essay on salvation army

The Salvation Army’s Mission and Functions Essay

Social welfare, general functionality, financial and other issues, strategic planning, analysis results.

The Salvation Army is a non-profit organisation that has formed as a global Christian Church to provide a number of welfare tasks to the deprived and affected human being at the time of different natural disasters and political violence. A number of issues are existing which can be targeted as responsible for placing interest and attention to the various stakeholders of the organisation. Such issues are ranging from social welfare or basic performance terminologies, financial aspects, public support, expenses of the programs, supporting services, risk or threat factors and obviously each of the philosophies upon which it starts ahead to its activities. All of such issues are important to various stakeholders who are the personnel affected by the corporate performance as well claim over it involving- formal leaders, members of advisory boards, the volunteers, employees, supported global community and general members. Along with such factors, in the global environment of increased natural and artificial adversity, such non- profit entities also have to face a number of complexity and pressure for which it must make specific and appropriate steps to resolve those. Therefore, considering all of such concerns, some specific features can be placed as the core concern of the corporate people. Such as:

The various kinds of social welfare programs of Salvation Army place a major concern towards its diversified stakeholders while the most important tasks are as following:

• SAWSO or The Salvation Army World Service Office is responsible for employing the Chikankata Child Survival Project in association with Health Service from external funding which has been assumed to assist 124613 people of Zambian region (Anon. 2009, p. 1).
• Missing persons program is another welfare aspect of Salvation Army, which stands upon the goal of reuniting the members in a family who want to seek each other. Here, several conditions are following involving debt accumulation, supporting child, children searching usual parents or reverse, minority cases, safekeeping argument etc.
• Salvation Army Ministry is responsible for offering veterans services while the projects youth segment assists the wheelchair individuals, arranges campsite, and delivers receiver cards and printed Bibles.
• Prisoner rehabilitation by the means of cooperative agreements with audition, prison and parole personnel over the nation are helpful to prevent crime. Companies like those patterns must pose a greater concern for adopting such program with an additional service of after- release training and development of jobs, Bible connecting course or employment scopes for both the individual and the family (Kotler & Keller 2006, p.96). But in the Salvation Army, such program is suffering from virtual problems which are needed to be resolved.
• This foundation is also engaged in youth camping activities for teaching the poor kinds newer knowledge, self- dependency, and help in solving problems of their own.
• Individual rehabilitation is one of the most important tasks that a non- profit group should perform while this Army delivers support to many affected people with a diversified social and spiritual difficulty through its ARC or Adult Rehabilitation Centers. Additionally, solution for legal conflicts, homelessness, and lack of employment along with a holy alteration are associated terms in this regard.
• Missionary- oriented entities should realize the need of education as a vital issue of their role played for the society as a whole (Thompson & Strickland 2008, p.167). The Salvation Army has demonstrated its active integration in this field with extraordinary provisional size.
• Health care and hospital support is another essential field upon which concentration has needed to be imposed for which Salvation Army is recognized, especially in the developing countries. The progress of mobile hospitals and outpatient services are mentionable among them and the Army operates effective programs to HIV/ AIDS.
• Dependency on addiction is a primary focus for which it is better to assume that such problem can better be found in residential and day care requirements.
• The fortified forces condition is very much convention from the long- term association of the Army along with the “armed partner”.
• Community and counseling are equally important although they engage in certain conflict in some specific criteria.
• Other social functions those involved in its activity are day care centers, seminars on pre- retirement period, hot- dining programs, camping for seniors, specialized day care servicing etc.

This sorts of welfare organisations generally have some common functions, like- participation of Army meetings, training of soldiers for holiday- school classes, playing of musical equipments, soldier or member participation in visiting the disabled, poor and sick, assistance in routine community work. However, the Army is somewhat committed with providing modern “peace- keeping” activities.

It incorporates the following aspects:

• The Salvation Army is well- known for offering modest salary to the ministers or officers, which represented a statistic consisting of 15% of total salary paid to the CEO in 2002 although such amount is actually insufficient for such kind of top ranked personnel for a kind of charitable organisation (Johnson, Scholes & Whittington 2008, p.667).
• Basic source of income consists of investment, dumping of assets, trading, donation from the members, legal grants, operations of social services and legacies while general costing involves fund development, administration and management, charitable tasks association and supportive purposes (The Salvation Army. 2009, p.1).
• The governmental relationship with the charitable entities is not always favorable in local and international context like the Army (Hitt, Ireland & Hoskisson 2001, p.210). The case of Moscow in 2001 is a significant example that poses its seriousness extending to the banning of the Army in Russia. The year 1913 was also notable for the same fact regarding a drop of communism.
• The Army likes to work in those nations where it is legally enforced by the national law; also, it occupies personal legislative rights in some countries like- UK although it is merely unusual for a charitable organisation.
• Like the general Army’s involvement with political leaders, this Salvation Army has to make such a function with single government characters that severely impacts its work by presenting wider diversity.
• The organisation has occupied a greater support from UK government. At the same time it has also got mentionable recognition from USA official and thus ranked as a participant of leading 10 charities of the country by Forbes magazine. But in Russia that journey was not so smooth because of being a western charity, also the organisational values encountered major complexity focusing upon the fact of global Christian mission (McKinley 1980, p.12).
• Adequate loyalty towards the regular and irregular staffs are regular in association with various cliental services are required (Kotler & Armstrong 2006, p.113).

After a thorough focus upon all of such issues, now it is possible to suggest some ways by which a non- revenue corporation can solve and improve the weakening factors as below:

• Since the government affiliation varies from nation for both internationalism and government structure, philosophies and policies of the Army must be conditioned in a matching point with the leaders. Press briefings can actively take part in this regard (The Salvation Army. 2009, p.1).
• In case of conflict in international religious beliefs, each of such social non- profit institution should make co- relation with other religious beliefs like- Islam, Buddhism and Hindus to avoid bitter disagreement (Read 2002, p.19).
• The salary level of officers should be modified and acceptable enough to cope with the international standard (Griffin 2006, p.34).
• Collection of huge membership,
• Increased demand for the intended services.
• It has incorporated cultural sophistication of foreign culture by local community and government.
• Removal of problems for relating with youth culture as an international entity,
• Shift in social policy from organisational care that its community activities had generally served to more provisions that are social.
• The Army should maintain a better combination of its own legislation with the local and regional law to remain fair and tolerable from legal perspective (Stoner, Freeman & Gilbert 2006).

The Salvation Army is a distinctive mode of charity and welfare organisation since it is an exclusive combination of religious and quasi- military structure. At present, the Army is formed upon the original framework of Indian Civil Service that gratifies the theme of “spiritual warfare” which can be realized by the exposition of uniforms, flags and ranks by well-known periodical of The War Cry. The existing feature of the Army would require some sort of modification in relation with governance and strategic focus.

The 1 st stage in the development of such strategic capabilities, it is better to identify the organisational core competence which can be shown as following:

After that, an I/ O model can be conducted to explain the dominant role of external environment on strategic actions by tailoring for a non- profit entity like:

So, the Salvation Army should form the organisational strategies by considering the following issues in mind:

• The members of Advisory board can be termed as top- level management who are formally responsible for making strategic decisions.
• This board will also consult and ensure the channels from which the targeted funds and donations will come into the organisation and at what costs.
• It should also prepare a complete plan by identifying the sectors of fund utilization.
• Analysing the over all external and internal flow of information to ensure operational and financial transparency for both the internals and externals of the entity.
• The associated political, social, legal, financial, and cultural pressure and challenges are apparent factors that must be considered in the strategic restructuring.
• More specifically, the Army requires working upon in the modern vision of social service and missionary focus.
• The basic strategic constitution should also pose equal importance upon the uniformed military and the non- uniformed civilian while the later will be able to occupy so many important posts and duties for it while the rank of substitute will be considered perfect for other employee who wants to become a temporary official. So, this “short service commission” in the regular force will be an effective strategic version for engaging empowered workforce within the organisation (The Salvation Army. 2009, p.1).
• Corporate flexibility will be exercised for the entire formulation of each of its individual unit while providing relief to the poor will be a prominent function. After that, disaster rehabilitation and funding will take second major concern for it.
• In generating funds from various sources, the Army will maintain strong ethical issues of not accepting such incentives from illegal alcoholic body gambler.
• It will not finance from the National Lottery of UK rather than acceptable flexibility from other supplies.
• The highly emphasized public welfare programs will be the most important agenda of the Army while Care Group, hearth Nutritional Treatment Model, Prevention, and Care Groups along set for men are notable.

Corporate governance needs to show the relationship among the different stakeholder groups for the purpose of determination and control the intended strategies and performance of the charity. The existing corporate governance of Salvation Army involves no international high- command format for determining national strategies and tasks. Although the global headquarter is situated in London, the individual territorial phase suffers from intensive autonomy where each of them are treated as domestic provision under the home- country. So, the modified corporate governance structure of the Army should incorporate the following phases:

• The governance must clarify an agency relationship like a profit organisation by renovating some non- profit managerial opportunities, like:

• The Army should have a director committee that will be consisting upon the individuals of present High council established upon all the dynamic officials and commissioners that will lead the international operation from the single UK based headquarter. This board will be regarded as the most powerful governing body of the organisation for delivering major single organisational objectives that will be mostly centralized in nature. This group will meet anywhere within the UK but there will be a particular “Conference Chamber” to elect new bodies.
• After, there will be territorial Counseling Committee, which will take the domestically based immediate and decentralized decisions by the authorization of international board. It will assign the officers having high potent to participate in the international committee in future as well as adequate efficiency for taking part in the overall macro strategy, mission or policy. However, they can also meet via electronic network or physically as suitable.
• An International Management Council needs to exist to judge or monitor the performance of the central global headquarter with monthly meetings (The Salvation Army. 2008, p.7).
• Executive compensation plan must be prepared while it will act as a governance mechanism for finding out of lining up the interest of the executive salaries, bonuses, and long- run financial and non- financial incentives. Although the organisation at present is not formed upon with the right structure of such compensation, it is very much essential for the formulation of that option in order to increase executive performance level. Effectively utilization of executive compensation is very much difficult for an international charity firm like- Salvation Army. Therefore, this task requires high degree of monitoring through a rise in agency expenses. Similarly, from region to region the total amount also varies based on value of money as well as performance complexity. Asking the external experts to prepare effective executive compensation plan is also feasible in this case (The Salvation Army. 2008, p.11).
• Finally, formulation of a multidivisional structure or M- form acts as an internal governance strategy through management scopes. The HQ is part of M- form structure associated with the director board jointly monitors the strategic decisions and implementation of management and advisors for the performance of various organisational units or divisions. Active monitoring will be helpful for eager managerial attention in maximizing worth of the stakeholders. This part of corporate governance is also vital for delivering the top executive with adequate and additional information by focusing upon financial outcomes obtained by the micro units. Along with internal participation, this tool sometimes works upon external control issue of the participants and volunteers.

Therefore, by analysing the core strategic and governance conditions upon which the Salvation Army should make some extent of reformulation, it can be concluded that through a sensible selection of major strategic tips and standard corporate governance feature, it would be able to fix up a timely, competent, and flexible organisational structure. Consequently, it would be able to maintain the interest of the stakeholders and assist properly the global Salvationists.

In a broader sense, the proposed strategic planning exercise of the Salvation Army involves several practical implications including global and regional operations. Some of such implementation sectors can be discussed as:

• Different forms of aiding activities will be expected as it tries to provide better prevention and treatment of malaria, improved care- finding for risky symbols, treatment of pregnant women program, more children immunization, detection, and treatment of malnutrition, better motherly, and infant care trends, improved exposure of postpartum concern etc.
• The original picture of the society embodies the strategies of Salvation Army are highly being important for fragmented social framework.
• The UK sector precisely describes the functionality of this charity from the viewpoint of developed world.
• Formation of volunteers as a part of constituting an effective organisational people can play significant role for delivering extensive extent of aiding and supportive activities.
• The governing board’s identification of multiple external monetary resource of the organisation would be resulted into periodic and systematic flow of cash or some other non- financial forms of assets of donation, which will ensure the financial strength of the charity.
• Establishing the strategy for providing information to various members of the entity will be efficient to implement a capable supply chain network of database consisting information about members, ruling bodies, volunteers and all other accessible stakeholders by ensuring the firm’s capability of synchronizing adequate and prompt support to the affected community along with a modern intelligence system.
• Planning to face social, political, cultural and financial recession will be helpful in such way through the Army would make adaptive responses and actions which take part in preventing social resistance, political banning or financial backwardness as taken place in Russia before several years.
• Emphasize upon hybrid strategy regarding military and religious aspects are supportive to sustain the performance in unsmooth Asian region.
• Planning of utilizing military and non- military workforce will be enforceable to carry out huge relief, health, and rehabilitation during the emergency period as an extra hand of that project.
• Ethical issues in restriction of funding, as illegal supply will create a sense by which the organisation will be able maintain its mainstream of following the values of Jesus as well as introducing a learning point for the society to protest the evil.
• Special concern and reformulation strategy for compensating executives will be implemented at all levels of organisational officers and military incentive programs while the projected benefits would be resulted in both individual satisfaction and positive charity image (The Salvation Army. 2009, p.1).
• Hiring of external staff for conducting necessary financial planning will be applied by the real engagement of such intelligence, corrected analysed financial data, and original placement of each unit of non – monetary activities.

Therefore, it can be said that for a global charity organisation as Salvation Army, many difficulties or negative pressure may affect the composition, especially the implementation of those strategies where a careful integration of existing resources and supporting attitude of each participant will remove all such obstacles in a smoother outcome.

