URI TZAFON- FAR RIGHT MOVEMENT

Uri Tzafon is the far-right movement pushing for Jewish settlement of southern Lebanon.. A growing movement in Israel has begun to argue that the only way to guarantee lasting security in the North is not merely military control of territory but the establishment of permanent Jewish communities there. One such initiative is Uri Tzafon (“Awaken, O North”), an organization advocating the settlement of southern Lebanon as a long-term security solution.

Uri Tzafon is backed by an organized movement with broad support from politicians and the media. Uri Tzafon’s informal, oft-repeated motto is “occupation, expulsion, settlement.” It has advanced the idea that Israel must move its northern border to the Litani River—which bisects Lebanon about 15 miles north of the current Israeli boundary—and occupy a depopulated southern Lebanon, comprising some 10% of Lebanon’s total territory.

In response to the joint US and Israel war on Iran, Israeli public figures have called calling for the occupation and depopulation of southern Lebanon—a claim repeated again and again by mainstream Israeli media personalities. Retired military leaders and politicians also voice their support, and members of Knesset have joined the call for occupation. On April 7th, 20 members of Knesset (MKs) wrote to the Israeli cabinet advocating for “occupation and full control” of southern Lebanon alongside “the complete displacement of the population.” One poll found that 62% of Israelis now support the idea of occupying all of Lebanon south of the Litani River.

These aspirations are being translated into policy: On March 24th, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that the military would control southern Lebanon up to the Litani, and prevent the return of hundreds of thousands of residents. A week later, he said that all homes near the border would be destroyed, “like in Rafah and Beit Hanoun,” in order “to permanently remove border-adjacent threats.” Israel has now issued evacuation orders for about 15% of Lebanon’s territory, part of its campaign to ethnically cleanse the southern part of the country, specifically of Shiite Muslims. (Hezbollah is a Shiite organization.) “Every home in southern Lebanon, the Shiite homes, are control command centers, they hold weapon supplies, they have tunnels going beneath them,” Israeli military spokesperson Doron Spielman recently said, in comments chillingly reminiscent of Israel’s justification for the destruction of Gaza. Over a million people have already been displaced from southern Lebanon, and over 2,000 people have been killed, with nearly 6,000 injured.

This sets the stage for Uri Tzafon’s final horizon—civilian settlements—another idea which is gaining steam. Rabbis, families of fallen soldiers and pundits have called for settlements in Lebanon over the last weeks. In 2024, the sole Knesset member who had expressed support for civilian settlements in southern Lebanon was Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the conservative, nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party. Now, that is changing. Religious Zionist MK Ohad Tal posted that he supported “annexation and Israeli settlement” of southern Lebanon, while Jewish Power MK Yitzhak Kroizer announced that “sovereignty and settlement are the keys for peace and security.” Likud MK Ariel Kallner joined with Uri Tzafon in leading a tour of the northern border in March, and on April 9th, Finance Minister and Religious Zionist MK Bezalel Smotrich called for settlements in Lebanon at an event inaugurating the illegal settlement of Maoz Tzur in the West Bank, saying, “There will be a political step in Lebanon that expands our borders.”

On April 8th, hours after the US and Iran announced a shaky ceasefire, Israel launched the deadliest attack in Lebanon in decades. The campaign, which the military termed “Operation Eternal Darkness,” used thousand-pound bombs to strike densely populated residential neighborhoods of Beirut, killing over350 people and injuring at least 1,165 in ten minutes. The message seemed to be: Our work here isn’t done. In a poll the following day, 82% of Israelis said they wanted the war with Lebanon to continue.

In the meantime, this dynamic of the right upping the ante continues, as some of the movement’s leaders have begun setting their sights even further north. The Hottest Place in Hell, an Israeli news site, reported this month that Amos Azaria, one of Uri Tzafon’s co-founders, said on a recent Zoom call that as the military has continued its operations in south Lebanon, Uri Tzafon has decided “to start talking a bit more about the Zaharani, and not just the Litani,” referring to a river another dozen miles deeper into Lebanon. There is nothing surprising in this. “That’s how the settlement movement started,”

Israel’s war in Lebanon can be seen as expressing three distinct, but overlapping, motivations, from different factions within the state. Hawkish elements in the military and security establishment may see the atmosphere of regional chaos as a good opportunity to crush a major enemy, and see an expanded Israeli military presence in Lebanese territory in these terms. The government has declared an intention to establish a permanent, Israeli-controlled “buffer zone” 10km deep into Lebanon.

For the messianic religious far right, seizing and holding land is part of a theologically-motivated project of territorial expansion. Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, leaders of this current, do not directly determine military strategy. Nevertheless, their role as power-brokers in a fragile government coalition means their influence can act as an accelerant.

A group of 18 members of the Knesset (Israeli parliament) from Ben Gvir’s party Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, and Netanyahu’s Likud published an open letter to the security cabinet on 5 April, calling for “occupation and full control” of the territory between Israel’s current northern border with Lebanon, and the Litani river. The open letter poses its call in military-security terms, but for Ben Gvir and Smotrich, the motivation is undoubtedly also theological.

One settler organization, Uri Tzafon (Awake, O North), has argued: “The idea of settlement in Lebanon sounds as detached from reality to the Israeli ear as settlement on the planet Venus, but it is not. [...] What is ‘south Lebanon’ actually? It is simply the Northern Galilee. The clear natural border between Israel and the Lebanon Mountains runs along the Litani River, Lebanon’s greatest river, an area about which Moses said: ‘A land with brooks, streams, and deep springs gushing out into the valleys and hills.”

Uri Tzafon is a fringe organization, but the recent history of Israeli politics, where the Kahanist current represented by Itamar Ben Gvir has gone from being widely regarded as criminal to being at the heart of government, shows that fringe ideas can become mainstream.

A third motivation is electoral. Israel is due for a general election in the autumn. Almost all polls show the current governing coalition would lose. The two most recent polls conducted by the Maariv newspaper, politically centrist and the country’s fourth-largest daily newspaper, show coalition parties winning 49 seats, with opposition parties winning 61. Netanyahu will surely calculate that his chances of retaining power will be significantly increased if he can prolong, or resume, wars with Iran and Hezbollah as close to the elections as possible.

Thousands of people in Lebanon and Iran, and some dozens in Israel (and in Palestine: four people in the West Bank have also been killed by Iranian missiles), are paying with their lives for the messianic ambitions of the settler movement, and the megalomania of a would-be authoritarian dictator.

With global condemnation of settler terror growing, including from many mainstream-Zionist, Jewish-diaspora organisations and individuals, a meeting of the Israeli security cabinet on 25 March reportedly approved a directive against “nationalist crimes” in the West Bank, with plans for additional resources to clamp down on settler attacks. However, the same meeting also approved 34 new settlements, suggesting moves against settler terror are likely to be superficial. Settler violence is undertaken to intimidate, displace, and in some cases murder Palestinians, in order to claim property and land for settlers. In a context in which the government is expanding settlements in order to “bury” prospects for a Palestinian state, armed settlers can legitimately claim to be the shock troops of state policy.

Anti-war protests in Israel have continued. On 4 April, Alon-Lee Green, the national co-director of the left-wing binational (Palestinian-Jewish) social movement Standing Together, was arrested at a protest in Tel Aviv, along with fellow activist Nadav Oren. More than 20 people have been arrested during recent anti-war protests, including 13 people at one demonstration in Tel Aviv on 28 March.