Observers have been saying for years that what is happening in the West Bank is ethnic cleansing. But now voices from the heart of the Israeli consensus are admitting it as well. Ron Ben-Yishai, the veteran military correspondent with the deepest ties to the IDF of any reporter wrote the following in a column for Ynet this morning:

1) He toured the West Bank and saw a repeated pattern. Settlers establish an outpost a few hundred meters from a Palestinian village, often funded by local councils with taxpayer money. Caravans, water tanks, generators, and livestock pens appear almost overnight. The IDF issues demolition orders but delays enforcement, while small army details end up effectively guarding the outposts.

2) Youth from these outposts conduct 24/7 “provocation patrols,” entering villages on foot or in ATVs provided by the Israeli government. Israeli flags get planted meters from Palestinian tents; barbed-wire fences annex thousands of dunams of grazing land.

3) He saw hundreds of productive olive trees cut down on private Palestinian land, far more than any military order authorized, apparently by a contractor paid from the defense budget.

4) IDF units include soldiers who ideologically sympathize with the settlers and stand by, or even help.

5) He calls this pattern organized, sophisticated, government-funded activity with a long-term strategic goal: clearing most of the West Bank of Palestinian presence and annexing it. He explicitly frames it as ethnic cleansing.

6) Ben-Yishai writes that if this group succeeds, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren will live in a binational Middle Eastern state where Jews are a minority.

The piece is shockingly blunt for a middle of the road military correspondent. This is not Haaretz or +972. This is Ynet and Ron Ben-Yishai. I was really stunned to see this. Hopefully some normie Israelis are waking up to the horror of what Israel is doing.