The entire analysis shows that the Salvation Army is facing up with exclusive demand throughout the world in the dynamic stakeholder context although several problems, issues and modifications are influencing the entire entity. From this perspective, the Salvation Army can take the following options to sustain their growth and success in future as below:

• The Army will be required to make a sustainable cooperation with governments in terms of basic values for continuing to be an international force as well as to be most powerful when the newly employed general will take the responsibility.
• The organisation will also be committed to serve all sorts of communities ranging from men to women, African to American and black to white.
• Employment of efficient candidates like Shaw Clifton would serve the more exclusive memories of Africa. Armed with his strong academic background and huge publications offer a critical analysis and creative role to the project.
• Additionally, the Army will be completely trusted to assist the victims in most vulnerable situations.
• The organisation will have an interest for adopting both practical as well as gospel proclaimed task.
• The organisation is expected to be trustworthy and sincere.
• It will be able to offer a relaxed and flexible atmosphere for its participants to work.
• Similarly, it will also maintain a strong gentle culture.
• Responsiveness to the needs and wants of publics,
• The Army should try to maintain a smooth relationship with government in terms of corporate policies and procedures.
• The mission should make higher protection policy to operate in the holistic religious environment like- Afghanistan and Iraq.
• It should develop an image as a truly international charity regardless any religious prejudice or thoughts that can be seemed in the charity functionality.
• Improvement in disaster relief programs are required for establishing a distinctive position, competency and physical and psychological presence for becoming as one of the most active charitable association in the world.
• The apolitical posture of the Army should be examined considering after- 9/ 11 background because its operation in a conflict free way associated with other values will be helpful for sustaining for a longer period.
• Materialization of predicted income;
• The strategic analysis could be assumed upon the necessity of engaging outsider consultant in Army for managing and reducing administrative and management expenditures.
• Motivating the commanding bodies within the organisation by offering standard salary level for employing their highest effort and trust to the corporate journey.
• It should remove of gaps among the rising confusion of responsibility through a greater influence of cultural empathy.
• Timely adaptation of entire services through appropriate evolvement feature with an additional viewpoint of meeting the global challenges.
• Strong integration with the core values and philosophy can enhance its operation.
• Deliberating those contexts where it will be able to pose standard.
• It should optimize a mutual balance between its religious and social framework.
• Ensuring and accumulating adequate resources for responding perfectly to the diversified demand of the future world.

Anon. 2009. History of the Salvation Army . [Online]. Web.

Griffin, R. W. 2006. Management. 8 th ed. Boston New York: Houghton Mifflin Organisation.

Hitt, M. A., Ireland, R. D., & Hoskisson, R. E. 2001. Strategic Management. 4 th ed. Singapore: South-Western Thomson Learning.

Johnson, G., Scholes, K. & Whittington, R. 2008. “Exploring Corporate Strategy”. Case study: Belief in action: The Salvation Army, a global not-for-profit organisation . Prentice Hall.

Kotler, P. & Keller, K. L., 2006. Marketing management . 12 th ed. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Kotler, P., & Armstrong, G. 2006. Principles of Marketing. 11 th Ed. New Delhi: Prentice-Hall of India Private Limited.

McKinley, E. H. Marching to Glory: The History of the Salvation Army in the United States, 1880-1980 . Harper & Row.

Read, A., 2002. The Salvation Army and government: marching in step into the 21st century . South Bank University.

Salvation Army 2009. Media Room: Brochures and Reports . [Online]. Web.

Stoner, J. A. F., Freeman, R. E., & Gilbert, D. R. 2006. Management . 6 th ed. Prentice-Hall of India Private Limited.

The Salvation Army. 2009. Christmas Charity . [Online]. Web.

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The Salvation Army. National Annual Report 2008 of the Salvation Army . [pdf]. Web.

The Salvation Army 2008. The Salvation Army: Twin cities 2008 Annual Report . [pdf]. Web.

Thompson A. & Strickland, A. J. 2008. Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases . 13 th ed. McGraw-Hill.

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Transforming lives since 1865

The story of the salvation army so far.

1865 A worshipping and inclusive Army is started

The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel, London, location of the first work of the Booths – a busy and diverse area still today (2017)

When William and Catherine Booth began the work in London that would grow to become The Salvation Army, few would have predicted their legacy: an organisation, part of the Christian Church, now working in more than 130 countries and with a history spanning more than 150 years. Throughout this time there have been millions of members, and people have been helped right across the world – but this movement had humble beginnings.

Today, statues of William and Catherine Booth stand in the area of London where The Salvation Army began

Born in 1829 in Nottingham, UK, William Booth found his Christian faith early on in life and became an active Methodist, preaching and helping the poor in his local area. After some time working as a pawnbroker, he moved with his wife Catherine Mumford to the east of London. The two of them began working with a group of Christian businessmen who were concerned for the poor and disadvantaged in their community. In June 1865, William Booth preached to crowds outside the Blind Beggar pub; a new organisation, The Christian Mission, was born.

William Booth preaches at a meeting in a tent in East London (photo: International Heritage Centre)

Over the next few years, the movement flourished. Its focus on teaching people about the message of Jesus in a way they could relate to, meeting wherever they could – dance halls, bowling alleys and outdoors – as well as addressing some of their material needs, saw many people become Christians. Despite opposition from parts of the public who disliked some of the Booths’ methods and style, many joined.

Their focus on those who had been rejected by the traditional churches was key. All were welcome – including those impoverished and disadvantaged.

It was in 1878 that The Christian Mission got its present name. William Booth objected to a phrase contained in that year’s annual report: ‘The Christian Mission … is a Volunteer Army.’ By replacing the word ‘volunteer’, The Salvation Army had its new title and with it an inspired metaphor for its role in fighting the injustices of society and in bringing people to understand God. Over time, the organisation gained military-style titles (ministers are ‘officers’, for example) and even uniforms designed to publicly demonstrate a commitment to God.

Despite the differences between the Army of today and that of 1865, the organisation continues to be relevant to people and their situations. From weekly worship services, outdoor events, clubs and activities through to responding to disasters and providing practical support to those in need of help, the same spirit of putting the gospel into action as in those early days carries on.

1878 The first brass band introduces music and the arts to the Army

Music can be found in The Salvation Army in many forms

Charles Fry and his family, who formed the first Salvation Army brass group in 1878

The Salvation Army is well-known for its music. Its bands and choirs can be found in many countries, with numerous other creative expressions like dance and drama springing from the movement.

A member of the Konverse dance group (Barking, UK) at the Mobilising Celebration, 2017

Open-air music

Songs were one of the tools of The Salvation Army right from its early days as the Christian Mission. Popular songs were rewritten with new lyrics which explained the Christian faith and used alongside well-known and contemporary hymns. Concertinas, tambourines and guitars were played at first, but it was not long before a style more suited to outdoor services was found – brass!

The first Salvation Army brass group was heard in 1878 when a Methodist preacher named Charles Fry, together with his three sons, played instruments to support the Army in open-air meetings in Salisbury, UK. They were soon travelling with Booth as he toured the UK, becoming a distinctive and effective feature of the Army’s style. Bands were also formed in areas such as Consett, Northwich, Whitechapel and Portsmouth. Over time, many gifted composers used their skills to write new music for Salvation Army groups to play, bringing glory to God. Today, brass groups remain an important way of attracting crowds and telling people about him.

Staying relevant

There have been many other arts groups within the Army in its history. Between 1963 and 1968, Captain Joy Webb led The Joystrings in performing contemporary music, achieving chart success and capturing the attention of millions. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Salvation Army officers John Gowans and John Larsson (both of whom would go on to become General) collaborated on a series of popular musicals to share the Gospel message, with titles including Take-over Bid , Spirit , Son of Man and The Meeting .

The Joystrings perform on UK TV network ITV (photo: International Heritage Centre)

In most Army churches and centres, music, drama and dance play a central role in allowing people to become involved in publicly communicating the Bible.

1880 The Army starts working overseas

It is remarkable to think that William Booth was initially unsure about whether to extend the work of The Salvation Army beyond Britain, given how widespread the organisation is nowadays.

Early pioneers

The first such venture was in 1879, when Salvationist Amos Shirley travelled to Philadelphia, USA with his family and began working for the Army unofficially. Booth cautiously decided, upon learning of this, to send a small group to New York the following year to formally commence the Army’s work: George Scott Railton and seven others. Just as in the UK, street preaching and practical assistance was used to great effect. By late 1880, 1,500 people had come to have a Christian faith through the relationships built by these Salvation Army pioneers.

Early Salvationists in India (Photo: International Heritage Centre)

International expansion was quick. In the same year, the Army extended to Australia when John Gore and Edward Saunders held meetings in Adelaide and offered food to those who were hungry. The first meetings in Paris were held in 1881 by Catherine Booth-Clibborn – or la Maréchale (marshal’s wife) as she was known – eldest daughter of the Founders. 1882 saw work begin in Canada, Switzerland and Sweden, and 1883 saw Sri Lanka, South Africa and New Zealand added, amongst others, and on it continued.

The Salvation Army feeds children in Berlin, Germany (Library of Congress c.1915-1920)

Being part of the community

Wherever The Salvation Army has gone, it has been careful and try and work alongside people in a culturally-appropriate way, not to impose.

‘I say to my officer who is going to Holland “Can you be a Dutchman?” To the man who is going to Zululand “Can you be a Zulu?” To the one going to India “Can you be an Indian?” If you cannot, you must not go at all.’

When Frederick Booth-Tucker started The Salvation Army’s activities in India in 1882 he and his group adopted Indian names, dressed as locals and worked amongst the outcasts of society.

The Salvation Army is welcomed to Nigeria (photo: International Heritage Centre)

In each country, the Army has developed programmes that are relevant to the local community. It has diverse expressions, whilst remaining true to one message of God and of salvation. By the time of William Booth’s death in 1912, the Army was working in 58 countries. Today the figure is more than 130.

All the World , reporting on the Army’s work globally, is published four times a year.

1883 An Army fighting for justice

The Salvation Army opened its first Labour Exchange in 1890

‘Soup, soap and salvation’ was a common saying amongst early Salvationists, and is still repeated today. It sums up the idea of the importance of offering practical as well as spiritual support. Soup kitchens and showers were offered alongside sermons and services.

Helping society

In the 1880s, new types of social work began. In 1883 a prison-gate home was opened in Melbourne, Australia, to provide support for prisoners re-entering the community. The following year a women’s rescue home was opened in London. 1885 saw the age of consent in the UK raised following a campaign by the Army. In 1890 it opened its first labour exchange to help people in finding work. These and other actions paved the way for the publication, in October 1890, of William Booth’s famous work In Darkest England and the Way Out .

(Photo: International Heritage Centre)

This book acted as a blueprint for the Army’s efforts to address poverty and poor quality of life on a wider scale. It described the slum conditions, homelessness and starvation of much of Great Britain and laid out a way of improving it. Rescue homes, skills training and co-operatives were proposed, and donations flooded in from society’s wealthiest.

Changing lives

Help was designed to not simply be a one-off but as an opportunity for real change. In the same year as In Darkest England, the Booths opened a match factory in London. Its purpose was to challenge the industry use of white phosphorous in their production, which caused necrosis (‘phossy jaw’) and baldness in workers. The new matches, packaged in boxes labelled ‘Lights in Darkest England’, paved the way for universal adoption of safer red phosphorous.

Matchboxes produced in The Salvation Army's factory were printed with the phrase 'Lights in Darkest England'

Similar projects to bring about systematic change developed all around the world as the Army grew. The first Salvation Army hospital was in founded in 1897 in Nagercoil, India – there are now tens of hospitals worldwide, plus thousands of schools, health projects, sanitation programmes and other social services. The motivation remains the same: a love of God’s people and a desire to put our beliefs into action. Above all, the aim is to provide a ‘hand up, not a hand-out’ – just as that proposed by In Darkest England and the Way Out .

Salvation Army officers working in slums in the 1800s (photo: International Heritage Centre)

1888 Young people's work organised

A summer camp at Star Lake, Greater New York Division (2017)

The Salvation Army has always worked with young people, recognising their worth and therefore the importance of being relevant to them.

Young people from Regent Hall Corps, UK, take part in the Mobilising Celebration (2017 - photo: Dave Bird)

Meetings and publications

In 1888, these activities were formalised and by 1897 the first national meetings for the age group were being held in the UK. In 1906, publications for young people were launched. In the 1910s, scouting groups were being created in Europe, Africa, Australasia and North America. With Scout, Cub, Brownie and Guide groups at Salvation Army centres around the world, this is still an important part of the organisation’s ministry.

In modern times, there are all kinds of young people’s activities. Junior bands, choirs and drama groups rehearse hard in many Army centres, alongside bible study and social groups. Young people also support The Salvation Army in other ways, from fundraising to volunteering themselves.

Developing young people

Youth clubs, social services and toddler groups provide practical support for families as well as introducing them to the Army. For many decades it has run summer camps all over the world, not only for those who regularly attend Army programmes throughout the year but also for those referred by municipal services or as a result of other Army work. A programme of sports, art and games sits alongside the development of young people’s spiritual life. Many adults refer to the Army’s involvement in their lives at a young age as being pivotal in their growing up.

1914 The Army supports soldiers in the First World War

Coffee and donuts are served at a soldier's rest room run by The Salvation Army (photo: International Heritage Centre)

In some of the world’s most difficult and fragile environments, The Salvation Army can be found lending a hand.

Red Shield sign at an outpost in Papua New Guinea during WWII

Supporting troops

In 1894, The Salvation Army Naval and Military League was established. It aimed to serve the needs of Salvationist sailors and soldiers, from the practical – refreshments and food parcels – to the emotional and spiritual – being a listening ear. 1899 saw the start of the Second Boer War, and Army services were sent to the battlefields.

Canadian Red Shield Services during the First World War

It was in the First World War, lasting from 1914 to 1918, that The Salvation Army’s role in conflicts really stepped up. Evangeline Booth, daughter of William and Catherine and commander of the Army in the US, created a National War Board to organise and raise funds for its efforts in helping military personnel at US bases. Before long, she decided that Salvationists too – aside from those serving in the regular forces – must go overseas to support those fighting. Motor ambulances, meals and chaplaincy services were all offered.

It was here that ‘Doughnut Girls’ first provided simple home comforts using the limited ingredients available locally – flour, sugar, lard and cinnamon. These proved essential in helping to combat the depression and homesickness experienced in the trenches. By the end of the war, The Salvation Army had earned widespread public approval and financial support for its role in helping with the morale of troops.

Evangeline Booth’s parting words to those serving were:

‘You are going overseas to serve Christ. You must forget yourselves, be examples of his love, willing to endure hardship, to lay down your lives, if need be, for his sake. In your hands you hold the honour of The Salvation Army.’

In every situation in which the Army has assisted – the Second World War, Vietnam War, Biafran War, Gulf War, and others – even where the methods have changed these principles have remained the same.

1929 First election of a General

Sunbury Court near London, UK, traditional meeting place of the High Council

In planning for the future leadership of the organisation, William Booth had always envisaged a General choosing his or her own successor, and so it was in this way that his son Bramwell Booth became leader.

However, William also made provision for exceptional cases whereby a General could be removed from office, such as through illness. A group of senior officers, known as a High Council, could meet and discuss the issue, electing a new leader if necessary.

The first High Council

This procedure is exactly what happened in 1929. 63 officers met in London and concluded that Bramwell was unfit for office. The 73-year old had not been present at International Headquarters for some seven months owing to ill health, and it was felt that Commissioner Edward Higgins was the best choice to succeed Bramwell.

