With the world focused on Gaza, Israeli settlers and soldiers are increasing attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.
The world’s eyes have been on Gaza since Hamas’s brutal attack on Israeli citizens on October 7 and Israel’s retaliatory invasion that has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians.
But another front in this long-running conflict is the West Bank, a kidney-bean shaped piece of land on the west bank of the Jordan River and to the east of Israel that is home to nearly 3 million Palestinians and would make up the heart of any future Palestinian state. Alongside those Palestinian cities and villages, however, are Jewish settlements.
Since the Six-Day War of June 1967, the state of Israel has planned and funded Jewish outposts throughout the West Bank; other settlers have moved in without the state’s explicit backing. The settlers believe they have a right to be there, even though most of the international community views the settlements as illegal.
These populations are largely separated by Israel’s complex security infrastructure, including military checkpoints, armed patrols, a separation barrier, and color-coded identification cards and license plates. This system dictates all aspects of daily life for West Bank residents.
Some settlers have for years harassed and attacked the Palestinians living there, often with impunity and occasionally with the support of Israeli soldiers. In the weeks since October 7, however, the rate of violence has significantly increased. It is already the deadliest year since the Second Intifada, and is getting bad enough for the eyes of the world to occasionally leave Gaza and look to the West Bank.
“I continue to be alarmed about extremist settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank,” President Joe Biden said in late October, comparing the attacks to “pouring gasoline on fire.”
Meanwhile, popular support for Hamas has surged among Palestinians in the West Bank as faith in the Palestinian Authority plummets.
This escalation of settler violence could, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains, “lead to a deeper entrenchment of Israel’s occupation and, quite possibly, a violent Palestinian response that brings outright war to the West Bank.” That would in turn “weaken the already-slim prospects of a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the foreseeable future,” he writes.
The writer Nathan Thrall is well acquainted with the dual lives of Palestinian and Israeli residents of the West Bank. Thrall spent a decade at the International Crisis Group covering Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. In his new book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, he tells the story of a Palestinian father from the West Bank searching for his son who’s gone missing after a school bus accident.
Thrall spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King about the history of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and why Israel faces strong criticism for its support of settlers, not just from Palestinians but also from some Israelis and the international community. Read on for an excerpt of the conversation that aired on November 20, edited and condensed for length and clarity, and listen to the full conversation wherever you find podcasts.
Help situate us: What does the West Bank look like? And who lives there?
The West Bank is quite hilly. It has a mountain ridge running through the middle of it, north to south. And it is covered with Israeli settlements. These settlements in the popular imagination are a set of caravans haphazardly erected on a hilltop. [Some newer outposts, particularly illegal ones, do consist largely of portable buildings.] But in fact, [many] are towns and cities that look identical to the communities of similar size within Israel proper. And they are connected seamlessly to Israel proper. The residents of these communities include Israel’s elite. They include Supreme Court justices. They include ministers in the Israeli government and many, many other government employees and leaders in industry.
These people are able to live in these communities precisely because they have been segregated from the Palestinian population that surrounds them. They have been given roads that cut through these Palestinian communities without having exits or entrances for the Palestinian communities that these highways pass through. This whole architecture, this infrastructure, gives the Jewish residents of these settlements the illusion that they are living in a Jewish-only zone where they don’t really have to confront or think about the Palestinians who are just beside them, and they can go very easily to their workplaces in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem and believe that they are living in a suburb just like any other.
How long have the Israeli settlements been in the West Bank?
The settlement project began, really, as soon as Israel conquered the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Those settlements were created by the Israeli center left that had been in power since the establishment of the state in 1948 and remained in power until 1977. So for the first decade of the settlement project, it was driven by center-left governments. And it’s important to stress it was driven by the government. This is not a story of a bunch of radicals twisting the arm of the state against its will, which is how it’s often depicted. This is a state-driven project and it is in fact the greatest project, the largest and most expensive project, that the state of Israel has undertaken.
As the settlers have moved in, how have they justified this?
There are a number of different motivations for moving to the settlements. Broadly speaking, there are three groups of settlers.
There are ideologically driven settlers who believe that the West Bank is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and that they have every right to build homes and establish Israeli sovereignty in these areas, no less so than Israel had a right to establish settlements in 78 percent of historic Palestine, the borders of Israel prior to 1967. And this is an argument that they make to their detractors in Israeli politics.
