Attack on Lior Amihai, executive director of ''Peace Now''.

This week, activists from Peace Now said their executive director, Lior Amihai, was attacked by settlers while leading a political tour through settlements and outposts in the occupied West Bank. The delegation reportedly included figures connected to Israel’s Democrats Party, brought there to witness firsthand what peace activists and human rights monitors have spent years documenting: the accelerating transformation of the West Bank landscape through settlement expansion, unauthorized outposts and the gradual displacement of Palestinian communities.

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Peace Now has long operated on a deceptively simple belief: that seeing the occupation up close changes people. Maps and statistics are one thing. Standing on a hilltop and watching roads cut through Palestinian farmland is another entirely. Watching armed settlers establish caravans on ridgelines under military protection carries a different moral weight when witnessed in person.

For decades, the organisation has documented settlement construction, tracked outpost growth and warned that the expanding Israeli presence across the West Bank was steadily eroding the possibility of a negotiated two-state solution. To supporters, it is one of the last remnants of Israel’s old peace camp — diminished politically, often vilified, but still stubbornly active. To its critics, particularly among the nationalist and settler right, it represents something far darker: an internal opposition accused of undermining Israel during a time of war and international isolation.

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That hostility did not emerge overnight. But since the Hamas attacks of 7 October and the devastating war that followed in Gaza, the atmosphere inside Israel and across the occupied territories has become more combustible, more ideological and markedly less tolerant of dissent.

The West Bank has experienced some of its deadliest and most unstable years in decades. Armed settler groups have become increasingly emboldened. Palestinian communities, particularly small rural villages near outposts, have reported mounting intimidation, attacks on property, destruction of olive groves and pressure to leave entirely. Israeli rights organisations and several international observers have warned that these incidents are not isolated acts of chaos, but part of a broader reality in which violence, ideology and territorial expansion increasingly overlap.

What makes the reported attack on Amihai particularly significant is not merely that violence occurred, but who the target was. An Israeli. A Jewish Israeli. A figure operating openly inside the country’s democratic and political framework.

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In earlier decades, Israeli peace activists were controversial but still recognisable participants in public life. Today, many operate under a growing sense that the boundaries of acceptable speech are narrowing. The accusation most commonly directed at them is no longer that they are naïve, but that they are traitorous.

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The symbolism matters. These tours are designed precisely to force Israeli political figures to confront realities often hidden behind military language and political abstraction. The occupation, when viewed on the ground, is physical and immediate: checkpoints, bypass roads, fenced perimeters, armed civilian patrols and fragmented Palestinian communities living beside expanding settlements connected by modern infrastructure.

To critics of the settlement project, this is not temporary security policy but the visible architecture of permanent control.

To the settler movement’s most committed supporters, however, such tours are perceived as hostile political theatre intended to delegitimise Jewish presence in the biblical heartland they believe belongs irrevocably to Israel.

Between those two visions lies a widening abyss.

There is also an uncomfortable historical echo running beneath all of this. Israeli society once feared that extremism incubated in the occupied territories could eventually corrode democratic norms within Israel itself. The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a Jewish extremist was the most traumatic expression of that fear. For a brief period afterward, there was national reckoning — a sense that political incitement carried consequences.

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Three decades later, many veterans of the Israeli peace movement believe that lesson has faded.

The attack on Lior Amihai, if confirmed as described by activists present, is therefore more than a personal assault. It is part of a broader struggle over Israel’s identity, over who gets to define patriotism, and whether opposition to occupation can still exist inside Israeli public life without intimidation.

The deeper danger is not simply the violence itself, but the normalization of it — the slow societal adjustment to scenes that once would have seemed intolerable.

And perhaps that is what alarms peace activists most of all. Not only that they are being attacked, but that fewer and fewer people appear surprised when it happens.

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