Australian citizen, Palestinian farmer and vigneron Sari Kassis, whose family company Domaine Kassis wines sells both locally and overseas, has reported that over the past two weeks there has been a rapid increase in destructive raids on his farm by the Israeli “Hilltop Youth”.

His farm is near Bir Zeit, just north of Ramallah. These youth, supported by the Israeli Defence Forces, break open the fences, then let the sheep that they have stolen from Palestinian herders and others into the vineyard, doing damage to the vines, olive trees and crops. The settlers are extremely violent when attacking villagers harvesting their olives. In the past week, a crowd of extremist youth near the Crusader village of Turmusaya beat a woman so viciously that she sustained a serious head injury. A young man also sustained injuries.

During this past year, under the direction of Israeli Finance Minister, Bazalel Smotrich, there has been an exponential rise of violence in these outpost settlements across the Occupied West Bank. National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, formerly from the Kach party, now outlawed and sanctioned for terrorism, has been distributing guns to the illegal settlers. Previously, the focus of land theft was in more limited areas; now these settlements can be found across the north, central and southern parts of the West Bank, deliberately seeking to break up Palestinian territories, creating isolated cantons which will result in an unsustainable Palestinian state.

The relationship between the IDF and the settlers is clear as Kassis explains: ”The IDF has recently declared a security zone around a settlement near my farm so that we now need permits to access these lands, including part of my land." At least 20 or 30 farmers are affected and these are active farms, not just grazing lands. He says, “I believe their intentions are very clear, they want to chase us off the land.”

One of the strategies that settlers use, particularly during the olive season, a critical economic time for farmers, is to attack the farms, cutting holes in fences and entering the land to try to chase off farm volunteers and workers. Kassis explains the frustration Palestinian farmers feel when faced with a man who has illegally entered his land, stolen his sheep and crops, when he can only retaliate by holding up a phone and filming this violation. To do otherwise will incur the vicious and often violent wrath of the settlers as well as the IDF soldiers who protect them. Recently, Israel has deported scores of international observers who try expose the settler attacks.

Kassis goes on to explain that when they called the police, now under the extremist Ben-Gvir, “they take us away and when asked why, we are told that the police had a complaint that we were throwing rocks at the settlers when the reverse was true. The settlers tell the police that this was their land and that we were coming in and destroying their land. In such circumstances we take the settlers to court and win the case and then the police will remove the settlers off the land and tell us to ‘report them if this happens again as the safety of all is paramount to us’.

“When the settlers come back, we call the police with our court order, the police then come again and dismantle the camp, but by the end of the day the settlers have re-erected the camp. If we call the Palestinian Authority, they wouldn’t come as they are not allowed to engage with Israeli citizens. It is a dispiriting and vicious merry-go-round.”

Palestinians report that a majority of the Hilltop Youth are European or US settlers, though there are a lot of Russian speakers as well as Israeli Yemeni “lost children”. These children are similar to Australia’s Stolen Generations, as some were taken from their Jewish Yemeni parents soon after being pushed to migrate to Israel in the early 1950s. Four inquiry committees have not definitely determined if these missing babies died in state hospitals or if they were stolen and given to other families.

The relationship between these extremist settler youth, and Messianic Jews and Christian Zionists pushing the settler movement in the US, is apparent. It was shown recently when, in a village called Um Safa, a huge US flag could be seen flying over one of the houses. When locals asked about it, they were told that a wealthy American was coming who had given a huge donation to this settlement. In a newly established settlement close to where Kassis lives, the head of settlement is a tall American woman straight out of Brooklyn in the US. In Brooklyn, as in Israel and the West Bank, posters and graffiti proclaim that “Kahane was right”, a slogan characteristic of the Hilltop Youth movement.

The ideology that these extremist Hilltop settlers adhere to is that of Kahanism a violent, extremist and messianic movement that advocates for the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from both Israel and the Occupied Territories. The leader of this movement, Meir Ettinger, has called for the destruction of what he calls the ”secular” state of Israel and State of Palestine, both to be replaced by a religious society based on Biblical principles, believing that the Palestinian land was given to them by God. These extremist and messianic views have influenced terrorist acts such as the massacre of Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in February 1994, carried out by the Kach militant Baruch Goldstein from the US, and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 by Yigal Amir.

The former head of Israel’s security agency Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, sacked by Prime Minister Netanyahu in March this year, warned in a letter to the government in August 2024 that Jewish terrorism in the West Bank is out of control and has become a serious threat to national security. “. . . the use of violence to create intimidation, to spread fear. That is terror”, he wrote, describing how the campaign had “significantly expanded” in the absence of an adequate police response and with the connivance of some national leaders. The militants had gone from using “cigarette lighters to the weapons of war”, Bar said, adding that some of those weapons had been provided by the state. The terror campaign, the letter said, was “a large stain on Judaism and on all of us”.

The extent and serious impact on Palestinians of this rampaging by settlers can be seen in the latest United Nations figures that show in the past 18 months between January 2024 to September 2025, illegal settlers, in conjunction with the IDF in the West Bank, have killed 609 Palestinians of whom 131 were children. There were 6140 injured, of whom 1181 were children. The settlers demolished 3164 residential and agricultural structures.

In response to this rise in settler terrorism, in 2024 the European Union put Hilltop Youth as well as the related Lehava groups on its asset freeze and visa bans, declaring them to be extremist organisations. And in July 2024 Australia followed suit, imposing financial sanctions and travel bans on seven Israelis and a youth group which Canberra says has been involved in violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Several Kahanist organisations, including those to which Ben-Gvir belonged, and Hilltop Youth, are on DFAT’s Consolidated List of sanctioned terrorist entities; support for these organisations is a crime in Australia.

Clearly, none of these actions are enough, nor is Australia’s recognition of Palestinian as a state in 2025, as just this week Israel’s parliament passed the first of four stages of a law to impose Israeli sovereignty on the Occupied West Bank. This move, tantamount to annexation, is in clear violation of international law and against the policies of the overwhelming majority of the UN members, several of whom are implementing wide-ranging sanctions. Australia must do the same, otherwise the stance of the international community, and the votes at the UN for a Palestinian state, will end up being an aspiration only.

The question is what actions will Australian diplomats take to protect an Australian citizen and his family business from attacks by Israeli terrorist organisations?

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.