JERUSALEM: Attacks on a US journalist and European diplomats in the occupied West Bank have turned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's championing of settlers into a potential liability days before elections, with opponents calling him soft on "Jewish terrorism".
Leading opposition contenders Gadi Eisenkot, Yair Golan and Naftali Bennett, whose politics range widely, all referred to the attacks as "Jewish terrorism" -- a term of the sort that the Netanyahu government bristles at when levelled from abroad.
In separate incidents, settlers ambushed both US photographer Heidi Levine, who remains in hospital, and a European delegation including the top French official in Jerusalem when they went to Palestinian villages east of Ramallah for the olive harvest.
Several Palestinians have been killed in the near-daily attacks by settlers during the harvest which have included beatings, arson and theft.
"What is happening in the West Bank is Jewish terrorism under the auspices of the Israeli government," said centre-right candidate Eisenkot, a former military chief and Netanyahu's main rival in the Oct 27 vote.
Similarly, Yair Golan, from the centre-left, said that "Jewish terror must be fought with an iron fist, just as Palestinian terror is fought," and vowed to restore order in the West Bank should he come to power.
Golan went to visit Levine in hospital, while President Isaac Herzog, who holds a largely ceremonial role, spoke to her by phone.
Netanyahu has challenged the accounts of the attacks and pointed out that Bernard Baudoux, a 78-year-old French mayor who was beaten up, is a leftist supporter of the Palestinian cause.
"These reports come amid concerns about a coordinated campaign to smear Israel and the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria during the annual olive harvest," Netanyahu's office said in a statement, referring to the West Bank by its Biblical name.
Boaz Bismuth, a member of parliament for Netanyahu's Likud party, said in a television interview that "there is no Jewish terrorism in Judea and Samaria".
Netanyahu, in a UN address last month delivered amid mounting international criticism, said the violence was the work of a small number of juvenile delinquents.
Security and governance
Polls show that a dwindling number of Israelis support a Palestinian state, especially after the unprecedented Oct 7, 2023 attack by Hamas from Gaza.
But experts say settler violence, long off the radar politically in Israel, is another matter.
"Even though Israeli society leans to the right and people aren't supportive of a territorial solution right now (with Palestinians), there is high consensus against settler violence," said Alon Yakter, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University.
"This became a soft belly for Netanyahu because he's allied with parties that want to divert the conversation (on settler violence) or treat them as a few rotten apples," said Yakter, who specialises in voting patterns.
He said that the settler violence itself is unlikely to determine how Israelis vote, but it could feed into two issues that matter most to Israeli voters -- security and governance.
"It's better for them (opposition leaders) to portray this violence as a lack of control and governance hurting our security interests," he said.
Eisenkot has vowed to restore the use of administrative detention, through which Israel can detain a suspect without charge, for Jewish suspects.
Under Netanyahu, whose government includes far-right advocates of annexing the West Bank, administrative detention applies only to Palestinians.
Eisenkot vowed to use "an iron fist" against anyone acting outside the law and to prevent settler raids and arson against Palestinians.
Netanyahu's government, one of the most right-wing in Israel's history, has approved or legalised 104 settlements since coming to power in 2022.
More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live across the West Bank, in settlements that are illegal under international law.
Putting issue on radar
Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst on Israel for the International Crisis Group, said that while the settler attacks would not alter the vote, they had made Netanyahu's response an election issue.
"It's part of a discourse about how Netanyahu is actually hurting Israeli national security," she said.
"Netanyahu's statements make him look so beholden to the settler movement and it looks ridiculous just to kind of pretend like (these attacks) didn't actually happen".
But she doubted whether a different future prime minister would ultimately question settlements themselves.
Opposition leaders are "going after the most egregious elements of settler violence but they are not going to upend the settlement enterprise," she said