Following this, senior leadership in the Army decided that election of the General was in fact the most suitable method of choosing the holder of this important role. 1931 saw The Salvation Army Act come into being, meaning that the terms are office are now enshrined in UK law. All Generals must be elected by a High Council, and there are limits on the length of time they can hold the role.

Delegates take part in the Welcome Meeting for the 2013 High Council

Each General brings something different to the office of leader. The High Council process, in which each prospective General explains their vision for the organisation, ensures that the current feeling of the Army – in all of the areas in which it works – is reflected. The Army has, at different times, been led by Generals from Canada, Sweden, Finland, Australia, the US and elsewhere.

Accountability

The General is not the only provider of leadership within the Army however. The international Army is divided up into territories and commands, made up of one or more countries, with are subdivided into divisions and then corps or centres. At each level leaders are given responsibility, supporting the General in running this global organisation.

It is particularly important in such a large and diverse organisation for good governance to be at the forefront. It is for this reason that the Accountability Movement was formally established in 2016, calling on each person in The Salvation Army to be ‘accountable for every aspect of our journey through life. We are pilgrims and accountability helps us keep going in the right direction.’

1934 First female General

If William Booth is the father of The Salvation Army, his wife Catherine is seen as the Army Mother. Her contribution to the organisation was just as valuable, and was behind the Army’s views on many different issues.

Catherine Booth

In 1859, Catherine wrote a pamphlet entitled ‘Female Ministry: Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel’ in which she argued powerfully for the right of women to preach the Christian message. Although she was not the only person saying these things, it was still ground-breaking at the time, in a world in which leadership and church ministry were usually reserved for men.

Evangeline Booth

The importance of the role of women in The Salvation Army is reflected in its leadership. Evangeline Booth, previously Commander in the US, became the first female leader, elected the fourth General in 1934 – and other women have followed. In all areas of Salvation Army leadership – locally and nationally – women are represented.

Today, Women’s Ministries programmes and resources are available throughout the world aiming ‘to bring women into a knowledge of Jesus Christ; encourage their full potential in influencing family, friends and community; equip them for growth in personal understanding and life skills; address issues which affect women and their families in the world.’

Our international women’s magazine Revive is published several times a year.

1959 Caring for older people

Just as the Army seeks to serve younger people, we believe in the dignity of older people and consider it a privilege to offer services to this particular age group.

Over-60s clu bs

In 1959, the first over-60s clubs were inaugurated. Building on the organisation’s previous work, these groups offered friendship and activities to a generation often more vulnerable to loneliness, particularly post-retirement, and are still run today.

Practical needs

Sometimes more intense support is called for, and the Army runs a number of residential homes where practical needs are taken care of. At lots of corps and centres, befriending schemes are run where volunteers take the time to regularly make contact – by phone or in person – with older people. Many describe this as incredibly rewarding. Elsewhere, home shopping schemes and day trips are organised.

Supporting those with addiction

For those in need, The Salvation Army runs a number of addiction rehabilitation programs. We believe in a holistic approach, not just helping the person to overcome their addiction, but attacking the roots of that addiction.

This goes right back to the early days of the organisation. As mentioned earlier, many churches at this time rejected those on the fringes of society, particularly those who suffered from addiction problems including alcohol. The Salvation Army instead sought to welcome these people, and moreover to help them.

An Adult Rehabilitation Centre in Pennsylvania, USA (photo: SAConnects, 2016)

Members of the Army, known as soldiers, commit themselves not to drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco or taking harmful drugs, recognising the negative impact these things can have upon one's life. But it also serves as a sign of solidarity with those who are also seeking to give up damaging substances.

People are often invited to attend a Bible study as part of the rehabilitation process - this is one in Massachusetts, USA (photo: SAConnects, 2016)

Around the world, the Army offers help and support for those who are addicted. From addiction centres, support groups or just an understanding conversation as a starting point, we want people to live life as fully as possible.

Help with addiction is provided in a holistic fashion (photo: SAConnects)

2001 The Army in disasters and emergencies

Widespread damage was caused in Fiji by Cyclone Winston, where The Salvation Army responded (2016)

In a crisis, The Salvation Army is often said to be among the first on the scene.

Responding with compassion

Significantly in recent history, this was the case following the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001. Within half an hour of the reports of a plane crash at the site, the Army was present. For nine months following that day it provided pastoral support and refreshments to those involved in rescue and recovery efforts, and was involved in the larger rebuilding projects until 2006.

‘Incidents of national significance morph quickly into legend. The Salvation Army will always be noted historically for the service it provided in New York, but more importantly, The Salvation Army will be remembered by the individual lives it touched.’

This response is echoed in many of the world’s consequential events: in earthquakes, floods, fires, hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis, winter storms and extreme heatwaves, The Salvation Army has provided expertise and support where it is needed most.

2008 International social justice work

The Salvation Army has worked at the United Nations since 1947, the very early days of the latter organisation. Being concerned with matters of justice at a local level, as the Army was, it was similarly concerned with seeking justice in matters of poverty, gender equality, security, development and health that touched countries on an international scale. Therefore, the opportunity to contribute as a non-governmental organisation into the work of the UN has proved important.

The International Social Justice Commission

In 2008, General Shaw Clifton expanded this work by establishing the International Social Justice Commission . Based a few streets away from the headquarters of the UN itself, it is ideally located near to influential politicians, charities and faith-based organisations and aims to amplify the voices of the world’s oppressed.

Development work

Alongside these efforts, The Salvation Army organises and funds many initiatives to bring about real change for communities in the most need. A team at International Headquarters supports development work right across the world, with many of the Army’s territories running similar services with their own funding. From health clinics and hospitals (the first Army hospital was in Nagercoil, India in 1897), to schools, sanitation projects and community centres, The Salvation Army uses money generously given by the public and other sources to make a positive difference.

2015 150 years of The Salvation Army

From time to time in The Salvation Army’s history, it has held International Congresses. National and Territorial Congresses are held regularly, but these international occasions have seen the whole of the organisation convening for special meetings.

Celebrating 150 years

Usually held in London, the 2000 Congress was arranged in Atlanta, USA. However, 2015 saw a return to the birthplace of the Army, London, for a highly significant anniversary: 150 years since its founding.

Whereas previous Congresses have been held over the course of a weekend, this anniversary was marked with a five-day event in the O2, a large London event space. Themed Boundless – The Whole World Redeeming , reflecting William Booth’s hymn ‘O Boundless Salvation’, the name also echoes Ephesians 3:8:

'Preach to the nations the boundless riches of Christ!'

'Total commitment to the mission'

Boundless saw Salvationists from across the globe gather for music concerts, exhibitions, dance and drama performances, and of course meetings in the main arena offering reflection, prayer and worship of God. This culminated in General André Cox’s call for Salvationists to focus on God’s work. ‘This is boundless salvation’, he said, ‘A total surrender of our lives and the total commitment to the mission.’

Each event of the Congress was planned, first of all, to bring honour and glory to the Lord, but also to display the cultural diversity of our worldwide Army.

It is astonishing to think how far the organisation has developed in its history. From the early days of street preaching in London, it now offers vibrant weekly worship, practical care for the disadvantaged and services meeting all kinds of social needs. Through the vision of the Booths and subsequent leaders, members and friends, The Salvation Army is known in so many parts of the world, and through its work

Today What is your place in the story?

The 150th anniversary celebrations led naturally into a renewed focus, from 2017, on Salvationists mobilising in their own communities, to share the gospel and to meet human needs in an authentic and locally-relevant way.

Simba Mbiri and Mainga Milambo pray with a man in Lusaka, Zambia (2017, photo by Chola Simwanza, submitted to The Whole World Mobilising )

‘God has placed us in a community ... We can't wait for people to come to us, we need to get out and reach them.’

Houston resident Sandra Kizzee moved to tears by The Salvation Army's response after she and her neighbours felt forgotten in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey (2017, photo by Daphne Nabors, submitted to The Whole World Mobilising )

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The Salvation Army owes its existence to one man: William Booth, who founded the organization in 1865 in an attempt to relieve poor people in Britain from their misfortunes. At first, he preached in the streets of London, and as people listened to him, Booth directed them to nearby churches and chapels for food and a place to sleep. However, many of the poor could not find shelter because Victorian churches rejected them due to their extreme poverty, and “inappropriate” or “unorthodox” dress and habits; in order to solve this problem and provide the poor with a place to eat and sleep, Booth founded the East London Christian Mission. The term “Salvation Army” emerged later, when Booth was dictating a letter in which he compared believers to God’s army; as the name “Salvation Army” appeared, the goals and structure of the organization became clear: Booth called himself “The General of the Salvation Army,” and his wife Catherine became the “Mother of the Salvation Army.” A progressive trait of the organization—especially considering the fact that it appeared in Victorian Britain—was that women could participate with equal rights, so Catherine occupied the position of an ordained minister. In accordance with the organization’s name, each member had a rank similar to those existing in the army; regular church members were called soldiers, and those of higher ranks were ministers. The name “Salvation Army” reminds all of its members that they are on a mission: saving souls. Booth quickly realized that the last thing hungry and exhausted people think about is the salvation of their souls, so in order to keep up with the mission, he established the “three S” principle: soup, soap, salvation. The idea was that when people’s primary needs are satisfied, they can direct their thoughts and eyes to God. These principles are kept nowadays as well (GotQuestions).

Booth did not want his church to be correlated with the existing religious traditions, so he eliminated all of the forms of outward religious observance. As for other outward symbols, the Salvation Army differed from other religious organizations greatly. It emulated the structure and charters of a military organization. In 1878, the organization adopted its first flag designed by Catherine Booth, and starting from 1880s, the organization began to establish its corps all over Britain. At that time, the Salvation Army already utilized military-like uniforms, ranks such as “cadet,” lieutenant,” “captain,” or “general,” and its own terminology; for example, the places of religious worship were called “outposts,” newly recruited members were “captives,” and Bible readings were “rations.” Such a fresh approach looked attractive to the masses tired of traditional preaching, so the Army increased in numbers quickly: by the beginning of the 1880s, there were 127 officers and 81 corps across Britain and overseas (VictorianWeb.org).

The Salvation Army’s religious doctrine is based on 11 principles, or the articles of faith.

These articles are:

• We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by inspiration of God: and that they only constitute the Divine rule of Christian faith and practice.
• We believe that there is only one God, who is infinitely perfect, the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of all things, and who is the only proper object of religious worship.
• We believe that there are three persons in the Godhead—the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost—undivided in essence and coequal in power and glory.
• We believe that in the person of Jesus Christ the Divine and human natures are united, so that He is truly and properly God and truly and properly man.
• We believe that our first parents were created in a state of innocency, but by their disobedience they lost their purity and happiness; and that in consequence of their fall all men have become sinners, totally depraved, and as such are justly exposed to the wrath of God.
• We believe that the Lord Jesus Christ has, by His suffering and death, made an atonement for the whole world so that whosoever will may be saved.
• We believe that repentance towards God, faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and regeneration by the Holy Spirit are necessary to salvation.
• We believe that we are justified by grace, through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ; and that he that believeth hath the witness in himself.
• We believe that continuance in a state of salvation depends upon continued obedient faith in Christ.
• We believe that it is the privilege of all believers to be wholly sanctified, and that their whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
• We believe in the immortality of the soul; in the resurrection of the body; in the general judgment at the end of the world; in the eternal happiness of the righteous; and in the endless punishment of the wicked (BBC).

In order to deliver salvation, the Army uses music (the famous orchestras marching around the streets of almost any big city in the world), propaganda, free food and shelter for homeless and those in need, and also sells cheap clothes and other goods through a network of shops, preaches, and helps people in a number of other ways. Members of the Salvation Army can be found almost anywhere where there is a disaster, and where people are desperately looking for help.

The Salvation Army is a charity organization founded by William Booth in London in 1865. His initial purpose was to help poor people find food and shelter, but when he noticed that Victorian churches often rejected these people because of their appearance and habits, he decided to establish an organization that would help them. Booth, as well as his wife, led the organization, established its structure, doctrine, and principles of work, and although there has been more than 150 years since its emergence, the Salvation Army exists today. This is probably the best proof of its efficiency and popularity in the world.

Works Cited

• “What is the Salvation Army, and What Do They Believe?” GotQuestions.org. N.p., 04 Jan. 2017. Web. 28 Apr. 2017.
• “The Origin and Early Development of the Salvation Army in Victorian England.”Victorianweb.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2017.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Volunteering — My Experience Volunteering at the Salvation Army

My Experience Volunteering at The Salvation Army

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• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• HISTORY AND TODAY
• THE CHURCH - TOWARDS A COMMON VISION
• THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS
• THE CHRIST OF THEOLOGY
• CHRIST AND CULTURE
• WILL ALL BE SAVED?
• SERVANT LORD
• ALL THINGS UNDER HIS FEET?
• FROM WHAT TO WHAT?
• CHRIST ALONE

A paper presented at The Salvation Army’s 4th International Theology and Ethics Symposium, Sunbury Court, 8-12 October 2014.

The IDC is grateful to each presenter for the content of this paper. The papers should be recognised as discussion papers and what is written is not necessarily the official view of The Salvation Army.  

Introduction

I've been asked to present a short essay on the subject of universalism. Will All Be Saved? is the title and I am going to reveal my conclusion right away: I don't know. But I hope so, and I believe we have good reason to hope so.

The essay will first present briefly how the Christian church has approached the doctrine of hell, how views have changed, and what the available interpretive options are today. I will then discuss the main objections against universalism. By offering a few thoughts on these common objections I attempt to show that universalism does not necessarily lead to the downfall of key Christian beliefs ...

Read the full paper  

Share your thoughts

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Whether you're assisting at a shelter, organizing food drives, or ringing bells at a Red Kettle, every act of volunteerism contributes to creating positive change. By lending a helping hand, you'll have the chance to uplift individuals and families facing adversity, offering them hope, resources, and a pathway to a better future. You'll not only transform the lives of others but also experience personal growth, fulfillment, and discover a sense of purpose. Join The Salvation Army's volunteer force, and become an integral part of a remarkable movement dedicated to serving humanity and building a more compassionate world.

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Salvation Army’s New Strategic Operational Management

Introduction, brief background, managing sa’s stakeholders, stakeholder analysis, governance and strategic vision, strategic planning, recommendation.

