At the time, such an aspiration could not be articulated or voiced due to the political climate, so these extremist leaders resorted to euphemism. But in the past few years, Israeli politicians, have spoken openly about their desire to annex most of the West Bank, including, at one time, Naftali Bennett before he became prime minister. Today, with a government that appears far more aligned with them, the extremist settlers seem to think that the white donkey is in sight.

The far-right Israeli cabinet minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has been a settler activist himself, is now the de facto minister of the West Bank. The new Israeli government has declared its commitment to a policy that strives to boost Israeli presence and diminish the Palestinian footprint in Area C. The area is envisioned under the Oslo Accords to be gradually handed over to the Palestinian Authority but remains under Israeli control. It covers 60 percent of the West Bank, and includes all of the Jewish settlements. The current government has just issued a new policy that will speed up the approval process for settlement construction and advanced plans for building more than 4,000 new settlements units there.

The Biden administration has issued welcome condemnations of settler violence and of Israel’s failure to confront it, as well as of the Israeli government’s settlement expansion policy. But judging by these public announcements, it may be missing the full importance of this dangerous shift in both the motivation behind the attacks and the government’s position. Washington is reacting to settler violence mainly as a failure of the Israeli authorities to enforce the law on violent settlers, and to settlement policies as an impediment to a future peace agreement. Both are correct, but they do not address the prospect of these policies and practices to drive out West Bank Palestinians.

Already, in May, the entire population of Ein Samiya, a tiny Palestinian community of about 200 people northeast of Ramallah, packed up their modest belongings and fled their homes following unrelenting attacks by neighboring settlers. “We decided to leave out of fear of the settlers,” Khader, a father of nine, told Haaretz’s Hagar Shezaf. “I left for my children. My youngest said to me, ‘I don’t want to live here — the settlers come and throw stones. Tomorrow they could kill me.’”

But even as the settlers terrorize their Palestinian neighbors with increasing frequency and ferocity, their actions have come with little consequence; Israeli authorities seldom prosecute or convict them. In some recent attacks, Israeli military and police officers have even been documented standing idly by as settlers stormed and burned Palestinian villages.

Last week, after calling on settlers to abide by the country’s laws, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would immediately advance plans to build 1,000 new homes in the settlement where Palestinian terrorists killed four Israelis, as a response to the attack.

This is a striking departure from the promises Israel made as settlers burned and destroyed buildings in several Palestinian villages in February. In the Aqaba agreement, the result of a summit in Jordan convened by the U.S., Egypt and Jordan that brought the Palestinians and Israelis together for talks for the first time in over 10 years, both sides “reaffirmed the necessity of committing to de-escalation on the ground and to prevent further violence.”

Building one thousand new homes for settlers is unlikely to de-escalate anything. The Biden administration and Israel’s Arab neighbors should not allow the Israeli government to go back on its word to contain violence enacted by its own citizens. Thirty-five years after Ms. Porat’s death, the vigilante justice crudely advocated by the settler at her funeral is becoming dangerously normalized.

Ori Nir, the vice president of public affairs for Americans for Peace Now, was the West Bank correspondent of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper between 1986 and 1990, and between 1994 and 1996.

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