In July, British journalist Piers Morgan asked Daniella Weiss, an Israeli settler leader appearing on his show, how she felt about the killing of 20,000 Palestinian children in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Ms. Weiss, dressed in a crisp white button-down shirt and a blue-and-white patterned headscarf, responded with a grin, “Arabs around should stop attacking Israel.” Mr. Morgan repeated the question six more times, before pressing her: “I will give you one last chance to offer some sympathy, or empathy or sorrow about the deaths of 20,000 children in Gaza. Are you capable of doing that?” Ms. Weiss’s initial response was a laugh, followed by repeated claims that Arab children are taught “to hate Jews”. “You know what, you couldn’t give a damn, could you? You don’t care and all you want is all the Palestinians gone,” said a visibly irritated Mr. Morgan before wrapping up the session, with a smiling Ms. Weiss remarking, “The audience will judge”.
Ms. Weiss, a prominent figure in the settler movement since the 1970s, which has promoted illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, returned to the spotlight in recent years after Hamas’s October 7 attack. After the war began, Ms. Weiss stepped up her campaign to resume Jewish settlements in Gaza, while settlers went on rampages in the West Bank against the local Palestinian communities.
Born in 1945 in Bnei Brak, an Orthodox Jewish suburb of Tel Aviv, then part of the British-ruled Palestine, Daniella Weiss grew up attending a religious school in Ramat Gan before studying English literature and philosophy at Bar-Ilan University. Her father, born in the U.S., and mother, born in Poland, were members of Lehi(the Fighters of the Freedom of Israel), a Zionist paramilitary group founded in 1940, in Palestine.
The ‘miracle’ of 1967
After the 1967 war, in which Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza and Sinai from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria, a new wave of Zionist activism pushed for settlements in the occupied territories. Ms. Weiss, who described the outcome of the war as “a miracle… in the dimensions of a Biblical scene”, joined Gush Emunim, a right-wing extremist settler movement. “I felt that I wanted to be an active part in this miraculous happening,” she later said about her association with the settler movement.
Ms. Weiss and her family settled in the West Bank settlement of Kedumim, where she served as the Mayor from 1996 to 2007. Since the 1970s, settlements have flourished in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Today, roughly 4,50,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank and 2,50,000 in East Jerusalem. In 2005, more than 10,000 settlers in Gaza were pulled back by the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, following five years of violent Hamas resistance during the Second Intifada — a decision Ms. Weiss calls “a mistake”. She claims hundreds of Jews are today ready to move into Gaza immediately if they get government permission.
A close ally of Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister who advocates the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and its resettlement with Jews, Ms. Weiss is currently affiliated with the Nachala Settlement Movement, which works to expand Jewish settlements in disputed areas. Nachala, which calls for “conquest, immigration and settlement in Gaza”, says it has already registered 500 families for future settlement in the enclave. The group wants the war to continue “until the enemy is destroyed”. Its main slogan: “Twenty years later, we are returning to the Gaza Strip.” In November 2024, Ms. Weiss went to northern Gaza in an IDF-sanctioned trip to survey locations for Jewish resettlements.
Since the October 7 attacks, violence by Jewish settlers against the local Palestinian population has surged. Sixteen Palestinian communities have been driven from their land and 175 Palestinians killed. The escalating attacks prompted the Canadian and British governments to impose sanctions on Jewish settler leaders, including Ms. Weiss.
But Ms. Weiss does not seem to care. For her, the borders of the Jewish nation stretch from “the Euphrates in the east to the Nile in the southwest” (this would include a host of modern states in West Asia and Africa such as Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and part of Egypt). As for Gaza, she is unequivocal. “Gaza Arabs will not stay in the Gaza Strip. Who will stay? Jews,” she said recently. “The world is wide. Africa is big. Canada is big. The world will absorb the people of Gaza. How do we do it? We encourage it.”
Published – August 10, 2025 01:37 am IST