For generations, the olive harvest has been a cultural and economic mainstay for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, with a good crop ensuring a family’s finances throughout the year. 

Now, across the Palestinian West Bank, that crucial harvest is being threatened by unprecedented violence and terror by Israeli settlers, with backing and support from the Israeli military. What was once an occasion for celebration, picnics and coming together with neighbors, has been turned into a time of terror for Palestinian farmers and their families. 

Settlers are people who "settle" on stolen Palestinian land. They are often rabid Jewish fundamentalists who engage in mob violence against Palestinian people. In recent decades, settler attacks have escalated during the olive harvest from September to November. This year things have gone to a whole other level. “Across 77 towns and villages, according to U.N. figures, gangs of Jewish extremists have burned cars, looted farming equipment and vandalized more than 4,000 trees and saplings,” the Washington Post reports. “The number of attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians—an average of eight incidents a day—is the highest since the United Nations began documenting them in 2006.”

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said settlers were attacking Palestinians “daily,” including “shooting, beating and threatening residents, throwing stones, torching fields, destroying trees and crops, stealing produce, blocking roads, invading homes, and burning cars.” 

A few examples from this past week: settlers set fire to dozens of olive trees in the village of Majdal Bani Fadil. Settlers attacked Palestinians harvesting their olives with rocks and clubs near the village of Beita, injuring more than a dozen people including reporters from Reuters and Al Jazeera. As hundreds of anti-occupation Israeli activists were coming to the village of Burin in solidarity with an olive harvest, the Israeli army declared the village a closed military zone. Some of the activists tried to block traffic, then stood along the road with signs saying “Stop Jewish Terror.”¹ 

Israeli settlers and the IDF aren’t only targeting the olive harvest. This past week settlers rampaged through the West Bank’s Beit Lid industrial zone setting cars, fields and buildings on fire, and then moved on to attack the Kedumim Industrial Zone, including a dairy factory which is a major West Bank employer.

Israeli settlers also attacked a mosque in Deir Istiya, setting fire to its entrance, and defacing the mosque by spraying threatening graffiti on its outer walls, including “we are not afraid,” “we will revenge again.”

The West Bank is the area of historic Palestine west of the Jordan River (on the east side of what is now Israel). It is home to nearly three million Palestinians and has been mandated by the United Nations to be part of a future Palestinian state. It has been under illegal military occupation since it was seized by Israel through war in 1967. Since then, some 600,000 to 750,000 Israelis have set up more than 250 settlements and outposts across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. These are flagrantly illegal under international law, but Israel has relentlessly expanded them, while terrorizing the Palestinian population and destroying Palestinian homes, farms, crops, and animals.

What’s happening today is a sharp escalation of even those atrocities, and their backing from the highest levels of the Israeli state. 

Jewish Terrorism in the West Bank Has a Clear Plan

Even as violence is rising, investigations of settler violence by Israeli authorities and police have fallen 73 percent over the past three years. “The situation is out of control, the [Israeli army] is doing nothing,” one Israeli newspaper said. Israeli authorities and prominent settlers make light of the violent attacks as the work of a few extremists or "a few lost boys." 

In reality, “Hundreds are taking part, not a small group of wayward youths,” Haaretz reports (“A Few Lost Boys? Jewish Terrorism in the West Bank Has a Clear Plan”). And this is given full backing from the fascists in power.

Haaretz went on, “The incidents are occurring almost every day, and they're part of a larger plan. While the settler mainstream deplores the events, some settlers see them as highly useful. The violence, in some cases to the point of killing, is designed to instill fear among the Palestinians, shrink their living space and forcibly evict them from their land, on which new settler farms and outposts would be established.”

Trump’s “Peace” Plan, Israeli Maneuvers, and the Future of the Palestinian People

This past week, the Trump regime submitted a revised U.N. Security Council resolution, aimed at legitimizing and enshrining Trump’s 20 point “Peace” Plan for Gaza, which for the first time included language indicating a possible pathway to Palestinian statehood, something Israel has vehemently opposed. This comes after Trump told Israel not to formally annex the West Bank (steal it from the Palestinians and make it formally part of Israel).  

In another first, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (aka Netan-Nazi) condemned settler violence in the West Bank, claiming Israel “will take very forceful action against the [settler] riots … against Palestinians, and against IDF soldiers — because we are a nation of laws, and a nation of laws acts in accordance with the law.” Up to now, the fascists in Netan-Nazi's cabinet have given full backing to the anti-Palestinian settler movement.

It is beyond the scope of this article to delve into all the maneuvering between the U.S., Israel, and various global and Middle East powers over Trump’s “Peace” Plan, and the repercussions of the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza. (We have analyzed the basics of Trump’s plan HERE and HERE.) It is also the case that the future of Trump’s plan is impossible to predict with any certainty.

But a few things can be said with certainty:

First, Trump’s plan has nothing to do with ensuring the rights of or a just future for the Palestinian people. It is an effort by the Trump fascist regime to extend U.S. dominance in the Middle East, as well as open up big financial opportunities for U.S. capitalism-imperialism. An ongoing open, and undeniable, genocide in Gaza or openly annexing the West Bank would prevent many Arab governments from openly getting on board with Trump’s agenda.

Second, the language about a future Palestinian state is subject to U.S. dictates and therefore largely meaningless. It is political window-dressing to provide cover for the reactionary Middle Eastern regimes which are allied with the U.S.

Even a "two-state solution," which Trump has not mentioned but which a number of European powers have argued for, would, as the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has said, "really amount to nothing more than a powerful state of Israel continuing to occupy land stolen from the Palestinian people, while the so-called 'Palestinian state' created with this 'solution' would be a bitter joke—a puppet state—merely a patchwork of separated small territories, surrounded and dominated by Israel, with the Palestinian people still subjected to terrible oppression and deprivation." (That is from his social media message REVOLUTION #48, "Liberalism, 'progressivism'—opposition to injustice—and Zionism: you can’t 'have it all'—you can’t hold on to Zionism...and be consistent in opposing injustice and atrocity.")

Third, as an Israeli analyst from the International Crisis Group wrote in the New York Times, “A U.S., European or Arab policy that says no to formal annexation but does nothing to stop de facto annexation [of the West Bank] will be interpreted by Israel as an invitation to continue apace” with its “explicit agenda of expanding and deepening its control over the West Bank.”

Fourth, Israel and the U.S. may have their differences over Gaza and the West Bank, but Israel remains America’s key military outpost and enforcer in the Middle East. In fact, this past week it was reported by Axios that Israel is now pushing for a new, 20-year military aid agreement with the U.S., which would double the current $38 billion deal which provides Israel with massive military equipment and support.

And finally, Israel’s atrocities in the West Bank are not fundamentally a matter of policy or who is Prime Minister. As Bob Avakian analyzed in his social media message REVOLUTION #76, The Democratic Party Convention: Delegates chant “We Love Genocide!”, Israel’s towering crimes against the Palestinian people: 

...flows out of—and is the “logical extension” of—the nature of Israel as a Zionist (racist, Jewish-supremacist) state, which justifies its massive atrocities by denying the humanity of the Palestinian people.

For more, see: Israel’s West Bank Violence Escalates to Highest Level in 20 Years - 44 Children Killed This Year Alone, revcom.us, November 10, 2025.