Good morning. The settler movement in Israel is capitalizing on the moment and has designs beyond Gaza and the West Bank. More on that below, along with news on extending ceasefires and ending scams. But First:

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Israel’s shift to the right, even to the far right, has been driven by the trauma of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Iran-backed militia Hamas that killed 1,200 people and saw 251 others taken hostage. A new mainstream belief is that Israel can only protect itself by expanding its territory. And now, with the U.S. at their side, settlers believe their dream of a “Greater Israel” − an idea rooted in a biblical passage in which God promises Abraham “this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates” − is closer than ever.

The Globe and Mail’s senior international correspondent, Mark MacKinnon, spent time in the region to learn more about the settler movement and its influence on global politics. Today, he answers questions based on his most recent travels and reporting.

Before we get into things, can you tell us about the settler movement?

So, the Jewish settler movement, since we’re really speaking about Jewish settlers who live beyond the recognized borders of the state of Israel, dates back to the 1967 War. And in the aftermath of that, Israel was left in control of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip − what we call Palestine today − as well as the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt and the Golan Heights of Syria. But shortly after that, small groups of Jewish settlers began establishing homes beyond the legally recognized borders of Israel. So, what started with a few hundred people has grown over the decades that the occupation has persisted to more than 730,000 people today. And as you can imagine, that’s a huge obstacle toward any peace based on the concept of two states.

In your story, you allude to there not being very much of a political pro-peace left in Israel any more. What happened?

It’s one of the biggest changes I’ve clocked. I used to live in Jerusalem 20 years ago, and back then, the political divide was very much between the Labor government headed by people like Ehud Barak and Likud governments headed by people like Benjamin Netanyahu. Labor was the party of the two-state peace solution, and Likud was sort of the peace-process skeptic.

The political debate now is between the right and the far right, and Labor is a non-factor in Israeli elections. There is, of course, still a pro-peace movement. The overriding sense is they are a tiny minority, and all the polls show that the majority of Israelis, or at least Jewish Israelis, want these wars against Hezbollah, against Iran, to continue until Israel achieves its aim of what Benjamin Netanyahu calls reshaping the Middle East.

The settlers you speak to see President Donald Trump as an ally. Can you explain further?

Yeah, the settlers are thrilled with the combination of Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. And particularly Trump is seen as a real advocate for the settlers for what he did in his last term in office. He took two giant steps that reversed decades of American policy and which violated international law. The first was he recognized Israel’s decades-old claim to have annexed the Golan Heights from Syria. By international law, Canada, for instance, considers the Golan Heights to be occupied Syrian territory (There’s now a settlement called Trump Heights up that way). And he moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, de facto recognizing Israel’s claim to all of the holy city as its capital, which puts yet another barricade in front of the Palestinian state.

What can Palestinians do to protect themselves against violence and escalating expansion?

As for what the Palestinians can do, it’s not much. As one of the characters that I interviewed said: ‘What are we supposed to do? We’re a bunch of unarmed farmers trying to defend our land against a bunch of people who have guns and have been told that the Bible gives all this land to them.’ Ever since Oct. 7, we’ve seen an escalating number of deaths in the West Bank, both deaths caused by the Israeli military action and murders by Jewish settlers.

This violence comes hand-in-hand with a spree of new settlements and outposts. Under past Israeli administrations, outposts would eventually get taken down by the government because they weren’t done with any official approval. These days, outposts that go up are generally quickly connected to utility grids and protected by the Israeli military and turned into official settlements. So, this is why the settlers feel that after once being on the fringes of Israeli politics, now they’re the ones driving events, and they have the momentum.

Was there anything else that you learned or experienced on the ground while travelling?

I did a lot of driving around from the south of Israel, the edge of the Gaza Strip, through the West Bank up to northern Israel. Spent a lot of time in Jerusalem and Ramallah as well, interviewing people. What really changed was the sense of impunity that the settlers feel. Previous trips to the West Bank, if I saw settlers and I wanted to understand what they were doing, why they were doing it, I’d often just sort of drive up to them, say shalom, say I was press. What’s changed now? As you’ve seen, a series of attacks by settlers, even targeting big international media outlets such as CNN and Deutsche Welle, the German public broadcaster. And in this particular case, I was on a hill near Nablus, where there had been a couple of murders by settlers recently, and I saw the settlers watching us from the valley below. And I thought I should go down there and talk to them, hear their version of events. And the Palestinians were saying: Please don’t go near them – that they’ll either shoot you or they will come back and punish us for having sent you their way. And that was a sense you felt everywhere you went with the settlers. I found another group of settlers on the edge of the Gaza Strip and tried to ask them some questions. The response I got was we don’t care about the international community. We don’t care about the world. God gave us permission to be here.

So, is it fair to think Netanyahu is in a strong position to keep power in upcoming elections?

Had the Iran war gone according to the Trump-Netanyahu plan, I think there would have been elections quite quickly, with Netanyahu running on a platform of, look, I’m the one who solved all of our problems, first Gaza, then Lebanon, now Iran, and with the help of my good friend Donald Trump, would you want to change any of this? And that would be a very strong security platform for him to run on. So far, Iran is showing quite a bit of resilience, and that does have an impact on Israeli politics. We’re not seeing the snap election call that I think might have been possible otherwise. There’s a sense that the Israeli opposition is scattered, and Netanyahu remains sort of the dominant figure in the political scene, despite the corruption charges against him, despite the accusations of war crimes with the International Criminal Court.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.