Israel doesn’t have an extremism problem.
A fringe of Israelis is being mistaken for a national trait — and the distortion says more about the narrative than it does about Israel.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
One of my favorite media publications is The Free Press, the outlet founded by the great journalist Bari Weiss, which has in many ways pushed back against some of the worst habits of modern journalism — groupthink, intellectual laziness, and the reflex to flatten complex stories into moral caricatures.
That’s precisely why it was so disappointing to see it stumble into those same patterns this week with an essay titled “Israel Has an Extremism Problem.” For a publication that prides itself on clarity and independence, this piece leans heavily on a familiar and deeply misleading narrative, one that says more about the prevailing discourse on Israel than it does about Israel itself.
The claim that “Israel has an extremism problem” sounds like an empirical observation. It isn’t. It is a framing choice — one that takes a marginal phenomenon, strips it of proportion, and recasts it as a defining feature of an entire society.
Every country has extremists. That is not the question. The question is scale, influence, and representation. And on those measures, the argument collapses.
What is being described as an “extremism problem” in Israel is, in reality, a small, volatile fringe operating within a complex and imperfectly governed environment. That distinction matters. Because once a fringe is mistaken for a defining trait, analysis gives way to narrative — and narrative, in this case, is doing most of the work.
Even the critics concede the basic facts. The number of violent actors in the West Bank is not in the thousands, or even the high hundreds. It is, by most estimates, a few hundred individuals. The number of violent incidents — once inflated reporting is adjusted for — amounts to a few dozen per month in a region with hundreds of communities and a population in the millions.
That is not a societal extremism crisis; it is a law enforcement problem.
To describe a country of nearly 10 million people through the actions of a few hundred is not serious analysis. No other democracy would be defined this way. No other society engaged in an ongoing security conflict would have its fringe elements elevated into a central, identity-defining feature.
And yet, with Israel, this move is made routinely — and rarely questioned.
The argument then shifts: If the phenomenon is small, why isn’t it stopped?
Here, a second leap is made. Imperfect enforcement is reinterpreted as ideological complicity.
But states fail to enforce laws perfectly all the time, especially in contested or semi-governed territories. That failure can stem from political constraints, bureaucratic friction, competing priorities, or operational complexity. None of that amounts to endorsement.
In fact, the reality points in the opposite direction. The Israel Defense Forces has dismantled illegal Israeli outposts. Israeli security forces have arrested Jewish extremists. There have been direct confrontations, at times violent, between these radicals and Israeli soldiers. Extremists who attack soldiers, defy military orders, and operate outside the law are not agents of the state. They are, by definition, acting against it.
Another distortion lies in how the issue is isolated from its broader environment.
Israel is not managing this phenomenon in peacetime. It is doing so in the midst of a prolonged, multi-front conflict, where civilian populations are under threat and national attention is constantly pulled toward immediate security concerns. This does not justify lawlessness, but it does explain prioritization.
No society under sustained external pressure allocates its resources in a vacuum. It triages. It focuses on the most acute threats first. Internal fringe violence, especially when limited in scale, does not disappear in such conditions, but it does become secondary.
To analyze Israeli policy without acknowledging that context is not clarity; it is distortion. Perhaps the most revealing move in the argument is the expansion of the term “terrorism” to describe this phenomenon.
Yes, some of these acts are premeditated and politically motivated. Yes, they target civilians. But labeling a fragmented pattern of violence carried out by a small, decentralized fringe as a “terrorism problem” in the same analytical category as organized campaigns is not precision; it is escalation.
Words matter. Definitions matter.
When every form of political violence is elevated to terrorism, the term loses its analytical value. It ceases to distinguish between systemic threats and isolated ones. And once that distinction collapses, so does any meaningful ability to assess scale, intent, or risk.
What is being described here is serious and unacceptable criminal behavior. But it is not an organized, society-defining terrorism campaign. Conflating the two is not insight; it is narrative construction.
The argument also leans heavily on the presence of controversial political figures such as Israeli politicians Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who hold ministerial portfolios in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition.
But this, too, proves less than it claims. Democracies produce polarizing figures. That is not a flaw unique to Israel; it is a feature of open political systems. The presence of such figures does not indicate consensus; it indicates contestation.
Within Israel, these individuals are deeply divisive. Their views are debated, opposed, and challenged across large segments of society, including within the security establishment itself. To treat them as representative of Israel as a whole is to misunderstand how democratic systems function. It is to mistake visibility for dominance.
A key detail of this argument is that its entire framing is misconstrued. If one accepts the premise that Judea and Samaria (also known as “the West Bank”) is “occupied,” you’ve already conceded half the argument. The term “occupied” carries a built-in legal and moral conclusion: that one side is a foreign occupier with no legitimate claim, and the other is the rightful sovereign. But that is not the only, or even the most accurate, way to understand the territory.
The areas of Judea and Samaria are, in actuality, disputed territory. Before 1967 Six-Day War, they were controlled by Jordan, which illegally annexed them in 1950 and rebranded them as “the West Bank.” There was no Palestinian state there, and no widely recognized legal owner from whom Israel “took” the land in the conventional sense. What emerged after 1967 was not a classic case of occupation of one sovereign state by another, but a territorial dispute layered with competing national claims.
That distinction is not semantic; it changes the entire analytical framework.
If the territory is “occupied,” then Israeli presence is inherently illegitimate, settlements are by definition violations, and the story becomes one of unilateral imposition.
