CHICAGO: Israel’s repression and its continued expansion of Jewish-only settlements are pushing Palestinians toward violence, Middle East experts said during a panel discussion attended by Arab News on Tuesday.
Hosted by the Middle East Institute, the panelists included Ron Shatzberg, co-executive director of the Economic Cooperation Foundation; Dr. Tahani Mustafa, visiting fellow in the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations; and Yael Lempert, a former US ambassador to Jordan.
“From speaking with Palestinians, the hardship of what they’re going through, I see a potential escalation into violence in the West Bank,” Shatzberg said, adding that the goal of the settler movement and its supporters in Israel’s government is to achieve the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and block Palestinian statehood.
Violence in the West Bank would jeopardize the peace plan of US President Donald Trump, Shatzberg said, adding that accelerated settlement growth is a form of “de facto annexation.”
Mustafa said violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank began long before the Hamas attack on Israel of Oct. 7, 2023.
“It was driving younger and younger generations of Palestinians that saw absolutely no political horizon toward more radical elements like Islamic Jihad and Hamas … In the last few months leading up to Oct. 7, the situation had been more tense than it had ever been in the decade that I’d worked on Palestine before that,” she added.
“Pre-Oct. 7, the levels of violence in the West Bank, land appropriation, Israeli search and arrest operations, settler violence, had been the worst they’d ever been in this conflict. The numbers of (Palestinian) fatalities were outnumbering anything we’d seen in the 15 years prior.”
Lempert said there has been “tremendous frustration” from US administrations at the continued settlement expansion.
Despite Trump publicly declaring that “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” the “de facto reality is one of annexation, and no longer creeping annexation but sprinting annexation,” she added. “You see an acceleration that frankly is unrivaled since 1967.”
Shatzberg said Israel erected more than 30,000 new settler housing units just in 2025, fast outpacing the average of 4,000-5,000 each year.
He added that according to recent polling, 47 percent of Israelis oppose annexation while only 32 percent support it. The remainder, 21 percent, support a continuation of the status quo.