The second type of settler is just an ordinary middle-class or upper middle-class person who is moving there because there are financial incentives to do so. You can have a nicer home, a larger home, a less expensive home. And because it has all been set up in a way that makes it painless to live there and gives you the sense that this is really no different than any other suburb, members of the middle class do move there. What happens over time is they often start to shift ideologically after moving there because every human being naturally wants to feel justified in what they’re doing.
The third type are ultra-Orthodox Jews, and they historically had avoided living in settlements. But that changed. And they live in a few settlements, but they’re very large and dense. And those settlements are, for the most part, closer to the edge of the West Bank, closer to the boundary with pre-1967 Israel.
How do Palestinian and Jewish residents of the West Bank interact with each other? Do they interact with each other, typically?
The Palestinian and Jewish communities in the West Bank are entirely segregated and the settlements have gates at their entrances and security guards at those gates. Palestinians are not allowed to enter them unless they are coming as pre-approved workers, as cleaners or gardeners or construction workers. That’s the degree of segregation that exists in the West Bank. [Israel justifies these measures as necessary for the security of both Jewish and Palestinian populations, but human rights groups like B’Tselem say these tactics are entirely geared toward making Palestinians’ lives unbearable and forcibly driving them off their land.]
So this is a highly unequal situation. If you are Palestinian in the West Bank, you are subject to restrictions. You are subject to inequities. But then on top of that, Nathan, we hear about settler violence. What does this refer to? What does that mean?
So settler violence is a broad term that includes everything from settlers going and burning down olive trees of Palestinians who live nearby. It includes raids on Palestinian communities in the middle of the night. It includes activities that Israeli officials even have referred to as pogroms, such as the burning of all kinds of property in the town of Huwara earlier this year or in the town of Turmus Ayya last June.
The Palestinians who are attacked are entirely defenseless in this situation. [Israel points to terror attacks by Hamas, including a November 30 shooting at a bus stop in west Jerusalem, as a reason to maintain security measures.] They know that if they lay a single finger on an armed settler who enters their home, they can be arrested and put in jail and locked up in what is known as administrative detention, which is detention without trial or charge. Israel can do that for six months to somebody, and then extend it indefinitely.
And so when a Palestinian encounters a settler militia, they know that putting their finger on that settler is not putting their hand on an individual. It’s putting their hand on the entire state of Israel, this enormous machine that controls their every movement and that can arrest them and their family members at any moment.
How is it that the settlers can commit such violence without legal repercussions? Where does the law fit in here?
The law doesn’t fit in here because there is total impunity for the settlers. When there are cases filed against settlers for attacks on Palestinians, fewer than 10 percent result in an indictment and only 3 percent result in a conviction. That’s data from the last 18 years. And now after October 7, when most of the regular army is off in Gaza or on the border with Lebanon, you have those same settlers who were attacking the Palestinian communities several months ago, now in uniform [called up from the reserves], with full authority to do those same attacks as the army.
We know that there will be an end in Gaza. We don’t know what it is. And it sounds as though the Netanyahu government and the international community are actively debating, discussing, what the end in Gaza will look like. But in the West Bank, it seems as though there is no end in mind. How do you envision this playing out? Where do you think this is all leading, Nathan?
No matter how long this war in Gaza lasts, whether it’s weeks or months or years, at the end of it, we are going to be in the situation that we were in on October 6, which is 7 million Palestinians, 7 million Jews, all living under Israeli rule. And the vast majority of those Palestinians don’t have basic civil rights. That’s the situation that the international community and the United States will need to address if they want to see an end to this recurrent bloodshed.
Money always helps, but for the very poor, one lump sum can last a long time.
Large sections of my brain that could contain useful knowledge are instead filled up with dumb tweets I saw years ago. One of my absolute favorites was someone identifying himself only as “Side Hustle King,” who would ask his followers, “Would you rather get paid $1,000,000 right now or $50 every month for the rest of your life? I’ll take Option B. That’s what passive income is.”
To save you some arithmetic: Unless you plan to live at least another 1,667 years (which is what it would take to make $1 million in $50 monthly increments) and do not care about inflation, Side Hustle King is mistaken. Option A is far better. It’s a case in point that, sometimes, you should take the lump sum, not regular payments.