Peter Drucker in his book, Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Practices and Principles , mentions that the aim of the Salvation Army (SA) is to “make citizens out of rejected” (Drucker 2001, p. 3). Analyzing the internal environment of a nonprofit organization is essential to understand its external effectiveness (Courtney 2002). A nonprofit organization aims to bring about changes in society. Therefore, for this kind of organization, the mission must be clear. Courtney points out that for a nonprofit organization “good intentions” are all the mission an organization has and strategy acts as a “bulldozer” (2002, p. 45).

The case study showed that Salvation Army was doing good work and doing it well in its targeted area. However, the question that arose was how to do it better? This is the question, as suggested by Courtney, is faced by most organizations. In the case of the Salvation Army, the growth of the organization has been exceptionally good. The questions are four in number. First, with increasing size, the number of stakeholders has also increased for the organization. SA now faces the problem of incorporating them and maintaining their interests as well as attains its goals. The second issue that emerges is that of organizing its strategic vision to meet its goals. This third issue is related to the implementation of strategic management in the operations of SA and its implication upon its growth. And the fourth issue that arises is sustaining growth and ensuring future success.

The questions posed show that Salvation Army has grown too big for its management to control it properly. What is required is proper strategic operational management which would help the organization attain its goals. This essay is a case study analysis of the Salvation Army. The essay will aim to provide a strategic analysis of the present predicaments of the organization and provide recommendations for the future to solve the above-mentioned problems. The next section will provide a brief background of SA, after which the questions related to the case will be analyzed and solved and then recommendations will be provided.

Salvation Army is a Christian nonprofit organization founded in 1865 in London. The main aim of the organization is to provide support and help globally to people suffering from natural disasters or social conditions or war or terror struck areas. It is one of the most diverse social service providers. The other mission of the organization is to preach the teachings of the Bible and convert people to Christianity. However, the social welfare that it provides is for all irrespective of caste, race, color, sex, or age.

One of the main features of the structure is its quasi-military structure. Presently the organization operates in 111 countries and in 175 different languages. Even though the organization has grown steadily over the years, it is facing problems in the twenty-first century due to increasing demand for its services and fewer volunteers as many generation nexters do not believe in the mission of the organization.

Another predicament that has been faced by SA is its constant growth. It began in the UK and today it is a global organization. Initially, the growth of soldiers has been mostly in developed countries. The army works in countries where it receives legal recognition. Further, the organization has specific legislation which is not similar to other nonprofit organizations. The organization though has not always been welcomed by governmental bodies, usually works in countries where it receives legal sanction.

Salvation Army is a quasi-military organization, which has a hierarchical organizational structure. It has a top-down approach. However, internally all the regional operations are autonomous from the rule of the headquarters in the UK. This is a problem of the organization in order of governance of the whole organization.

The original focus of the Salvation Army was on poverty-related issues and to preach for the prohibition of alcohol and gambling. However, the mission of the organization today is too varied, which aims to provide social welfare to all who are in distress, poverty and homeless. It provides food and shelter for the homeless. Health facilities for the poor. It also serves and provides medical aid in disturbed areas.

Growth has made the scope and reach of the organization further than it should be. In doing an internal review, various methods are employed by nonprofit organizations. One of these is stakeholder theory. Stakeholder theory is one of the most powerful tools that can be applied in the case of internal analysis for nonprofit organizations is stakeholder theory (Courtney 2002).

Further, for initiation of the strategic planning process, it is essential to identify (1) the key decision-makers and (2) the individuals, groups, units, or organizations who are involved in the process of doing the planning. Therefore, according to Herman, a stakeholder analysis is essential in order to initiate a strategic planning process (Bryson 2005). Herman points out that the key success of a nonprofit organization is in the satisfaction of its stakeholders. Therefore, a stakeholder analysis is a process through which the organizational decision-makers can immerse themselves in the politics and networks surrounding the organization. Thus, by learning about the relations between the stakeholders, it is possible to learn about the strategic issues and plan accordingly. Therefore, before doing any further internal analysis, it is important to a stakeholder analysis, which will help us to identify the strategies required for the organization.

A stakeholder theory identifies those who affect the organization’s decision-making or are the ones affected by these decisions. Stakeholders may be anybody – individuals, groups, units, or organizations. Usually, the stakeholders have a stake in the decisions and actions of the organization or the actions, which affect the decisions of the organization (Freeman 1984). Using this basic idea of stakeholders, it has been highlighted that the environment of the organization – internal and external – is the multilateral agreement between the stakeholders and the organization (Freeman & Evan 1990). Others have divided the theory among stakeholders into three – normative, instrumental, and descriptive (Donaldson & Preston 1995).

One central axiom of stakeholder theory is that the stakeholders will try to influence the decisions of the organizations, and the other is organizations must understand and bring forth a balance between various stakeholder interests (Savage, Dunkin & Ford 2004). These axioms are based on the premise that an organization cannot survive in the end if it does not provide due attention to its stakeholders.

One issue in managing stakeholder relations is that a single decision made by the organization can provoke various responses from a set of stakeholders. This is so because each stakeholder has a different interest. In a way, each stakeholder has a different interest in the organization and therefore, has different expectations out of the strategic decision-making process. Therefore, it is essential to classify stakeholders according to their interests and relationships with the organization.

In the case of a nonprofit organization, the key accountability is related to fiduciary, legal, professional, and obligation to serve the public good (Chisolm 1995; Hammack 1995; Kearns 1996; Balser & McClusky 2005). Therefore, the task that is related to the management of stakeholders is to understand who the stakeholder is, and their expectations are regarding the organization, and weighing them against the organization’s mission and ethical values. Therefore, executives at nonprofit organizations have some discretion as to how stakeholder relations are to be maintained.

The question arises – who are the stakeholders of the Salvation Army? From figure 1, it can be seen that the stakeholders of the Salvation Army are those who are affected by the decisions of the organization. It must be noted, that here we are considering only those stakeholders who are directly associated with the decisions or the outcome of decisions of the organization. According to stakeholder theory, there are two kinds of stakeholders – internal stakeholders and external stakeholders.

According to the literature on the nonprofit organization, they have stakeholders varying from funders, referral agencies, government officials, volunteers, and clients or participants; for executive directors and staff, the board of directors is an additional stakeholder (Van Til 2005). In the case of the Salvation Army, the internal stakeholders of the organization are shown on the left-hand side of figure 1. They are the employees, volunteers, executive managers and trustees of the organization. These people have their stake in the organization as they are directly involved in the decision-making process or implementation process of the organization. For instance, the trustee and the executive management decide the workings and the planning of the organization. Further, they are instrumental in formulating the objective and mission of the organization. Again, employees and volunteers are responsible to implement the plan that has been devised by the authorities and put it into action.

The internal stakeholders benefit from the good performance of the organization. However, too much of the growth of the organization without proper support and employee strength makes growth plans a difficult affair.

External stakeholders of the Salvation Army are shown on the right side of figure 1. They include people, who give donations to the organization, society, government, the church, and the distress victims who required the help of the organization.

The donators are inclined to give money for the betterment of the operations of the organization. Their interest lies in seeing that their money is put to the right use. Sometimes they even insist on the terms on which their money will be used. For instance, Joan K. Broc, wife owner of the US fast-food chain McDonald’s, donated $1.6 billion to the Salvation Army’s unit in the US. This was the largest donated amount in the history of any nonprofit organization. However, this had restrictions on its use. However, this received a lot of criticism from the UK branch of the organization where an officer wrote in the Guardian in January 2004:

“ In the UK, where we run a vast array of services for the vulnerable people, we rely on the support of the public and we would like to thank everyone who contributes. We don’t need $1.5bn to make a difference to people’s lives” (Murdoch 2007, p. 669)

This comment demonstrates the differences in opinion between internal and external stakeholders and their interest in the organization.

Salvation Army is an organization, which has an evangelical association, and its association with the church is undisputed. It is a part of the universal Christian Church. One of its main objectives is to spread “good news about Jesus Christ” and “persuade people to become his followers” (Murdoch 2007, p. 667). The organization’s lifestyle and workings are based on the teachings of the Bible. Therefore, the church is a major stakeholder in the organization, as the teachings of the Bible and preaching are associated with the organization. Consequently, the church will want their control over matters of the kind of preaching by the organization. Further, it may want to regulate the matters of decision-making and operations of the organization. This might become a source of the problem in maintaining a relationship with other stakeholders and in the basic operations of the army. One conflict arises between the military structure of the organization and the evangelical mission of the organization. In this case, it has been mentioned that the Salvation Army’s picture as a quasi-military organization with its ranks, uniforms, and War Cry assumes a picture of religious warfare. However, with time the organization needs to change its image as a solely evangelical organization, thus, altering its image. This would bring forth a conflict between its evangelical aim, organizational structure, and its social welfare programs.

The other stakeholders are the beneficiaries of the services provided by the organization. They are on the receivers’ end of the organization. They are the ones for whom the organization works to provide social programs, disaster management programs, health-oriented, programs, etc. to help them relieve their distress. For instance, in case of the hurricane Katrina in the US, Salvation Army undertook the largest disaster management program in the Gulf Coast providing relief work to almost all hurricane-hit states. The other relief program was launched after the 9/11 attack on WTC, which was the organization’s second-largest relief program after Katrina.

The other stakeholders who are concerned with the operations of the organization are the government of the countries where the Salvation Army operates. Salvation Army operates in 118 different countries globally. Therefore, the countries where they operate, and the governments of the countries they operate are the stakeholders of the aim and objective of the organization. Usually, Salvation Army does not operate in countries where they do not receive government sanctions. However, they do not share a cordial relation with all governments. For instance, the Salvation Army was engaged in a dispute with the UK government in a labor issue where they were charged with “sweating” the laborers in their workshops at a wage rate 500 percent lower than the trade union rate (Telegraph 1907). The Salvation also faced a ban from the Russian government, which was later on lifted (Murdoch 2007). This is indicative of the disputes between the two stakeholders the government, employees, and the organization’s goals.

Another stakeholder of the organization is society. The preaching, the charitable, and welfare works of the organization ultimately trickle down for the benefit of society. However, the organization has faced problems in coping with changing societal constructs. The army serves society through its welfare work. However, there has been a decline in donations, which has increased the possibility of reducing welfare activities. This may conflict with the interest of the society in the organization.

The question that now arises is that the number of stakeholders is increasing every day with the growing nature, the strength of the organization. There is more than 19000 staff of the organization and not enough officers to manage them. Then there is the problem of increased globalization, which has exposed the organization to different kinds of culture, society, political situation, and environment. These problems create problems for the organization largely.

The above recommendations provided will help Salvation Army to solve the conflict arising out of its increasing stakeholders. Now the question that needs to be answered is how Salvation Army can manage its growth. The army has been growing constantly with the number of volunteers, employees, geographically, as well as in scope. The problem that is faced is to sustain this growth as well as not to lose organizational effectiveness. In this respect, literature on nonprofit organizations provides threefold solutions: goal alignment, system resources, and reputational. Goal alignment implies they must align their goal with that of the stakeholders. Historically, the mission of the Salvation Army was to preach the word of God and help all irrespective of religion, caste, creed, class, color, sex, or age. Further, its organizational structure has been hierarchical, based on a quasi-military structure. This made the organization less aligned to the new generation when we reached the twenty-first century. The operational values of the organization were still those made in the nineteenth century, and there was little change in its values. This lessened its appeal to the new generation (Murdoch 2007).

From the case, it was apparent that the operation of the organization in different countries was independent of each other’s decisions making processes. This increased internal problems within branches of the Salvation Army. It would be better if the organization could align these operations in the form of a transnational organization. The operations of the organization would become easier.

Further, the relation with governments in each country must be weighed before specific planning is undertaken. In hostile environments, the usage of limited resources and augmenting of resources are recommended.

The structure of the organization must be changed in order to prevent the staff to be overburdened due to the hierarchical military structure. Today most nonprofit organizations have a flat structure. Though the military feel of the Salvation Army provides a different image of the organization, it has been creating problems in attracting new staff.

The organization is well known for the reasonable salaries that the organization pays to its executive directors. It is much lower than the salaries paid in other nonprofit organizations is much higher. Thus, it is facing difficulty in attracting talent in order to remain in managerial positions. That is one reason for the increasing shortage of officers in the organization. According to the Salvation Army authorities, the low salary goes with the value of the originations. However, an organization, which fails to learn will, not be able to sustain itself in the end.

Further, there has been an initiative of joining the evangelical section of the organization with that of the social service arm (Murdoch 2007). This has increase apprehension among many professionals. This move would create a problem for the future of the organization. This is so because, the organization, then, will be viewed solely as a religious entity as this would gain prominence in the perception of the stakeholders.

Thus, the governance structure of the organization and the strategic planning process must ensure that Salvation Army maintains its image of a nonprofit, social reform organization with Christian values.

The strategic planning process of the Salvation Army will be based on its internationalization process. The growth it receives due to increased operations in African and Asian countries will help it to expand. However, in this respect, the organization must plan for the following:

• consistent flow of adequate donations,
• volunteers, staff, and managers who can help in implementing the plan of actions.

The problem that Salvation Army usually faces is to maintain a balance in keeping its staff satisfied and not overworked and serving its clients. Thus, the organization should be able to recruit more employees in order to reduce their staffing problem.

Further, it is primarily a Christian organization, which may induce problems for its global existence. For their mission may conflict with the interests and religious customs of other countries. The governmental intervention has also posed certain problems, which conflicted with the organizational values. Further, its values have stopped the organization to accept the donation from sources from alcohol or gambling. But new sources of donation must be identified.

As the organization entered the twenty-first century, the problems it faces became more apparent. These were mainly to face their increasing growth and internationalization, increasing demand of service, and aging membership, the problem of associating with the new generation of youths, and attracting them to join the organization’s cause. In the future, the organization must try to do the following:

• Increase its membership strength through attracting younger people and solve their problem of graying members. For this, they have to shed their missionary image and put forth the image of a nonprofit social welfare organization with Christian values.
• Their core values must be aligned with that of the government, which will help their operations in many countries. This is even more essential in face of internationalization.
• Salvation Army must identify its key stakeholders and balance their interests with those of the organization. Further, managing the interests of the stakeholders, in order to avoid stakeholder conflict is essential to maintain future growth.

Responsiveness becomes a problem when there are too many stakeholders to take care of. This creates conflicting expectations and the objectives of nonprofit organizations. Further, the stakeholders may desire things, which are beyond the scope or culture of the organization. In this respect what should be done? The recommendation that is put forth is to manage stakeholders’ expectations.

Strategic management of stakeholders is not only related to responding to the stakeholders but also to guide them and their expectations and their evaluation of the organization (Kearns 1996; Oliver 1991; Romzek 1996). This process will help in aligning their expectations with the vision, values, and mission of the organization. Further, this will also help the organization in making it appear more responsive to the stakeholder and less conflict in their expectation.

