper echelons of the military and intelligence apparatus, who are publicly declaring the lawlessness in the West Bank a threat to Israel’s existence as a democracy.

More than 200 prominent Israelis signed a letter in June demanding that the government stop the attacks against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank. The signatories included two former prime ministers, more than three dozen retired Army and Air Force generals, the former heads of the nation’s foreign and domestic intelligence services, as well as rabbis, a Nobel laureate and one of Israel’s most revered novelists.

The retired officials come from across the political landscape, including from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own party, and many were considered security hawks.

In their letter, they called for an end to “Jewish terrorism” and the “ethnic cleansing” underway in the West Bank. And they accused Mr. Netanyahu’s government not just of being negligent in failing to stop it, but of pursuing “a deliberate government policy in which the entire security establishment — including the military, Shin Bet and the police — is knowingly complicit.”

The signatories cited tens of millions of dollars in government spending on illegal Israeli outposts and farms, and demanded a full accounting of all public money spent on roads, water, electricity, vehicles and weapons to support them.

They also accused the military of being complicit in the violence, saying soldiers stand by and watch as Palestinians are attacked, or sometimes even join settlers to assault Palestinian villages together.

The public denunciation, given whom it is coming from, is staggering. Activists have often asserted that Israel commits atrocities in the West Bank. But accusations of ethnic cleansing from such a large group of former prime ministers, generals and other top Israeli officials — the same people who once led their nation’s security forces — are virtually unheard of.

Many of the Israeli critics took part in extreme violence during their own military careers, ordering targeted killings, deadly airstrikes, raids and other attacks on Palestinians, including in the West Bank. But they say they were acting in the interest of Israeli security, under a chain of command and legal oversight.

The difference now, they say, is that the violence is unchecked, indiscriminate and targets innocent civilians, with the intent of clearing large stretches of the West Bank so that Israelis can take it for themselves and stamp out any prospect of a Palestinian state.

The injustice today, they contend, has crossed a moral red line in which the state is allowing, and sometimes helping, Israeli civilians beat, stab and shoot others with almost no consequences.

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