The following letter, dated June 17, 2026, on the subject of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, was addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to his Ministers Israel Katz, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben Gvir, to IDF Chief of Staff Major General Eyal Zamir, to the head of the IDF’s Central Command General Avi Bluth, and to other significant figures in the current Israeli government, including the head of the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security agency) David Zini. It was signed by two former Prime Ministers, former senior military and intelligence figures, eminent writers, scholars, and scientists, former judges and legal officials, and an encouraging smattering of rabbis. A selection of the signatories is given after the text.
This letter deserves to be more widely known, not least for its candor, since so many American Jews have confused loyalty to Israel with blind support for the Israeli government or silent discomfort about its misdeeds — with a reflexive denial of what are undeniably crimes. But Zionism is not the enemy of conscience.
“This letter is a wakeup call and a final warning,” the text begins, and it ends with an assurance by its signatories that they will next resort to legal action in their attempt to bring the shameful Jewish terrorism against the Palestinians in the West Bank to an end. The letter is the preface to a quasi-legal document that clearly refutes Netanyahu’s statements about the outrages in the West Bank and is followed by forty pages of evidence of the truth of its allegations. Of course a public letter is only a public letter, and what will really matter is the political revival of the Israeli center and center-left, which is the only power that can force a reckoning with the hideous devolution of Israeli democracy. There is a long road of reconstruction ahead, but this document is a welcome act of resistance to the political and cultural effects of trauma, which can never be allowed the last word. For this reason we have translated and published it.
Leon Wieseltier and Celeste Marcus
We demand that you immediately take all measures necessary to terminate the Jewish terror that has been widespread in Judea and Samaria in recent years, in which Palestinian villagers and shepherds are murdered and wounded and their property is damaged and plundered with savage violence perpetrated by hundreds of young Jewish criminals. These criminals live mainly in outposts and homesteads which were established mostly without approval by the appropriate authorities. They were established in the very midst of Palestinian communities, primarily to strike at their homes and to expel them from their villages, with the purpose of hastening the realization of the vision of the “redemption of the land” by means of a forced Judaization of Judea and Samaria.
For some reason these Jewish criminals are described by you with the prettifying phrase “hilltop youth,” as if they were members of a youth movement or merely “marginal youth” or “stray weeds” – when in fact we are speaking here of highly motivated adolescents and adults who pursue a path of terror, crime, and lethal violence. Many adult settlers from the settlements have joined the ranks of these criminals, as have members of local security units at Jewish locations within the borders of the State of Israel. These Jewish criminals cruelly ambush the Palestinian population, a civilian population, composed mainly of Palestinian farmers and shepherds who are innocent of any crime. They strike them with clubs, they stab them with knives, they stone them, and sometimes they murder them by opening fire on them with weapons that they received from the Ministry of National Security and the IDF. These criminals also violently attack peace activists and human rights activists who are attempting to protect the local Palestinian with their presence, or to protest against Jewish terror, or to document it.
Sometimes these Jewish criminals are not inhibited from attacking IDF soldiers and from destroying military equipment when this equipment has been deployed for the purpose of protecting Palestinians who have been assaulted. In the majority of cases, however, Israeli soldiers have not prevented these attacks on Palestinians, or they have arrived at the scene after the attacks have concluded. Even though these Jewish criminals live mainly in outposts and homesteads that were not authorized by the government, they are equipped with residential structures and vehicles that they receive from [Finance Minister] Bezalel Smotrich and [Minister for Settlement and National Missions] Orit Struck. It appears likely that these criminals also receive support from older settlements that were established with the authorization of previous governments.
Prominent figures in Israeli society, academic institutions, distinguished scholars, former senior officers in the IDF and the security and intelligence agencies and the Israeli police force, and scores of reservists have sharply condemned the Jewish terror in the territories and demanded that it be stopped. So far, however, you have not taken the trouble to heed these criticisms nor have you put in place the measures that are required to end the Jewish terror in the territories. The Jewish population in Judea and Samaria, which now amounts to approximately 500,000 people, and the Council of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, the body which represents it, has also not bothered to denounce the Jewish criminals, except for a few isolated condemnations by a number of rabbis and leaders of regional councils, and they have done nothing in practice to abolish the Jewish terror.