Another method that can be employed to manage stakeholders’ expectations is to use a consistent rational approach towards stakeholders. Consistency increases the organization’s predictability and reduces the uncertainly of the stakeholders. When the actions of the organization are considered consistent in relation to their external environment, stakeholders are in a better position to analyze the dynamics of interaction with the organization. This will increase the perception of organizational efficiency in the minds of the stakeholders. Here consistency many are defined as a public trust, which is defined by Kearns as “being able to account for the organization’s implied promises to its constituencies by pursuing its stated mission in good faith and with defensible management and governance practices.” (1996, p. 40) This does not imply that the organization will manipulate stakeholder perception at the stake of social welfare. Rather, in the words of Balser & McClusky that the organizations will be “evaluated as effective when stakeholders interpret that they are serving the public interest, using behaviors that entail a consistent approach with them.” (2005, p. 298)

Salvation Army was formed in order to help people in need and preach the word of Jesus Christ. The army has a history of extensive work it has done in order to help people and in social service it has provided in the health sector, social programs, disaster management, etc. It has also grown consistently. However, in recent years the organization has faced problems in managing its stakeholder expectations and the process of expansion internationally. This case study analysis has provided a vivid account of the problems faced by the organization, and what it should do in order to sustain growth.

Therefore, to be more sustainable in the future, Salvation Army must become more responsive to its environment and most essential to its stakeholders. In the case of nonprofit organizations where the vision is social welfare, managing stakeholder issues attains paramount importance in order to keep them satisfied. Thus, Salvation Army must have proper control over the number of donations and be more transparent in its usage.

Balser, D & McClusky, J 2005, ‘Managing Stakeholder Relationships and Nonprofit Organization Effectiveness’, Nonprofit Management & Leadership , vol 15, no. 3, pp. 295-315.

Bryson, JM 2005, ‘The Strategy Change Cycle’, in RD Herman (ed.), The Jossey-Bass handbook of nonprofit leadership and management , John Wiley and Sons, San Francisco.

Chisolm, LB 1995, ‘Accountability of Nonprofit Organizations and Those Who Control Them: The Legal Framework’, Nonprofit Management and Leadership , vol 6, no. 6, p. 141–156.

Courtney, R 2002, Strategic management for voluntary nonprofit organizations , Routledge, London.

Donaldson, T & Preston, LE 1995, ‘The Stakeholder Theory of the Corporation: Concepts, Evidence, and Implications’, Academy of Management Review , vol 20, no. 1, pp. 65-91.

Drucker, PF 2001, Managing the non-profit organization: practices and principles , Gulf Professional Publishing, Oxford.

Freeman, RE 1984, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach , Pitman, Marshfield, MA.

Freeman, RE & Evan, WM 1990, ‘Corporate Governance: A Stakeholder Interpretation ‘, Journal of Behavioral Economics , vol 19, no. 4, pp. 337-359.

Hammack, DC 1995, ‘Accountability and Nonprofit Organizations: A Historical Perspective’, Nonprofit Management and Leadership , vol 6, p. 127–139.

Kearns, KP 1996, Managing for Accountability , Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Murdoch, A 2007, ‘Belief in Action: The Salvation Army, a global not-for-profit organization’, 667-676.

Oliver, C 1991, ‘Strategic Responses to Institutional Processes’, Academy of Management Review , vol 16, p. 145–179.

Romzek, BS 1996, ‘Enhancing Accountability ‘, in JL Perry (ed.), Handbook of Public Administration , Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Savage, GT, Dunkin, JW & Ford, DM 2004, ‘Responding To a Crisis: A Stakeholder Analysis of Community Health Organizations’, Journal of Health & Human Services Administration , vol 26, no. 4, pp. 383-414.

Telegraph 1907, ‘The Sweating Evil’, Evening Post, Vol. LXXIV No. 61 , 9 September 1907, pp. 7. Web.

Van Til, J 2005, ‘Nonprofit Organizations and Social Institutions’, in RD Herman (ed.), The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management , John Wiley and Sons, San Francisco.

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Salvation Army recalls 'Donut Lassies' as National Donut Day approaches

For American soldiers stationed overseas, a small reminder of home can be a big deal. Nonprofits like Military Connections in Penn Hills regularly collect care packages to send to service members abroad.

In the early 1900s, that reminder took the form of the “Donut Lassies,” Salvation Army workers who traveled to France to provide comfort and spiritual aid to soldiers. According to the nonprofit World War Veterans, about 250 volunteers traveled to France and set up small huts near the front lines where they would provide clothes, supplies and baked goods to soldiers.

After two volunteers, Ensign Margaret Sheldon and Adjutant Helen Purviance, realized that serving baked goods would be more difficult than they anticipated, they began using soldiers metal helmets as cookware. They filled the helmets with oil and used them to fry doughnuts that they distributed to the troops.

In recognition of National Donut Day on June 7, Salvation Army members in Pittsburgh will deliver 35 dozen doughnuts, provided by Giant Eagle, to veterans at the VA in Aspinwall.

In 1938, The Salvation Army celebrated the first National Donut Day in Chicago as a fundraiser to help those in need during the Great Depression and to commemorate the work of the Donut Lassies.

“The Donut Lassies exemplified sacrifice on behalf of others,” said Maj. Gregory Hartshorn, divisional commander of The Salvation Army’s Western Pennsylvania Division. “Their bravery inspires us to continue to proudly serve our neighbors in need across 28 counties in Western Pennsylvania. We look forward to once again marking this sweet occasion in our community.”

Salvation Army members continued to provide comfort, care and doughnuts to troops in World War II, where another similar tradition took root. Teams of three female American Red Cross workers operated “club- mobiles” equipped with a kitchen area. They visited with soldiers, played them Victrola records, served hot coffee and fresh-made doughnuts, earning them the nickname of “Donut Dollies.”

During the Korean War, Donut Dollies fried up to 20,000 doughnuts per day for U.S. troops, according to the Heinz History Center, and were most visible during the Vietnam War. Between 1962 and 1973, they traveled more than 2 million miles in military vehicles visiting combat troops at remote fire bases across the country.

Part of the Heinz History Center’s collection in Pittsburgh includes papers and photographs from South Side native Rose Karlo Gantner, who served as a Donut Dollie during Vietnam.

History center officials said Gantner often spent her evenings visiting wounded soldiers and supporting medical teams. Its collection includes some of Gantner’s Donut Dollie activity sheets, materials regarding her work with the Red Cross and a card sent home to her mother.

In addition to bringing doughnuts to the VA, the Salvation Army will also host a Donut Day 5K in Bradford, near the New York state line, June 8. For more information, see SalvationArmyWPA.org/donutday5k .

Patrick Varine is a TribLive reporter covering Delmont, Export and Murrysville. He is a Western Pennsylvania native and joined the Trib in 2010 after working as a reporter and editor with the former Dover Post Co. in Delaware. He can be reached at [email protected] .

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Woman Robbed Salvation Army, Assaulted Employee: Newark PD

A woman robbed a Salvation Army in Newark, assaulting an employee on Wednesday, May 15, authorities said.

At 4 p.m., police responded to the Salvation Army Thrift Shop and Donation Center at 74 Pennington St. in Newark on a report of a robbery, Newark Public Safety Director Fritz Fragé said. 

The woman attempted to leave the store with $100 in merchandise without paying for it, so employees locked the door to prevent her from leaving, Fragé said. The woman shoved an employee to the floor, unlocked the door and fled westbound on Pennington St., Fragé said.

The employee was transported to St. Michael’s Hospital for treatment and is in stable condition, Fragé said. The woman was wearing a blue sweater, blue jeans, and a black hat.

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Russian key bridge used for ammunition transport destroyed — Ukrainian intelligence

Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence service has officially confirmed the destruction of a railway bridge over the Chapayevka River in Samara Oblast, Russia in a statement released on Telegram on March 4.

Train traffic is expected to be suspended for several weeks.

The bridge, used by Russia for transporting military cargo, including engineering ammunition from the Polimer factory, reportedly suffered damage around 6 a.m. on March 4.

Read also: Partisan photos reveal Russian radars guarding Crimean airbase, key intelligence handed to Kyiv

Due to the extent of the damage, the bridge will remain inoperable for the next few weeks, HUR said.

The statement does not explicitly confirm HUR’s involvement in the bridge destruction.

Russian Telegram channel Baza earlier reported an explosion on the railway bridge. According to Russian media, the metal structures of the bridge and the railings were damaged, while the concrete support remains reportedly undamaged. Train traffic has been suspended.

Moscow commits to war of mass and attrition amid highest losses since full-scale invasion - British Intelligence

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine

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The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.

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• May 16, 2024

This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.

By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.

Listen to this article, read by Jonathan Davis

Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now.

Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.

Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy.

The interviews, along with classified documents written in recent months, reveal a government at war with itself. One document describes a meeting in March, when Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, gave a withering account of the efforts by Bezalel Smotrich — an ultraright leader and the official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank — to undermine law enforcement in the occupied territory. Since Smotrich took office, Fox wrote, the effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled “to the point where it has disappeared.” Moreover, Fox said, Smotrich and his allies were thwarting the very measures to enforce the law that the government had promised Israeli courts it would take.

This is a story, pieced together and told in full for the first time, that leads to the heart of Israel. But it begins in the West Bank, in places like Khirbet Zanuta. From within the village’s empty ruins, there is a clear view across the valley to a tiny Jewish outpost called Meitarim Farm. Built in 2021, the farm has become a base of operations for settler attacks led by Yinon Levi, the farm’s owner. Like so many of the Israeli outposts that have been set up throughout the West Bank in recent years, Meitarim Farm is illegal. It is illegal under international law, which most experts say doesn’t recognize Israeli settlements in occupied land. It is illegal under Israeli law, like most settlements built since the 1990s.

Few efforts are made to stop the building of these outposts or the violence emanating from them. Indeed, one of Levi’s day jobs was running an earthworks company, and he has worked with the Israel Defense Forces to bulldoze at least one Palestinian village in the West Bank. As for the victims of that violence, they face a confounding and defeating system when trying to get relief. Villagers seeking help from the police typically have to file a report in person at an Israeli police station, which in the West Bank are almost exclusively located inside the settlements themselves. After getting through security and to the station, they sometimes wait for hours for an Arabic translator, only to be told they don’t have the right paperwork or sufficient evidence to submit a report. As one senior Israeli military official told us, the police “exhaust Palestinians so they won’t file complaints.”

And yet in November, with no protection from the police or the military, the former residents of Khirbet Zanuta and five nearby villages chose to test whether justice was still possible by appealing directly to Israel’s Supreme Court. In a petition, lawyers for the villagers, from Haqel, an Israeli human rights organization, argued that days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, a raiding party that included settlers and Israeli soldiers assaulted village residents, threatened murder and destroyed property throughout the village. They stated that the raid was part of “a mass transfer of ancient Palestinian communities,” one in which settlers working hand in hand with soldiers are taking advantage of the current war in Gaza to achieve the longer-standing goal of “cleansing” parts of the West Bank, aided by the “sweeping and unprecedented disregard” of the state and its “de facto consent to the massive acts of deportation.”

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and the relief the villagers are seeking — that the law be enforced — might seem modest. But our reporting reveals the degree to which decades of history are stacked against them: After 50 years of crime without punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have become one.

Separate and Unequal

The devastating Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, the ongoing crisis of Israeli hostages and the grinding Israeli invasion and bombardment of the Gaza Strip that followed may have refocused the world’s attention on Israel’s ongoing inability to address the question of Palestinian autonomy. But it is in the West Bank where the corrosive long-term effects of the occupation on Israeli law and democracy are most apparent.

A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the activists as “anarchists.” A spokesman for the Israeli National Police declined to respond to repeated queries about our findings.

The violence and impunity that these cases demonstrate existed long before Oct. 7. In nearly every month before October, the rate of violent incidents was higher than during the same month in the previous year. And Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, looking at more than 1,600 cases of settler violence in the West Bank between 2005 and 2023, found that just 3 percent ended in a conviction. Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000 — speaking out now because of his concern about Israel’s systemic failure to enforce the law — says this singular lack of consequences reflects the indifference of the Israeli leadership going back years. “The cabinet, the prime minister,” he says, “they signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”

Ayalon’s assessment was echoed by many other officials we interviewed. Mark Schwartz, a retired American three-star general, was the top military official working at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021, overseeing international support efforts for the partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “There’s no accountability,” he says now of the long history of settler crimes and heavy-handed Israeli operations in the West Bank. “These things eat away at trust and ultimately the stability and security of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s undeniable.”

How did a young nation turn so quickly on its own democratic ideals, and at what price? Any meaningful answer to these questions has to take into account how a half-century of lawless behavior that went largely unpunished propelled a radical form of ultranationalism to the center of Israeli politics. This is the history that is told here in three parts. In Part I, we describe the origins of a religious movement that established Jewish settlements in the newly won territories of Gaza and the West Bank during the 1970s. In Part II, we recount how the most extreme elements of the settler movement began targeting not only Palestinians but also Israeli leaders who tried to make peace with them. And in Part III, we show how the most established members of Israel’s ultraright, unpunished for their crimes, gained political power in Israel, even as a more radical generation of settlers vowed to eliminate the Israeli state altogether.

Many Israelis who moved to the West Bank did so for reasons other than ideology, and among the settlers, there is a large majority who aren’t involved in violence or other illegal acts against Palestinians. And many within the Israeli government fought to expand the rule of law into the territories, with some success. But they also faced harsh pushback, with sometimes grave personal consequences. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts in the 1990s, on the heels of the First Intifada, to make peace with Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, gave rise to a new generation of Jewish terrorists, and they ultimately cost him his life.

The disagreement over how to handle the occupied territories and their residents has bred a complex and sometimes opaque system of law enforcement. At its heart are two separate and unequal systems of justice: one for Jews and another for Palestinians.

The West Bank is under the command of the I.D.F., which means that Palestinians are subject to a military law that gives the I.D.F. and the Shin Bet considerable authority. They can hold suspects for extended periods without trial or access to either a lawyer or the evidence against them. They can wiretap, conduct secret surveillance, hack into databases and gather intelligence on any Arab living in the occupied territory with few restrictions. Palestinians are subject to military — not civilian — courts, which are far more punitive when it comes to accusations of terrorism and less transparent to outside scrutiny. (In a statement, the I.D.F. said, “The use of administrative detention measures is only carried out in situations where the security authorities have reliable and credible information indicating a real danger posed by the detainee to the region’s security, and in the absence of other alternatives to remove the risk.” It declined to respond to multiple specific queries, in some cases saying “the events are too old to address.”)

