A sharp diplomatic clash has erupted between a senior far-right Israeli cabinet minister and Germany’s chancellor ahead of Israel’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, centered on escalating Israeli settler activity and violence in the occupied West Bank. Israeli Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a prominent advocate for full Israeli annexation of the West Bank, launched a blistering attack on German Chancellor Friedrich Merz after Merz publicly raised concerns about rampant settler attacks and stated he had made clear to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a recent phone call that any de facto annexation of the West Bank is unacceptable.
Writing on the social platform X on April 13, 2026, just ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Smotrich weaponized the memory of the Nazi Holocaust that killed six million European Jews to accuse Merz and Germany of rank hypocrisy. Instead of lecturing Israel on moral conduct, Smotrich argued, the German chancellor should “bow his head and apologise a thousand times on behalf of Germany” for the atrocities of the Holocaust. He doubled down on his criticism of European leadership, claiming “the days when Germans dictated to Jews where they were permitted or forbidden to live are over and shall not return. You will not force us into ghettos again, certainly not in our own land.” Smotrich, who has previously labeled Palestinians “the Nazis of our generation,” added that Israel’s presence in its historical and biblical homeland is a rebuke to all who have sought to destroy the Jewish people, and “we do not apologise for it for a single moment.”
Merz’s comments reflected growing international alarm over the unprecedented acceleration of Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank, a trend that has sharpened dramatically since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war in 2023. Data from the Israeli anti-settlement advocacy group Peace Now shows that the Israeli government approved 54 new and existing settlements in 2025 — a staggering all-time high that shattered the previous record of nine approvals set just one year earlier. Of these 54 expansions, 26 were retroactively legalized outposts that had originally been built without official government authorization. The group also recorded a 40% surge in new unauthorised outposts, reaching 86 in 2025, which works out to an average of one to two new outposts established every week across the territory.
United Nations data further underscores the human cost of rising settler activity. A UN report released in mid-March 2026 documented that between November 2024 and October 2025 alone, more than 36,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in the West Bank amid consistent and escalating settler attacks. Over that same 12-month period, researchers recorded 1,732 separate incidents of settler violence that resulted in casualties or property damage — a 25% increase compared to the previous year.
Smotrich has long been one of the most outspoken and hardline supporters of full Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and has publicly pushed for policies that would encourage Palestinians to leave the territory. In a February 2026 address to his Religious Zionism party and West Bank settlement leaders, Smotrich called for the full cancellation of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the framework that established the Palestinian Authority to govern Palestinian populated areas of the West Bank and Gaza. “Destroy the idea of an Arab terror state; finally, formally and practically cancel the cursed Oslo Accords and get on the path of sovereignty, while encouraging migration both from Gaza and from Judea and Samaria,” he stated, using the Israeli nationalist term for the West Bank. “There is no other long-term solution.”