GiveDirectly, a charitable nonprofit that sends cash directly to low-income households, has identified another such case, one where the answer was a little less obvious. For years now, GiveDirectly has been conducting the world’s largest test of basic income: It is giving around 6,000 people in rural Kenya a little more than $20 a month, every month, starting in 2016 and going until 2028. Tens of thousands more people are getting shorter-term or differently structured payments.
One of the big questions GiveDirectly is trying to answer is how to direct cash to low-income households. “Just give cash” is a fun thing to say, but it elides some important operational details. It matters whether someone gets $20 a month for two years or $480 all at once. Those add up to the same amount of money; this isn’t a Side Hustle King situation. But how you get the money still matters. A certain $20 every month can help you budget and take care of regular expenses, while $480 all at once can give you enough capital to start a business or another big project.
The case for giving all the money upfront
The latest research on the GiveDirectly pilot, done by MIT economists Tavneet Suri and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, compares three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group. The paper is still being finalized, but Suri and Banerjee shared some results on a call with reporters this week.
By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group. “You end up seeing a doubling of net revenues” — or profits from small businesses — in the lump sum group, Suri said. The effects were about half that for the short-term $20-a-month group.
The explanation they arrived at was that the big $500 all at once provided valuable startup capital for new businesses and farms, which the $20 a month group would need to very conscientiously save over time to replicate. “The lump sum group doesn’t have to save,” Suri explains. “They just have the money upfront and can invest it.”
Intriguingly, the results for the long-term monthly group, which will receive about $20 a month for 12 years rather than two, had results that looked more like the lump sum group. The reason, Suri and Banerjee find, is that they used rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). These are institutions that sprout up in small communities, especially in the developing world, where members pay small amounts regularly into a common fund in exchange for the right to withdraw a larger amount every so often.
“It converts the small streams into lump sums,” Suri summarizes. “We see that the long-term arm is actually using ROSCAs. A lot of their UBI is going into ROSCAs to generate these lump sums they can use to invest.”
I visited one of the villages receiving the 12-year UBI back in October 2016, and even then I observed people putting together ROSCAs and making plans to accumulate cash to invest. Edwine Odongo Anyango, a father of two and handyman who was 29 at the time, told me he had formed a ROSCA with 10 friends. “The monthly thing is not bad, but I think a lump sum payment would be better,” he told me. “That way you can do a big project at once.”
But I was surprised by just how often this attitude was reflected in Suri and Banerjee’s data. They found that the smallest increase in consumption — in actual regular spending on things like food and clothing — was in the long-term UBI group, which you might think is the group most able to spend a bit more every month. For the most part, they don’t do that: They invest the money instead.
The advantages of monthly
As you might expect, given how entrepreneurially minded the recipients are, the researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol — two common criticisms of direct cash giving. In fact, so many people who used to work for wages instead started businesses that there was less competition for wage work, and overall wages in villages rose as a result.
And they found one major advantage for monthly payments over lump sum ones, despite the big benefits of lump sum payments for business formation. People who got monthly checks were generally happier and reported better mental health than lump sum recipients. “The lump sum group gets a huge amount of money and has to invest it, and this might cause them some stress,” Suri speculates. In any case, the long-term monthly recipients are happiest of all, and “some of that is because they know it’s going to be there for 12 years … It provides mental health benefits in a stability sense.”
I think this points to the takeaway from this research not being “just give people a lump sum no matter what.” Ideally, you could ask specific people how they would prefer to get money. For instance, if you were a Kenya politician designing a basic income policy on a permanent basis, you could design it such that a recipient could opt into a $500 payment every two years or a $20 payment every month.
But barring that, long-term monthly payments seem to offer the best of all worlds because they enable people to use ROSCAs to generate lump sum payments when they want them. That enables flexibility: People who want monthly payments can get them, and people who need cash upfront can organize with their peers to get that.
The scandal-plagued Congress member has finally reached the end of the line.
On Friday, scandal-plagued Rep. George Santos (R-NY) officially became the sixth-ever lawmaker to be expelled from the House. Santos’s expulsion followed two previous failed expulsion votes, significant scrutiny of the lies he’s told about his work and personal history, a federal indictment, and a scathing investigation by the House Ethics Committee.
In the end, the House voted 311-114 to expel Santos, with 105 Republicans and 206 Democrats voting in favor of removing him. Two Democrats and 112 Republicans voted against removing him, while two other Democrats voted present.
