As we hear daily news of atrocities committed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank and the fanfare of disingenuous disavowals from Israeli politicians, this acute and devastating book shows in great detail how the settler movement in the West Bank is not an aberration, and their violence and cruelty is a fundamental element of Israeli colonial governance and territorial expansionism.

Laleh Khalili, author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration

As we hear daily news of atrocities committed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank and the fanfare of disingenuous disavowals from Israeli politicians, this acute and devastating book shows in great detail how the settler movement in the West Bank is not an aberration, and their violence and cruelty is a fundamental element of Israeli colonial governance and territorial expansionism.

Laleh Khalili, Professor, University of Exeter, GB

The settler is the state's alibi. Youssef Mnaili's outstanding study shows how Israel has cultivated, in the West Bank, agents it does not fully control, and whose unruliness is precisely the point: they do what the state will not do in its own name. Sponsored violence and licensed lawlessness are not lapses of colonial rule but its method. This book maps the road to genocide in Gaza.

Honaida Ghanim, General Director, MADAR – The Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies, Ramallah

Settler colonialism is one of the most pervasive yet least perceived and understood forms of political control and cultural erasure still prevalent throughout the world – indeed, its strategy of indirect governance renders it invisible and deniable. Youssef Mnaili's study of how Israel really governs the West Bank, through its settler agents in particular, provides a much needed analysis of how such insidious systems continue to thrive

Jeff Halper, Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a co-founder of The One Democratic State Campaign, author of Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State

Mnaili explores the cooperative relationship involving the Israeli settlers ruling the Palestinian West Bank and the Israeli state occupying it. Settlers and state remain separate, and yet the former have infiltrated the latter and its army, and the latter routinely delegates governance prerogatives to the former. What emerges is a symbiotic form of indirect rule now supported by a durable institutional architecture. Mnaili's precise analysis of power relations reveals how settler colonialism operates today in the occupied West Bank.

Lorenzo Veracini, Professor at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, and author of Israel and Settler Society

This compelling and distinctive work offers an illuminating analysis of the evolving relationship between Israeli state power and settler civilians in the ongoing occupation and dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank. Mnaili's central argument is that Israeli colonial rule is a hybrid system in which state institutions and settlers co-produce authority, surveillance, and territorial control, while simultaneously shaping the legitimation of settler governance. This provocative interpretation challenges conventional understandings of the occupation and opens new avenues for enquiry. Theoretically ambitious and empirically rich, this book provides an original and incisive contribution to the study of settler colonialism, state power, and the contemporary West Bank

Mohamed Adhikari, Emeritus Professor, University of Cape Town, author of Civilian-driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies