The video threatens to replicate West Bank settlement policies in Palestinian communities inside '48, as his party fights to retain parliamentary representation
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has released an AI-generated campaign video threatening to extend the model of settlement expansion used in the occupied West Bank to Palestinian communities in the Galilee and Negev.
The video, circulated by Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party under the slogan "Ahmed is right to be afraid", depicts two Palestinian men in distress. One, presented as a Palestinian from the occupied West Bank, calls another Palestinian man inside Israel to warn him that Smotrich is coming to do "the same thing he did to us".
"He will seize lands, establish towns and farms; everything is now lost for us," the animated character says, in an unusually blunt acknowledgement of what Palestinians argue is the dispossession that comes with Israel’s settlement project.
יש לאחמד ממה לפחד. מהפכת ההתיישבות ביהודה ושומרון מגיעה לנגב ולגליל - ובענק. צפו >>> https://t.co/QUJuseM3GD pic.twitter.com/xnJafA8V0h
— בצלאל סמוטריץ' (@bezalelsm)
August 27, 2026
The party frames that prospect as a campaign promise. Smotrich has announced a plan to "Judaise" the Galilee and the Negev — regions with large Palestinian populations — by bringing one million additional Jewish Israelis to the two areas, establishing 40 new communities and dozens of farms, expanding existing towns, and building hundreds of thousands of housing units.
He has vowed to replace officials deemed insufficiently "Zionist". Speaking about Palestinian citizens of Israel, Smotrich claimed that Arabs had "occupied" the Galilee and Negev.
The plan is not simply a demographic-development proposal. Smotrich explicitly said it would replicate what he called "revolution" carried out in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli settlements have expanded rapidly under the current government.
More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in West Bank settlements, which are illegal under international law; settlement construction, land seizure and the growth of settlement outposts have repeatedly displaced or restricted Palestinian communities.
For Palestinians, the language of “Judaisation” carries the threat of further ethnic cleansing: the use of state planning, land policy, housing and settlement construction to reduce Palestinian control of their land and reshape areas in favour of Jewish Israeli settlement.
Israel is due to hold elections on 27 October, with Religious Zionism battling to clear the 3.25 percent electoral threshold. A recent *Channel 12 *poll placed the party below it, while other recent surveys have put it on roughly four to six Knesset seats — leaving its parliamentary future uncertain.
Analysts argue Smotrich’s rhetoric may therefore be aimed at consolidating the party’s hard-right base, particularly amid growing disillusionment with the far-right leader among national-religious voters due to his support for the ultra-Orthodox factions’ bid for mass Haredi exemption from military service.
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