But if the territory is disputed, then you are dealing with overlapping claims, unresolved borders, and a political conflict awaiting negotiated resolution. In that framework, Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are not automatically reducible to acts of colonial aggression; they become part of a broader, contested national project — one that may be debated, criticized, or opposed, but not simplistically dismissed as illegal by definition.
More importantly, the “occupation” framing distorts how phenomena like so-called settler extremism are interpreted. It implicitly casts all Israeli presence beyond the Green Line as morally suspect, making it far easier to treat the actions of a fringe minority as the logical extension of a fundamentally illegitimate enterprise.
But if you start from the premise of dispute rather than occupation, that logic collapses. The extremists are no longer the tip of a coherent ideological spear; they are what they actually are — a small, radical subset operating within a far more complex reality.
None of this is to deny that Israeli settler violence, driven by extremism, exists. It does. Nor is it to minimize the harm caused by acts of violence against civilians. Those acts are wrong, and they demand a response. But mislabeling the nature of the problem does not help solve it; it obscures it.
Hence, this is not an “extremism problem” in the sense being implied. It is not systemic. It is not representative. And it is not unique. It is, instead, a contained but real challenge — one that requires law enforcement, political will, and institutional clarity, not rhetorical inflation.
The insistence on framing Israel through its most extreme margins ultimately reveals something deeper. No other democratic society facing comparable security pressures is so consistently defined by its fringe. No other country’s internal tensions are so readily elevated into its central identity. The pattern is familiar: Zero in on the worst behavior, detach it from context, expand its meaning, and project it outward as the essence of the whole.
That is not nuanced analysis; it is nitpicking. And it tells us less about Israel than it does about the lens through which Israel is so often viewed.
Israel does not have an extremism problem. If we’re going to talk seriously about extremism, we should reserve the term for systems and movements where radicalism is organized, normalized, and politically consequential at scale — not where it is marginal, contested, and opposed by the state itself.
If you want to analyze an “extremism problem,” look at Palestinian society, which is among the most antisemitic and violent societies on this planet. Look at the Iranian regime, which brutalizes and murders its own people in the hundreds of thousands. Look at the Democratic Party, which has many politicians openly committed to America’s destruction.
Look at France, whose leadership openly sides with Islamists. Look at Spain, whose prime minister continues to try to cover up his and his wife’s charges of corruption — by casting Israel as the ultimate evil. Look at the UK, whose police force is told to look the other way on Muslim crime and disturbances, and instead punish the Brits who complain about it. Look at the United Nations, which wastes billions of dollars on sprawling bureaucracies, corruption, and outright biases, not to mention no real impact.
Israel has extremists like every society does. It has political dysfunction like every democracy does. And it faces enforcement challenges in contested territory like any state would under similar conditions. But the leap from those realities to a defining national pathology is not supported by the facts.
And the more it is repeated, the more it confuses the reality it claims to describe.
Vanessa, excellent article. The tendency to take a tiny fringe and turn it into a defining feature of Israeli society is clearly unfair. No country of nearly ten million people should be judged by the actions of a few hundred radicals, especially when the state itself confronts and arrests them. If anything worries me more about Israel’s internal balance, it’s the growing political influence of the ultra-Orthodox parties, not a fringe handful of extremists. That debate, at least, is a real and open issue inside Israeli society — unlike the distorted narrative so often pushed from the outside.
Vanessa, I very much appreciate your writing and analyses, but I found the present essay to be somewhat below par. It's tainted by your partial acceptance of some of the propaganda that has defined the issues in terms that handicap Israel from the starting gate.
Your arguments about the practice of selecting fringe social phenomena to represent Israeli society as a whole are entirely valid. But you missed the opportunity to inform readers of the extent to which the entire narrative of the "wild hilltop youth" has been grotesquely exaggerated and dishonestly framed to make a mountain out of a mole hill.
The United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) maintains an online database of incidents involving settler violence. The NGO Regavim managed to obtain the spreadsheet that feeds into the UN database. The data was carefully analyzed by Gadi Taub in an essential essay that was published in Tablet (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/settler-violence-myth). Here is a closer look at the "data": Of the 8,332 incidents of settler violence in that period, 2,047 of those incidents involve settlers as VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE. More gems:
'OCHA counts any Jewish pilgrimage to the Temple Mount, no matter how peaceful, as “settler violence.” It also classifies as settler violence clashes between Israeli security forces and rioting Muslims on the Mount, even when no Israeli civilians are involved. Also listed as violence are “tourists visiting archaeological sites, infrastructure work carried out legally by the State of Israel itself, traffic accidents,” and other common activities that in no way can be categorized as “settler” related or “violent.” ... “After filtering out thousands of irrelevant cases,” the report says, “only 833 incidents remain over a seven-and-a-half-year period—a mere 10 percent of the original list.”
So much for the myth of settler violence. As for the "disputed territories," I would argue that it's also time to discard that terminology and stop shooting ourselves in the foot. The meticulous legal arguments and analyses that have been provided by Eugene Kontorovich and Natasha Hausdorff should convince everyone apart from the ICC judges that no one has a more valid right to live in Judea and Samaria than the Jews. We need to get off our back foot in this discussion as well. Our enemies have invested their resources in framing the conversation to be about "occupation" and "illegal settlements" and "stolen land." We will never persuade them to abandon their narrative, but we do have the freedom to begin treating their propaganda with the contempt it deserves.