One big thing that tipped some lawmakers over the edge — and offered Republicans cover to support Santos’s expulsion — was the eight-month investigation by the House Ethics Committee, which was released in mid-November. That report found “substantial evidence” that Santos broke federal law and that he “fraudulently exploit[ed] every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.”
Many of Santos’s GOP colleagues gave the findings significant weight because the report was put together by a bipartisan House committee of lawmakers, a fact that gave some members the concrete justification they needed to take action. “I did not vote in the past to expel George because I didn’t believe there was due process,” Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, a Republican who had previously opposed expelling Santos, told MSNBC. “I think he’s been given the fair due process now.”
Santos has called the report’s findings “biased” and a “politicized smear” created by colleagues who want him out of office. He told participants in an X Space (an audio chat on the platform formerly known as Twitter) that an expulsion vote wouldn’t be about any charges he may face, but that, “I’ll be expelled because people simply did not like me.”
Santos lobbed other critiques — and threats — at his colleagues ahead of his expulsion, saying, “I will have fun on my way out. Don’t worry about it. And I have plenty of receipts.”
In remarks earlier this week, Santos referred to allegations of domestic violence that Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) has faced, and accused the lawmaker of “hypocrisy.” Previously, Santos has also suggested that some Republicans are engaging in infidelity and excessive drinking rather than properly doing their work. “I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk with the next lobbyist that they’re gonna screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on and sell out the American people,” he said in the X Space.
Following Friday’s vote, Santos kept up his comments, arguing that, “they just set new dangerous precedent for themselves,” adding, “To hell with this place.”
Santos has long maintained that he hasn’t committed any crimes, and pleaded “not guilty” to a 23-count federal indictment in a case that will go to trial next year. Now that he’s been expelled, a special election will be held to find a replacement to serve out the remainder of his term in New York’s third Congressional district.
What the ethics investigation said and how it changed things
The biggest game changer in Santos’s case was the ethics investigation, which concluded that Santos “blatantly stole from his campaign” and that he used campaign funds for personal gain and services including Botox, OnlyFans, and luxury trips.
Additionally, they found he misrepresented the use of these funds to donors and didn’t properly file reports to the Federal Election Commission. The lawmakers referred Santos’s case to the Justice Department for any potential penalties, and shortly after the report’s release, House Ethics Chair Michael Guest (R-MS) filed a resolution for Santos’s expulsion.
Prior to its release, a number of House Republicans said they’d wait until the ethics report came out before they drew definitive conclusions about Santos. These findings, however, were explosive enough that they convinced some of these Republicans to firmly state their support for expulsion and ultimately vote for it. Reps. Greg Murphy (R-NC), Stephanie Bice (R-OK), and Dusty Johnson (R-SD) were among those who changed their positions.
“I purposely waited for the results of the Ethics Committee’s report to come out before passing judgment,” said Murphy in a statement ahead of the vote. “However, given its findings of the facts of this case, I find his behavior reprehensible and not worthy of a member of Congress. I will vote to expel him.”
“The amount of fraud and abuse was something that was unprecedented. We’ve never seen that before,” Guest, who had also voted against Santos’s expulsion prior to the report, told SuperTalk Mississippi Radio.
The investigation’s results add to a whole slew of federal charges and scandals that Santos faces, including the 23-count federal indictment that charges him with identity theft, wire fraud, credit card fraud, and money laundering. That indictment accuses him of making charges on donors’ credit cards without their knowledge and fabricating records about loans and contributions his campaign received.
Beyond the federal charges he faces, Santos has also been scrutinized for lying extensively about his past, including claiming that he had attended Baruch College, that he had worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and that he had Jewish ancestry, all of which have been debunked.
In the past, Republicans have balked at voting to expel Santos not just because the ethics investigation was ongoing but because his district is a competitive one. Santos won the Long Island and Queens district by 8 points in 2022, and since he’s been expelled it’s possible that Democrats could retake it. The Cook Political Report has his district rated as leaning Democratic in 2024.
Both Republicans and Democrats now expect a heavily contested special election to find Santos’s replacement in the coming months.
Update, December 1, 1:05 pm ET: This story was originally published on November 28 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with the outcome of the expulsion vote and Santos’s comments.