This terrible development — these crimes, and the shutting of one’s eyes towards them or the acquiescence in them, as well as the failure to take steps to stop them— are utterly illegal according to Israeli law and according to international law, and utterly contradict the values of the state of Israel, and of Judaism and the Torah, and of the Israeli Defense Forces. They also increase antisemitism around the world and invite vicious international criticism.
To our dismay, it appears that even though a few of you have criticized the Jewish terror, you have limited your criticisms to words. Practically speaking, the Israeli government is not fulfilling its obligation to put an end to the Jewish terror in the territories and is issuing no instructions to the army and the police to accomplish that goal. More seriously, some of the government’s ministers (Israel Katz, Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Orit Struck) seem even to support the Jewish terror, by annulling administrative arrests and supplying equipment and financial support. The army, the security service [Shabak] and the police, which have astonished us with their successes in the suppression of Palestinian terror, have not taken any of the steps necessary for the suppression of Jewish terror, which include the physical prevention of attacks by Jewish criminals on Palestinians, restraining orders, arrests, and the prosecution of all the Jewish criminals whose addresses and identities are almost certainly known to you or can be easily established by means of simple inquiries that have not yet been undertaken.
As members of the Jewish people, which suffered greatly from pogroms and from the terror of gentiles when it lived under their rule in many countries, we are shaken by the very existence of Jewish terror against Palestinians in territories under the rule of the Israeli military administration.
As citizens of the state of Israel we are deeply disappointed by your many failures to put a stop to this terror despite the fact that you possess all the necessary capabilities for doing so. Since you hold the power in the territories, your failure in abolishing Jewish terror there may be interpreted as support for it or as acceptance of its continuation. This impression is even more plausible in light of the apparent enthusiasm for these Jewish criminals on the part of certain ministers in the government.
In the opinion of Tamir Pardo, a former head of the Mossad, the failure to terminate Jewish terror immediately represents “an existential threat for the state of Israel and runs the risk of further slaughter in the manner of October 7th.” After all, the day may come when the Palestinians strike back and slaughter an entire Jewish settlement, outpost, or homestead, as an act of revenge against the crimes of the Jewish terrorists.
We are warning you, we are importuning you, we are tugging at the hems of your garments, so as to deter these crimes, not least of endangering and destroying the property of Palestinians who have nothing to do with the settlements and with the State of Israel. We demand the complete eradication of Jewish terror and the removal of all these Jewish criminals from Judea and Samaria and their indictment in criminal court.
A selection of the signatories:
Ehud Olmert, Former Prime Minister; Ehud Barak, former Prime Minister, former Security Minister, former Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Moshe “Bogi” Yaalon, former Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces; Ran Cohen, former Minister of Industry and Trade; Dan Meridor, former Minister of Justice; Issawi Frej, former Minister of Regional Cooperation.The writer David Grossman; Professor David Harel, President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities;
Lt. General Dan Halutz, former Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces; Tamir Pardo, former Director of the Mossad; Danny Yatom, former head of the Mossad, former Commander of Central Command; Carmi Gillon, former head of the Shin Bet; Yaakov Peri, former Head of the Shin Bet; Rafi Peled, former chief of the National Police; Yossi Chen, former division head in the Shin Bet; Arik Livneh, former division head in the Shin Bet; Rafi Malka, former division head in the Shin Bet; Hezi Kalo, former division head in the Shin Bet; Chaim Koenig, former division head in the Shin Bet; Ron Shamir, former division head in the Shin Bet.
Gail Shoresh, former senior officer in the Mossad; Major General Gadi Shamni, Deputy Commander of the Central Command and Military Secretary to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Lieutenant General David Agmon, former Bureau Chief for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
Rabbi Moshe Lichtenstein, head of Yeshivat Har Etzion; Rabbi Arik Ascherman, CEO of the Protective Presence “Torat Tzedek” association and a prominent activist honored for protecting Palestinian farmers and shepherds from Jewish terrorism; Rabbanit Leah Shakdiel, the prominent social activist; Dr. Aryeh Carmon, founder of the Israel Democracy Institute.
Yarom Ariav, former director of the Ministry of Finance; Yoram Ben Ze’ev, former director of the Foreign Office and Israeli ambassador to Japan, Australia, and Germany; Professor Elie Barnavi, former Israeli ambassador to France; Ilan Baruch, former Israeli ambassador to South Africa; Alon Liel, former director of the Foreign Office and Israeli ambassador to South Africa.
And many more men and women who have devoted their lives to the security and the integrity of Israel.