According to a senior Israeli defense official, since Oct. 7, some 7,000 settler reservists were called back by the I.D.F., put in uniform, armed and ordered to protect the settlements. They were given specific orders: Do not leave the settlements, do not cover your faces, do not initiate unauthorized roadblocks. But in reality many of them have left the settlements in uniform, wearing masks, setting up roadblocks and harassing Palestinians.

All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.

In this system, even the question of what behavior is being investigated as an act of terror is different for Jews and Arabs. For a Palestinian, the simple admission of identifying with Hamas counts as an act of terrorism that permits Israeli authorities to use severe interrogation methods and long detention. Moreover, most acts of violence by Arabs against Jews are categorized as a “terror” attack — giving Shin Bet and other services license to use the harshest methods at their disposal.

The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet called the Department for Counterintelligence and Prevention of Subversion in the Jewish Sector, known more commonly as the Jewish Department. It is dwarfed both in size and prestige by Shin Bet’s Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism. And in the event, most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause. This system, with its gaps and obstructions, allowed the founders of groups advocating extreme violence during the 1970s and 1980s to act without consequences, and today it has built a protective cocoon around their ideological descendants.

Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands . Just two months earlier, according to news reports at the time, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal Amir.

Now Ben-Gvir was Israel’s national security minister and Smotrich was Israel’s finance minister, charged additionally with overseeing much of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank. In December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet, including a clear statement that the nationalistic ideology of his new allies was now the government’s guiding star. “The Jewish people,” it said, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel.”

Two months after that, two Israeli settlers were murdered in an attack by Hamas gunmen near Huwara, a village in the West Bank. The widespread calls for revenge, common after Palestinian terror attacks, were now coming from within Netanyahu’s new government. Smotrich declared that “the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out.”

And, he added, “I think the State of Israel needs to do it.”

Birth of a Movement

With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-​Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the territories animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands.

Gush Emunim followers believed that the coming of the messiah would be hastened if, rather than studying holy books from morning to night, Jews settled the newly occupied territories. This was the land of “Greater Israel,” they believed, and there was a pioneer spirit among the early settlers. They saw themselves as direct descendants of the earliest Zionists, who built farms and kibbutzim near Palestinian villages during the first part of the 20th century, when the land was under British control. But while the Zionism of the earlier period was largely secular and socialist, the new settlers believed they were advancing God’s agenda.

The legality of that agenda was an open question. The Geneva Conventions, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade occupying powers to deport or transfer “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But the status of the territory was, in the view of many within and outside the Israeli government, more complex. The settlers sought to create what some of them called “facts on the ground.” This put them into conflict with both the Palestinians and, at least putatively, the Israeli authorities responsible for preventing the spread of illegal settlements.

Whether or not the government would prove flexible on these matters became clear in April 1975 at Ein Yabrud, an abandoned Jordanian military base near Ofra, in the West Bank. A group of workers had been making the short commute from Israel most days for months to work on rebuilding the base, and one evening they decided to stay. They were aiming to establish a Jewish foothold in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli designation for the territories that make up the West Bank, and they had found a back door that required only the slightest push. Their leader met that same night with Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defense minister, who told the I.D.F. to stand down. Peres would treat the nascent settlement not as a community but as a “work camp” — and the I.D.F. would do nothing to hinder their work.

Peres’s maneuver was partly a sign of the weakness of Israel’s ruling Labor party, which had dominated Israeli politics since the country’s founding. The residual trauma of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 — when Israel was caught completely by surprise by Egyptian and Syrian forces before eventually beating back the invading armies — had shaken citizens’ belief in their leaders, and movements like Gush Emunim, directly challenging the authority of the Israeli state, had gained momentum amid Labor’s decline. This, in turn, energized Israel’s political right.

By the late 1970s, the settlers, bolstered in part by growing political support, were expanding in number. Carmi Gillon, who joined Shin Bet in 1972 and rose by the mid-1990s to become its director, recalls the evolving internal debates. Whose responsibility was it to deal with settlers? Should Israel’s vaunted domestic security service enforce the law in the face of clearly illegal acts of settlement? “When we realized that Gush Emunim had the backing of so many politicians, we knew we shouldn’t touch them,” he said in his first interview for this article in 2016.

One leader of the ultraright movement would prove hard to ignore, however. Meir Kahane, an ultraright rabbi from Flatbush, Brooklyn, had founded the militant Jewish Defense League in 1968 in New York. He made no secret of his belief that violence was sometimes necessary to fulfill his dream of Greater Israel, and he even spoke of plans to buy .22 caliber rifles for Jews to defend themselves. “Our campaign motto will be, ‘Every Jew a .22,’” he declared. In 1971, he received a suspended sentence on bomb-making charges, and at the age of 39 he moved to Israel to start a new life. From a hotel on Zion Square in Jerusalem, he started a school and a political party, what would become Kach, and drew followers with his fiery rhetoric.

Kahane said he wanted to rewrite the stereotype of Jews as victims, and he argued, in often vivid terms, that Zionism and democracy are in fundamental tension. “Zionism came into being to create a Jewish state,” Kahane said in an interview with The Times in 1985, five years before he was assassinated by a gunman in New York. “Zionism declares that there is going to be a Jewish state with a majority of Jews, come what may. Democracy says, ‘No, if the Arabs are the majority then they have the right to decide their own fate.’ So Zionism and democracy are at odds. I say clearly that I stand with Zionism.”

A Buried Report

In 1977, the Likud party led a coalition that, for the first time in Israeli history, secured a right-wing majority in the country’s Parliament, the Knesset. The party was headed by Menachem Begin, a veteran of the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that carried out attacks against Arabs and British authorities in Mandatory Palestine, the British colonial entity that preceded the creation of Israel. Likud — Hebrew for “the alliance” — was itself an amalgam of several political parties. Kach itself was still on the outside and would always remain so. But its radical ideas and ambitions were moving closer to the mainstream.

Likud’s victory came 10 years after the war that brought Israel vast amounts of new land, but the issue of what to do with the occupied territories had yet to be resolved. As the new prime minister, Begin knew that addressing that question would mean addressing the settlements. Could there be a legal basis for taking the land? Something that would allow the settlements to expand with the full support of the state?

It was Plia Albeck, then a largely unknown bureaucrat in the Israeli Justice Ministry, who found Begin’s answer. Searching through the regulations of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine in the years preceding the British Mandate, she lit upon the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, a major effort at land reform. Among other provisions, the law enabled the sultan to seize any land that had not been cultivated by its owners for a number of years and that was not “within shouting distance” of the last house in the village. It did little to address the provisions of the Geneva Convention, but it was, for her department, precedent enough. Soon Albeck was riding in an army helicopter, mapping the West Bank and identifying plots of land that might meet the criteria of the Ottoman law. The Israeli state had replaced the sultan, but the effect was the same. Albeck’s creative legal interpretation led to the creation of more than 100 new Jewish settlements, which she referred to as “my children.”

At the same time, Begin was quietly brokering a peace deal with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the United States at Camp David. The pact they eventually negotiated gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt and promised greater autonomy to Palestinians in the occupied territories in return for normalized relations with Israel. It would eventually win the two leaders a joint Nobel Peace Prize. But Gush Emunim and other right-wing groups saw the accords as a shocking reversal. From this well of anger sprang a new campaign of intimidation. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the leaders of Gush Emunim and the founder of the settlement in the heart of Hebron, declared the movement’s purposes on Israeli television. The Arabs, he said, “must not be allowed to raise their heads.”

Leading this effort would be a militarized offshoot of Gush Emunim called the Jewish Underground. The first taste of what was to come arrived on June 2, 1980. Car bombs exploded as part of a complex assassination plot against prominent Palestinian political figures in the West Bank. The attack blew the legs off Bassam Shaka, the mayor of Nablus; Karim Khalaf, the mayor of Ramallah, was forced to have his foot amputated. Kahane, who in the days before the attack said at a news conference that the Israeli government should form a “Jewish terrorist group” that would “throw bombs and grenades to kill Arabs,” applauded the attacks, as did Rabbi Haim Druckman, a leader of Gush Emunim then serving in the Knesset, and many others within and outside the movement. Brig. Gen. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, then the top I.D.F. commander in the West Bank, noting the injuries suffered by the Palestinian mayors under his watch, said simply, “It’s a shame they didn’t hit them a bit higher.” An investigation began, but it would be years before it achieved any results. Ben-Eliezer went on to become a leader of the Labor party and defense minister.

The threat that the unchecked attacks posed to the institutions and guardrails of Jewish democracy wasn’t lost on some members of the Israeli elite. As the violence spread, a group of professors at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem sent a letter to Yitzhak Zamir, Israel’s attorney general. They were concerned, they wrote, that illegal “private policing activity” against the Palestinians living in the occupied territories presented a “threat to the rule of law in the country.” The professors saw possible collusion between the settlers and the authorities. “There is a suspicion that similar crimes are not being handled in the same manner and some criminals are receiving preferential treatment over others,” the signatories to the letter said. “This suspicion requires fundamental examination.”

The letter shook Zamir, who knew some of the professors well. He was also well aware that evidence of selective law enforcement — one law for the Palestinians and another for the settlers — would rebut the Israeli government’s claim that the law was enforced equally and could become both a domestic scandal and an international one. Zamir asked Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties, to lead a committee looking into the issue. Karp was responsible for handling the most delicate issues facing the Justice Ministry, but this would require even greater discretion than usual.

As her team investigated, Karp says, “it very quickly became clear to me that what was described in the letter was nothing compared to the actual reality on the ground.” She and her investigative committee found case after case of trespassing, extortion, assault and murder, even as the military authorities and the police did nothing or performed notional investigations that went nowhere. “The police and the I.D.F. in both action and inaction were really cooperating with the settler vandals,” Karp says. “They operated as if they had no interest in investigating when there were complaints, and generally did everything they could to deter the Palestinians from even submitting them.”

In May 1982, Karp and her committee submitted a 33-page report, determining that dozens of offenses were investigated insufficiently. The committee also noted that, in their research, the police had provided them with information that was incomplete, contradictory and in part false. They concluded that nearly half the investigations opened against settlers were closed without the police conducting even a rudimentary investigation. In the few cases in which they did investigate, the committee found “profound flaws.” In some cases, the police witnessed the crimes and did nothing. In others, soldiers were willing to testify against the settlers, but their testimonies and other evidence were buried.

It soon became clear to Karp that the government was going to bury the report. “We were very naïve,” she now recalls. Zamir had been assured, she says, that the cabinet would discuss the grave findings and had in fact demanded total confidentiality. The minister of the interior at the time, Yosef Burg, invited Karp to his home for what she recalls him describing as “a personal conversation.” Burg, a leader of the pro-settler National Religious Party, had by then served as a government minister in one office or another for more than 30 years. Karp assumed he wanted to learn more about her work, which could in theory have important repercussions for the religious right. “But, to my astonishment,” she says, “he simply began to scold me in harsh language about what we were doing. I understood that he wanted us to drop it.”

Karp announced she was quitting the investigative committee. “The situation we discovered was one of complete helplessness,” she says. When the existence of the report (but not its contents) leaked to the public, Burg denied having ever seen such an investigation. When the full contents of the report were finally made public in 1984, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry said only that the committee had been dissolved and that the ministry was no longer monitoring the problem.

A Wave of Violence

On April 11, 1982, a uniformed I.D.F. soldier named Alan Harry Goodman shot his way into the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, one of the most sacred sites for Muslims around the world. Carrying an M16 rifle, standard issue in the Israeli Army, he killed two Arabs and wounded many more. When investigators searched Goodman’s apartment, they found fliers for Kach, but a spokesman for the group said that it did not condone the attack. Prime Minister Begin condemned the attack, but he also chastised Islamic leaders calling for a general strike in response, which he saw as an attempt to “exploit the tragedy.”

The next year, masked Jewish Underground terrorists opened fire on students at the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three people and injuring 33 more. Israeli authorities condemned the massacre but were less clear about who would be held to account. Gen. Ori Orr, commander of Israeli forces in the region, said on the radio that all avenues would be pursued. But, he added, “we don’t have any description, and we don’t know who we are looking for.”

The Jewish Department found itself continually behind in its efforts to address the onslaught. In April 1984, it had a major breakthrough: Its agents foiled a Jewish Underground plan to blow up five buses full of Palestinians, and they arrested around two dozen Jewish Underground members who had also played roles in the Islamic College attack and the bombings of the Palestinian mayors in 1980. But only after weeks of interrogating the suspects did Shin Bet learn that the Jewish Underground had been developing a scheme to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque. The planning involved dozens of intelligence-gathering trips to the Temple Mount and an assessment of the exact amount of explosives that would be needed and where to place them. The goal was nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the messiah.

Carmi Gillon, who was head of Shin Bet’s Jewish Department at the time, says the fact that Shin Bet hadn’t learned about a plot involving so many people and such ambitious planning earlier was an “egregious intelligence failure.” And it was not the Shin Bet, he notes, who prevented the plot from coming to fruition. It was the Jewish Underground itself. “Fortunately for all of us, they decided to forgo the plan because they felt the Jewish people were not yet ready.”

“You have to understand why all this is important now,” Ami Ayalon said, leaning in for emphasis. The sun shining into the backyard of the former Shin Bet director was gleaming off his bald scalp, illuminating a face that looked as if it were sculpted by a dull kitchen knife. “We are not discussing Jewish terrorism. We are discussing the failure of Israel.”

Ayalon was protective of his former service, insisting that Shin Bet, despite some failures, usually has the intelligence and resources to deter and prosecute right-wing terrorism in Israel. And, he said, they usually have the will. “The question is why they are not doing anything about it,” he said. “And the answer is very simple. They cannot confront our courts. And the legal community finds it almost impossible to face the political community, which is supported by the street. So everything starts with the street.”

By the early 1980s, the settler movement had begun to gain some traction within the Knesset, but it remained far from the mainstream. When Kahane himself was elected to the Knesset in 1984, the members of the other parties, including Likud, would turn and leave the room when he stood up to deliver speeches. One issue was that the continual expansion of the settlements was becoming an irritant in U.S.-Israel relations. During a 1982 trip by Begin to Washington, the prime minister had a closed-door meeting with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to discuss Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year, an effort to force out the P.L.O. that had been heavy with civilian casualties. According to The Times’s coverage of the session, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, then in his second term, had an angry exchange with Begin about the West Bank, telling him that Israel was losing support in this country because of the settlements policy.

