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The Settler Movement in Its Own Words

A settlement is an Israeli civilian community built on land Israel captured in 1967, mostly in the West Bank (which Israeli officials call Judea and Samaria). An outpost is one built without formal government approval, which often comes later. About 700,000 Israelis now live beyond the 1967 lines. The settler movement is the network of organizations, rabbis, and activists that plants these communities, and it is the engine that turns the Greater Israel idea into facts on the ground.

This page lets the movement's leaders explain, in their own words, what the settlements are for. They are unusually open about it. They say the land belongs to one people, that its borders are the Bible's, that the Palestinians "would go to other places," and that after the West Bank come Gaza, southern Lebanon, and Syria. They do not speak from the margins. Ministers attend their conferences, the army guards their outposts, and the government legalizes what they build.

"An inseparable part of the state"​

Daniella Weiss arrived in the northern West Bank in 1975 with nine other families. "I came to Shomron with the idea of it becoming an inseparable part of the state of Israel," she told Haaretz. "I was going up the hills [of the West Bank] to see the state of Israel getting broader and bigger, with millions of Jews settling the hills. That was the picture." Asked if she wanted more than Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan: "Yes, I want to have for the Jewish nation the promised land from the bible ... from the Euphrates to the Nile. And I'm sure it will be" (Haaretz).

Fifty years later she leads the Nachala movement, and on Piers Morgan's show in March 2026 she said: "The land of Israel belongs to only one nation." Asked what happens to the millions of Palestinians: "They would go to other places." Morgan answered: "That's called ethnic cleansing" (as reported by Dr. Jamal Al-Mulla on X, 11 March 2026). The United Kingdom sanctioned her in May 2025 for promoting settlement expansion.

Go deeper: Daniella Weiss

"The Jewish agenda triumphs"​

The men who built the movement after 1967 said openly that their project stands above democracy. In a documentary clip posted in September 2026, Benny Katzover, a founder of the settlement movement, says: "Where democracy and Judaism clash, the Jewish agenda triumphs." Moti Karpel, co-founder of the Bat Ayin settlement: "Whoever abides by Jewish law is not in awe of democracy." Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun, a leader of the early movement, describes the promised borders as running between the Nile and the Euphrates (as the poster renders it). A young settler says: "We'll occupy Transjordan and build settlements there. It's all temporary" (The Compass Report on X, 10 September 2026). A Movement for Greater Israel formed within months of the 1967 war.

The newer generation is blunter. Ariel Horowitz, a settler at Homesh in the northern West Bank, was filmed in December 2025: "Will not rest until the people return to all of greater Israel... In all of this area, we will dispossess and expel... there cannot be a single gentile [non-Jew] here" (The Resonance on X, 27 December 2025). Homesh itself was evacuated in 2005; the Knesset passed a law in March 2023 lifting the ban on Israelis entering it, with the "immediate purpose" of legalizing it, according to Peace Now.

Go deeper: The Founders of the Settlement Movement

Gaza next​

Since October 2023 the movement has openly planned to return to Gaza, which Israel evacuated in 2005, and ministers have joined it on stage. In January 2024 a Jerusalem conference on resettling Gaza drew, by Channel 12's count, 12 Likud ministers plus Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich; a map at the event showed "the locations of the planed settlements, some on top of existing Palestinian towns" (Oren Ziv of +972 on X, 28 January 2024, viewed about 1.5 million times). Weiss told CNN in March 2024: "The Arabs of Gaza lost the right to be in Gaza on the 7th of October ... We, Jews, will be in Gaza" (CNN transcript, 20 March 2024). At an October 2024 conference near the Gaza border she said: "We came here to settle the entire Gaza Strip, from north to south, not just part of it," with 700 families "ready right now." To Louis Theroux she said: "You will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs disappeared from Gaza." In December 2025: "Gaza belongs to the people of Israel. And we must begin settling in Gaza now." See Gaza: the Yellow Line and the resettlement movement.

Lebanon and Syria after that​

The movement's horizon is north. Uri Tzafon ("Awaken the North") was founded to settle southern Lebanon; at its June 2024 conference Netanyahu's brother-in-law Hagi Ben Artzi said of the biblical promise, "what we were promised, we must conquer." In October 2024, as Israel invaded Lebanon, settler groups declared southern Lebanon part of "Greater Israel" and urged Netanyahu to begin building. In December 2025 the head of Nachala said: "There are parties preparing to settle in Lebanon, our bags are ready on our backs, we want to replicate the West Bank, God willing, in Lebanon" (SilencedSirs on X, 29 December 2025). By April 2026 Truthout reported settlers "increasingly crossing from the occupied Golan Heights into southern Syria in an effort to advance a 'Greater Israel' project."

Go deeper: Settlers Look North: Lebanon and Syria

The state behind them​

These are not freelancers. Mouin Rabbani put it plainly: "Israel's settlement enterprise is a state project, not the work of vigilantes operating independently or in opposition to the state" (Mouin Rabbani on X, 6 December 2023). The record bears him out:

  • The finance minister, Smotrich, a co-founder of the settler group Regavim, holds civilian authority over the West Bank and has recognized 69 new settlements since the last election, while about 150 farm outposts went up in the same period, according to the Israeli analyst Amit Segal (see Settlements).
  • Reuters documented in September 2026 that new outposts get "government grants, military coordination, and eventual official recognition," as The Compass Report summarized it.
  • When Israeli police came to remove an outpost at Qusra in August 2026, CNN's Jeremy Diamond reported, "Settler reinforcements arrived & clashes ensued. As of now, Israeli forces have withdrawn & the settlers remain" (Jeremy Diamond on X, 12 August 2026). J Street, an American pro-Israel group, called what followed "part of a state-backed policy to push Palestinians out of their homes and make way for Greater Israel" (J Street on X, 16 September 2026).
  • Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria Regional Council, wrote to Netanyahu in August 2023 with a plan, endorsed by "hundreds" of settler leaders, to raise the settler population in his region to one million by 2050.

Evidence rating: CONFIRMED that settler leaders state their aim as the whole land, emptied of Palestinians, reaching Gaza and southern Lebanon, and that government ministers share their platforms. STRONG that the state backs and legalizes the movement's outposts as policy.

Why it matters to an American family​

Many settlers, as the Globe and Mail noted, "speak English with North American accents," and American tax-exempt groups help fund them (see Americans in the settlements). The movement's leaders say the next frontier is Lebanon and Syria, the same ground on which Israel's war with Iran's allies is being fought with American weapons.

Status: Daniella Weiss, Benny Katzover, Moti Karpel, Yoel Bin Nun, Ariel Horowitz, Hagi Ben Artzi, Yossi Dagan, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir, Mouin Rabbani, Jeremy Diamond, and Oren Ziv are alive. Nothing on this page states that any living person committed a crime.

Sources​

Last Updated: 2026-09-26

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