But Israeli officials came to understand that the Americans were generally content to vent their anger about the issue without taking more forceful action — like restricting military aid to Israel, which was then, as now, central to the country’s security arrangements. After the Jewish Underground plotters of the bombings targeting the West Bank mayors and other attacks were finally brought to trial in 1984, they were found guilty and given sentences ranging from a few months to life in prison. The plotters showed little remorse, though, and a public campaign swelled to have them pardoned. Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir also made the case for pardoning them, saying they were “excellent, good people who have erred in their path and actions.” Clemency, Shamir suggested, would prevent a recurrence of Jewish terrorism.

In the end, President Chaim Herzog, against the recommendations of Shin Bet and the Justice Ministry, signed an extraordinary series of pardons and commutations for the plotters. They were released and greeted as heroes by the settler community, and some rose to prominent positions in government and the Israeli media. One of them, Uzi Sharbav, now a leader in the settlement movement, was a speaker at a recent conference promoting the return of settlers to Gaza.

In fact, nearly all the Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial reductions in prison time. Gillon, the head of the Jewish Department when some of these people were arrested, recalls the “profound sense of injustice” that he felt when they were released. But even more important, he says, was “the question of what message the pardons convey to the public and to anyone who ever thinks about carrying out acts of terror against Arabs.”

Operational Failures

In 1987, a series of conflicts in Gaza led to a sustained Palestinian uprising throughout the occupied territories and Israel. The First Intifada, as it became known, was driven by anger over the occupation, which was then entering its third decade. It would simmer for the next six years, as Palestinians attacked Israelis with stones and Molotov cocktails and launched a series of strikes and boycotts. Israel deployed thousands of soldiers to quell the uprising.

In the occupied territories, reprisal attacks between settlers and Palestinians were an increasing problem. The Gush Emunim movement had spread and fractured into different groups, making it difficult for Shin Bet to embed enough informants with the settlers. But the service had one key informant — a man given the code name Shaul. He was a trusted figure among the settlers and rose to become a close assistant to Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the Gush Emunim leader who founded the settlement in Hebron.

Levinger had been questioned many times under suspicion of having a role in multiple violent attacks, but Shaul told Shin Bet operatives that they were seeing only a fraction of the whole picture. He told them about raids past and planned; about the settlers tearing through Arab villages, vandalizing homes, burning dozens of cars. The operatives ordered him to participate in these raids to strengthen his cover. One newspaper photographer in Hebron in 1985 captured Shaul smashing the wall of an Arab marketplace with a sledgehammer. As was standard policy, Shin Bet had ordered him to participate in any activity that didn’t involve harm to human life, but figuring out which of the activities wouldn’t cross that line became increasingly difficult. “The majority of the activists were lunatics, riffraff, and it was very difficult to be sure they wouldn’t hurt people and would harm only property,” Shaul said. (Shaul, whose true identity remains secret, provided these quotes in a 2015 interview with Bergman for the Israeli Hebrew-language paper Yedioth Ahronoth. Some of his account is published here for the first time.)

In September 1988, Rabbi Levinger, Shaul’s patron, was driving through Hebron when, he later said in court, Palestinians began throwing stones at his car and surrounding him. Levinger flashed a pistol and began firing wildly at nearby shops. Investigators said he killed a 42-year-old shopkeeper, Khayed Salah, who had been closing the steel shutter of his shoe store, and injured a second man. Levinger claimed self-defense, but he was hardly remorseful. “I know that I am innocent,” he said at the trial, “and that I didn’t have the honor of killing the Arab.”

Prosecutors cut a deal with Levinger. He was convicted of criminally negligent homicide, sentenced to five months in prison and released after only three.

Shin Bet faced the classic intelligence agency’s dilemma: how and when to let its informants participate in the very violent acts the service was supposed to be stopping. There was some logic in Shin Bet’s approach with Shaul, but it certainly didn’t help deter acts of terror in the West Bank, especially with little police presence in the occupied territories and a powerful interest group ensuring that whoever was charged for the violence was released with a light sentence.

Over his many years as a Shin Bet mole, Shaul said, he saw numerous intelligence and operational failures by the agency. One of the worst, he said, was the December 1993 murder of three Palestinians in an act of vengeance after the murder of a settler leader and his son. Driving home from a day of work in Israel, the three Palestinians, who had no connection to the deaths of the settlers, were pulled from their car and killed near the West Bank town Tarqumiyah.

Shaul recalled how one settler activist proudly told him that he and two friends committed the murders. He contacted his Shin Bet handlers to tell them what he had heard. “And suddenly I saw they were losing interest,” Shaul said. It was only later that he learned why: Two of the shooters were Shin Bet informants. The service didn’t want to blow their cover, or worse, to suffer the scandal that two of its operatives were involved in a murder and a cover-up.

In a statement, Shin Bet said that Shaul’s version of events is “rife with incorrect details” but refused to specify which details were incorrect. Neither the state prosecutor nor the attorney general responded to requests for comment, which included Shaul’s full version of events and additional evidence gathered over the years.

Shaul said he also gave numerous reports to his handlers about the activities of yet another Brooklyn-born follower of Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League: Dr. Baruch Goldstein. He earned his medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and in 1983 immigrated to Israel, where he worked first as a physician in the I.D.F., then as an emergency doctor at Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron.

In the years that passed, he gained the attention of Shin Bet with his eliminationist views, calling Arabs “latter-day Nazis” and making a point to visit the Jewish terrorist Ami Popper in prison, where he was serving a sentence for the 1990 murder of seven Palestinians in the Tel Aviv suburb Rishon LeZion. Shaul said he regarded Goldstein at the time as a “charismatic and highly dangerous figure” and repeatedly urged the Shin Bet to monitor him. “They told me it was none of my business,” he said.

‘Clean Hands’

On Feb. 24, 1994, Goldstein abruptly fired his personal driver. According to Shaul, Goldstein told the driver that he knew he was a Shin Bet informer. Terrified at having been found out, the driver fled the West Bank immediately. Now Goldstein was moving unobserved.

That evening marked the beginning of Purim, the festive commemoration of the victory of the Jews over Haman the Agagite, a court official in the Persian Empire and the nemesis of the Jews in the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. Right-wing Israelis have often drawn parallels between Haman and Arabs — enemies who seek the annihilation of Jews. Goldstein woke early the next day and put on his I.D.F. uniform, and at 5:20 a.m. he entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, an ancient complex in Hebron that serves as a place of worship for both Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried with him his I.D.F.-issued Galil rifle. It was also the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and on that morning hundreds of Muslims crowded the hall in prayer. Goldstein faced the worshipers and began shooting , firing 108 rounds before he was dragged down and beaten to death. The massacre killed 29 Muslim worshipers and injured more than 100.

The killings shocked Israel, and the government responded with a crackdown on extremism. Kach and Kahane Chai, the two political organizations most closely affiliated with the Kahanist movement, were outlawed and labeled terrorist groups, as was any other party that called for “the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land.” Rabin, in an address to the Knesset, spoke directly to the followers of Goldstein and Kahane, who he said were the product of a malicious foreign influence on Israel. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” he said. “You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”

Following the massacre, a state commission of inquiry was appointed, headed by Judge Meir Shamgar, the president of the Supreme Court. The commission’s report, made public in June 1994, strongly criticized the security arrangements at the Cave of the Patriarchs and examined law-enforcement practices regarding settlers and the extreme right in general. A secret appendix to the report, containing material deemed too sensitive for public consumption, included a December 1992 letter from the Israeli commissioner of police, essentially admitting that the police could not enforce the law. “The situation in the districts is extremely bleak,” he wrote, using the administrative nomenclature for the occupied territories. “The ability of the police to function is far from the required minimum. This is as a result of the lack of essential resources.”

In its conclusions, the commission, tracing the lines of the previous decade’s Karp report, confirmed claims that human rights organizations had made for years but that had been ignored by the Israeli establishment. The commission found that Israeli law enforcement was “ineffective in handling complaints,” that it delayed the filing of indictments and that restraining orders against “chronic” criminals among the “hard core” of the settlers were rarely issued.

The I.D.F. refused to allow Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel with “clean hands and a pure heart.”

A Curse of Death

One ultranationalist settler who went regularly to Goldstein’s grave was a teenage radical named Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would sometimes gather other followers there on Purim to celebrate the slain killer. Purim revelers often dress in costume, and on one such occasion, caught on video, Ben-Gvir even wore a Goldstein costume, complete with a fake beard and a stethoscope. By then, Ben-Gvir had already come to the attention of the Jewish Department, and investigators interrogated him several times. The military declined to enlist him into the service expected of most Israeli citizens.

After the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a new generation of Kahanists directed their anger squarely at Rabin for his signing of the Oslo agreement and for depriving them, in their view, of their birthright. “From my standpoint, Goldstein’s action was a wake-up call,” says Hezi Kalo, a longtime senior Shin Bet official who oversaw the division that included the Jewish Department at that time. “I realized that this was going to be a very big story, that the diplomatic moves by the Rabin government would simply not pass by without the shedding of blood.”

The government of Israel was finally paying attention to the threat, and parts of the government acted to deal with it. Shin Bet increased the size of the Jewish Department, and it began to issue a new kind of warning: Jewish terrorists no longer threatened only Arabs. They threatened Jews.

The warnings noted that rabbis in West Bank settlements, along with some politicians on the right, were now openly advocating violence against Israeli public officials, especially Rabin. Extremist rabbis issued rulings of Jewish law against Rabin — imposing a curse of death, a Pulsa Dinura , and providing justification for killing him, a din rodef .

Carmi Gillon by then had moved on from running the Jewish Department and now had the top job at Shin Bet. “Discussing and acknowledging such halakhic laws was tantamount to a license to kill,” he says now, looking back. He was particularly concerned about Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, who were stoking the fury of the right-wing rabbis and settler leaders in their battles with Rabin.

Shin Bet wanted to prosecute rabbis who approved the religiously motivated death sentences against Rabin, but the state attorney’s office refused. “They didn’t give enough importance back then to the link between incitement and legitimacy for terrorism,” says one former prosecutor who worked in the state attorney’s office in the mid-1990s.

Shin Bet issued warning after warning in 1995. “This was no longer a matter of mere incitement, but rather concrete information on the intention to kill top political figures, including Rabin,” Kalo now recalls. In October of that year, Ben-Gvir spoke to Israeli television cameras holding up a Cadillac hood ornament, which he boasted he had broken off the prime minister’s official car during chaotic anti-Oslo demonstrations in front of the Knesset. “We got to his car,” he said, “and we’ll get to him, too.” The following month, Rabin was dead.

Conspiracies

Yigal Amir, the man who shot and killed Rabin in Tel Aviv after a rally in support of the Oslo Accords on Nov. 4, 1995, was not unknown to the Jewish Department. A 25-year-old studying law, computer science and the Torah at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, he had been radicalized by Rabin’s efforts to make peace with Palestinian leaders and had connections to Avishai Raviv, the leader of Eyal, a new far-right group loosely affiliated with the Kach movement. In fact, Raviv was a Shin Bet informant, code-named Champagne. He had heard Amir talking about the justice of the din rodef judgments, but he did not identify him to his handlers as an immediate danger. “No one took Yigal seriously,” he said later in a court proceeding. “It’s common in our circles to talk about attacking public figures.”

Lior Akerman was the first Shin Bet investigator to interrogate Amir at the detention center where he was being held after the assassination. There was of course no question about his guilt. But there was the broader question of conspiracy. Did Amir have accomplices? Did they have further plans? Akerman now recalls asking Amir how he could reconcile his belief in God with his decision to murder the prime minister of Israel. Amir, he says, told him that rabbis had justified harming the prime minister in order to protect Israel.

Amir was smug, Akerman recalls, and he did not respond directly to the question of accomplices. “‘Listen,” he said, according to Akerman, “I succeeded . I was able to do something that many people wanted but no one dared to do. I fired a gun that many Jews held, but I squeezed the trigger because no one else had the courage to do it.”

The Shin Bet investigators demanded to know the identities of the rabbis. Amir was coy at first, but eventually the interrogators drew enough out of him to identify at least two of them. Kalo, the head of the division that oversaw the Jewish Department, went to the attorney general to argue that the rabbis should be detained immediately and prosecuted for incitement to murder. But the attorney general disagreed, saying the rabbis’ encouragement was protected speech and couldn’t be directly linked to the murder. No rabbis were arrested.

Days later, however, the police brought Raviv — the Shin Bet operative known as Champagne — into custody in a Tel Aviv Magistrate Court, on charges that he had conspired to kill Rabin, but he was released shortly after. Raviv’s role as an informant later came to light, and in 1999, he was arrested for his failure to act on previous knowledge of the assassination. He was acquitted on all charges, but he has since become a fixture of extremist conspiracy theories that pose his failure to ring the alarm as evidence that the murder of the prime minister was due not to the violent rhetoric of the settler right, or the death sentences from the rabbis, or the incitement by the leaders of the opposition, but to the all-too-successful efforts of a Shin Bet agent provocateur. A more complicated and insidious conspiracy theory, but no less false, was that it was Shin Bet itself that assassinated Rabin or allowed the assassination to happen.

Gillon, the head of the service at the time, resigned, and ongoing inquiries, charges and countercharges would continue for years. Until Oct. 7, 2023, the killing of the prime minister was considered the greatest failure in the history of Shin Bet. Kalo tried to sum up what went wrong with Israeli security. “The only answer my friends and I could give for the failure was complacency,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir. “They simply couldn’t believe that such a thing could happen, definitely not at the hands of another Jew.”

The Sasson Report

In 2001, as the Second Intifada unleashed a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, Ariel Sharon took office as prime minister. The struggling peace process had come to a complete halt amid the violence, and Sharon’s rise at first appeared to mark another victory for the settlers. But in 2003, in one of the more surprising reversals in Israeli political history, Sharon announced what he called Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza, with a plan to remove settlers — forcibly if necessary — over the next two years.

The motivations were complex and the subject of considerable debate. For Sharon, at least, it appeared to be a tactical move. “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” his senior adviser Dov Weisglass told Haaretz at the time. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” But Sharon was also facing considerable pressure from President George W. Bush to do something about the ever-expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank, which were a growing impediment to any regional security deals. In July 2004, he asked Talia Sasson, who had recently retired as the head of the special tasks division in the state attorney’s office, to draw up a legal opinion on the subject of “unauthorized outposts” in the West Bank. His instructions were clear: Investigate which Israeli government agencies and authorities were secretly involved in building the outposts. “Sharon never interfered in my work, and neither was he surprised by the conclusions,” Sasson said in an interview two decades later. “After all, he knew better than anyone what the situation was on the ground, and he was expecting only grave conclusions.”

It was a simple enough question: Just how had it happened that hundreds of outposts had been built in the decade since Yitzhak Rabin ordered a halt in most new settlements? But Sasson’s effort to find an answer was met with delays, avoidance and outright lies. Her final report used careful but pointed language: “Not everyone I turned to agreed to talk with me. One claimed he was too busy to meet, while another came to the meeting but refused to meaningfully engage with most of my questions.”

Sasson found that between January 2000 and June 2003, a division of Israel’s Construction and Housing Ministry issued 77 contracts for the establishment of 33 sites in the West Bank, all of which were illegal. In some cases, the ministry even paid for the paving of roads and the construction of buildings at settlements for which the Defense Ministry had issued demolition orders.

Several government ministries concealed the fact that funds were being diverted to the West Bank, reporting them under budgetary clauses such as “miscellaneous general development.” Just as in the case of the Karp Report two decades earlier, Sasson and her Justice Ministry colleagues discovered that the West Bank was being administered under completely separate laws, and those laws, she says, “appeared to me utterly insane.”

Sasson’s report took special note of Avi Maoz, who ran the Construction and Housing Ministry during most of this period. A political activist who early in his career spoke openly of pushing all Arabs out of the West Bank, Maoz helped found a settlement south of Jerusalem during the 1990s and began building a professional alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and would soon go on to his first term as prime minister. Years later, Maoz would be instrumental in ensuring Netanyahu’s political survival.

“The picture that emerges in the eye of the beholder is severe,” Sasson wrote in her report. “Instead of the government of Israel deciding on the establishment of settlements in the territories of Judea and Samaria, its place has been taken, from the mid-1990s and onward, by others.” The settlers, she wrote, were “the moving force,” but they could not have succeeded without the assistance of “various ministers of construction and housing in the relevant periods, some of them with a blind eye, and some of them with support and encouragement.”

This clandestine network was operating, Sasson wrote, “with massive funding from the State of Israel, without appropriate public transparency, without obligatory criteria. The erection of the unauthorized outposts is being done with violation of the proper procedures and general administrative rules, and in particular, flagrant and ongoing violation of the law.” These violations, Sasson warned, were coming from the government: “It was state and public agencies that broke the law, the rules, the procedures that the state itself had determined.” It was a conflict, she argued, that effectively neutered Israel’s internal checks and balances and posed a grave threat to the nation’s integrity. “The law-enforcement agencies are unable to act against government departments that are themselves breaking the law.”

But, in an echo of Judith Karp’s secret report decades earlier, the Sasson Report, made publicly available in March 2005, had almost no impact. Because she had a mandate directly from the prime minister, Sasson could have believed that her investigation might lead to the dismantling of the illegal outposts that had metastasized throughout the Palestinian territories. But even Sharon, with his high office, found himself powerless against the machine now in place to protect and expand the settlements in the West Bank — the very machine he had helped to build.

All of this was against the backdrop of the Gaza pullout. Sharon, who began overseeing the removal of settlements from Gaza in August 2005, was the third Israeli prime minister to threaten the settler dream of a Greater Israel, and the effort drew bitter opposition not only from the settlers but also from a growing part of the political establishment. Netanyahu, who had served his first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, and who previously voted in favor of a pullout, resigned his position as finance minister in Sharon’s cabinet in protest — and in anticipation of another run for the top job.

The settlers themselves took more active measures. In 2005, the Jewish Department of Shin Bet received intelligence about a plot to slow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by using 700 liters of gasoline to blow up vehicles on a major highway. Acting on the tip, officers arrested six men in central Israel. One of them was Bezalel Smotrich, the future minister overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank.

Smotrich, then 25, was detained and questioned for weeks. Yitzhak Ilan, one of the Shin Bet officers present at the interrogation, says he remained “silent as a fish” throughout — “like an experienced criminal.” He was released without charges, Ilan says, in part because Shin Bet knew putting him on trial might expose the service’s agents inside Jewish extremist groups, and in part because they believed Smotrich was likely to receive little punishment in any case. Shin Bet was very comfortable with the courts when we fought Palestinian terrorism and we got the heavy punishments we wanted, he says. With the Jewish terrorists it was exactly the opposite.

When Netanyahu made his triumphant return as prime minister in 2009, he set out to undermine Talia Sasson’s report, which he and his allies saw as an obstacle to accelerating the settlement campaign. He appointed his own investigative committee, led by Judge Edmond Levy of the Supreme Court, who was known to support the settler cause. But the Levy report, completed in 2012, did not undermine the findings in the Sasson Report — in some ways, it reinforced them. Senior Israeli officials, the committee found, were fully aware of what was happening in the territories, and they were simply denying it for the sake of political expediency. The behavior, they wrote, was not befitting of “a country that has proclaimed the rule of law as a goal.” Netanyahu moved on.

A NEW GENERATION

The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.

Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth “genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for Israel’s future.”

A former member of Hilltop Youth, who has asked to remain anonymous because she fears speaking out could endanger her, recalls how she and her friends used an illegal outpost on a hilltop in the West Bank as a base to lob stones at Palestinian cars. “The Palestinians would call the police, and we would know that we have at least 30 minutes before they arrive, if they arrive. And if they do arrive, they won’t arrest anyone. We did this tens of times.” The West Bank police, she says, couldn’t have been less interested in investigating the violence. “When I was young, I thought that I was outsmarting the police because I was clever. Later, I found out that they are either not trying or very stupid.”

The former Hilltop Youth member says she began pulling away from the group as their tactics became more extreme and once Ettinger began speaking openly about murdering Palestinians. She offered to become a police informant, and during a meeting with police intelligence officers in 2015, she described the group’s plans to commit murder — and to harm any Jews that stood in their way. By her account, she told the police about efforts to scout the homes of Palestinians before settling on a target. The police could have begun an investigation, she says, but they weren’t even curious enough to ask her the names of the people plotting the attack.

In 2013, Ettinger and other members of Hilltop Youth formed a secret cell calling itself the Revolt, designed to instigate an insurrection against a government that “prevents us from building the temple, which blocks our way to true and complete redemption.”

During a search of one of the group’s safe houses, Shin Bet investigators discovered the Revolt’s founding documents. “The State of Israel has no right to exist, and therefore we are not bound by the rules of the game,” one declared. The documents called for an end to the State of Israel and made it clear that in the new state that would rise in its place, there would be absolutely no room for non-Jews and for Arabs in particular: “If those non-Jews don’t leave, it will be permissible to kill them, without distinguishing between women, men and children.”

This wasn’t just idle talk. Ettinger and his comrades organized a plan that included timetables and steps to be taken at each stage. One member even composed a training manual with instructions on how to form terror cells and burn down houses. “In order to prevent the residents from escaping,” the manual advised, “you can leave burning tires in the entrance to the house.”

The Revolt carried out an early attack in February 2014, firebombing an uninhabited home in a small Arab village in the West Bank called Silwad, and followed with more arson attacks, the uprooting of olive groves and the destruction of Palestinian granaries. Members of the group torched mosques, monasteries and churches, including the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. A police officer spotted Ettinger himself attacking a herd of sheep belonging to an Arab shepherd. He stoned a sheep and then slaughtered it in front of the shepherd, the officer later testified. “It was shocking,” he said. “There was a sort of insanity in it.”

Shin Bet defined the Revolt as an organization that aimed “to undermine the stability of the State of Israel through terror and violence, including bodily harm and bloodshed,” according to an internal Shin Bet memo, and sought to place several of its members, including Ettinger, under administrative detention — a measure applied frequently against Arabs.

The state attorney, however, did not approve the request. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented 323 incidents of violence by settlers against Palestinians in 2014; Palestinians were injured in 107 of these incidents. By the following year, the Revolt escalated the violence by openly advocating the murder of Arabs.

The Shin Bet and the police identified one of the prominent members of the Revolt, Amiram Ben-Uliel, making him a target of surveillance. But the service failed to prevent the wave of violence that he unleashed. On the night of July 31, 2015, Ben-Uliel set out on a killing spree in a central West Bank village called Duma. Ben-Uliel prepared a bag with two bottles of incendiary liquid, rags, a lighter, a box of matches, gloves and black spray paint. According to the indictment against him, Ben-Uliel sought a home with clear signs of life to ensure that the house he torched was not abandoned. He eventually found the home of Reham and Sa’ad Dawabsheh, a young mother and father. He opened a window and threw a Molotov cocktail into the home. He fled, and in the blaze that followed, the parents suffered injuries that eventually killed them. Their older son, Ahmad, survived the attack, but their 18-month-old toddler, Ali, was burned to death.

It was always clear, says Akerman, the former Shin Bet official, “that those wild groups would move from bullying Arabs to damaging property and trees and eventually would murder people.” He is still furious about how the service has handled Jewish terrorism. “Shin Bet knows how to deal with such groups, using emergency orders, administrative detention and special methods in interrogation until they break,” he says. But although it was perfectly willing to apply those methods to investigating Arab terrorism, the service was more restrained when it came to Jews. “It allowed them to incite, and then they moved on to the next stage and began to torch mosques and churches. Still undeterred, they entered Duma and burned a family.”

Shin Bet at first claimed to have difficulty locating the killers, even though they were all supposed to be under constant surveillance. When Ben-Uliel and other perpetrators were finally arrested, right-wing politicians gave fiery speeches against Shin Bet and met with the families of the perpetrators to show their support. Ben-Uliel was sentenced to life in prison, and Ettinger was finally put in administrative detention, but a fracture was spreading. In December 2015, Hilltop Youth members circulated a video clip showing members of the Revolt ecstatically dancing with rifles and pistols, belting out songs of hatred for Arabs, with one of them stabbing and burning a photograph of the murdered toddler, Ali Dawabsheh. Netanyahu, for his part, denounced the video, which, he said, exposed “the real face of a group that poses danger to Israeli society and security.”

American Friends

The expansion of the settlements had long been an irritant in Israel’s relationship with the United States, with American officials spending years dutifully warning Netanyahu both in public and in private meetings about his support for the enterprise. But the election of Donald Trump in 2016 ended all that. His new administration’s Israel policy was led mostly by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had a long personal relationship with Netanyahu, a friend of his father’s who had stayed at their family home in New Jersey. Trump, in a broader regional agenda that lined up perfectly with Netanyahu’s own plans, also hoped to scuttle the nuclear deal with Iran that Barack Obama had negotiated and broker diplomatic pacts between Israel and Arab nations that left the matter of a Palestinian state unresolved and off the table.

If there were any questions about the new administration’s position on settlements, they were answered once Trump picked his ambassador to Israel. His choice, David Friedman, was a bankruptcy lawyer who for years had helped run an American nonprofit that raised millions of dollars for Beit El, one of the early Gush Emunim settlements in the West Bank and the place where Bezalel Smotrich was raised and educated. The organization, which was also supported by the Trump family, had helped fund schools and other institutions inside Beit El. On the heels of the Trump transition, Friedman referred to Israel’s “alleged occupation” of Palestinian territories and broke with longstanding U.S. policy by saying “the settlements are part of Israel.”

This didn’t make Friedman a particularly friendly recipient of the warnings regularly delivered by Lt. Gen. Mark Schwartz, the three-star general who in 2019 arrived at the embassy in Jerusalem to coordinate security between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. A career Green Beret who had combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and served as deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, the military task force with authority over U.S. counterterrorism special missions units, Schwartz wasn’t short on Middle East experience.

But he was immediately shocked by the landscape of the West Bank: settlers acting with impunity, a police force that was essentially nonexistent outside the settlements and the Israeli Army fanning the tensions with its own operations. Schwartz recalls how angry he was about what he called the army’s “collective punishment” tactics, including the razing of Palestinian homes, which he viewed as gratuitous and counterproductive. “I said, ‘Guys, this isn’t how professional militaries act.’” As Schwartz saw it, the West Bank was in some ways the American South of the 1960s. But at any moment the situation could become even more volatile, resulting in the next intifada.

Schwartz is diplomatic when recalling his interactions with Friedman, his former boss. He was a “good listener,” Schwartz says, but when he raised concerns about the settlements, Friedman would often deflect by noting “the lack of appreciation by the Palestinian people about what the Americans are doing for them.” Schwartz also discussed his concerns about settler violence directly with Shin Bet and I.D.F. officials, he says, but as far as he could tell, Friedman didn’t follow up with the political leadership. “I never got the sense he went to Netanyahu to discuss it.”

Friedman sees things differently. “I think I had a far broader perspective on acts of violence in Judea and Samaria” than Schwartz, he says now. “And it was clear that the violence coming from Palestinians against Israelis overwhelmingly was more prevalent.” He says he “wasn’t concerned about ‘appreciation’ from the Palestinians; I was concerned by their leadership’s embrace of terror and unwillingness to control violence.” He declined to discuss any conversations he had with Israeli officials.

Weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Israel for a trip that delivered a number of gifts to Netanyahu and the settler cause. He announced new guidelines requiring that goods imported to the United States from parts of the West Bank be labeled “Made in Israel.” And he flew by helicopter to Psagot, a winery in the West Bank, making him the first American secretary of state to visit a settlement. One of the winery’s large shareholders, the Florida-based Falic family, have donated millions to various projects in the settlements.

During his lunchtime visit, Pompeo paused to write a note in the winery’s guest book. “May I not be the last secretary of state to visit this beautiful land,” he wrote.

A Settler Coalition

Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to become prime minister for an unprecedented sixth term came with a price: an alliance with a movement that he once shunned, but that had been brought into the political mainstream by Israel’s steady drift to the right. Netanyahu, who is now on trial for bribery and other corruption charges, repeatedly failed in his attempts to form a coalition after most of the parties announced that they were no longer willing to join him. He personally involved himself in negotiations to ally Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party, making them kingmakers for anyone trying to form a coalition government. In November 2022, the bet paid off: With the now-critical support of the extreme right, Netanyahu returned to office.

The two men ushered into power by this arrangement were some of the most extreme figures ever to hold such high positions in an Israeli cabinet. Shin Bet had monitored Ben-Gvir in the years after Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, and he was arrested on multiple charges including inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He won acquittals or dismissals in some of the cases, but he was also convicted several times and served time in prison. During the Second Intifada, he led protests calling for extreme measures against Arabs and harassed Israeli politicians he believed were insufficiently hawkish.

Then Ben-Gvir made a radical change: He went to law school. He also took a job as an aide to Michael Ben-Ari, a Knesset member from the National Union party, which had picked up many followers of the Kach movement. In 2011, after considerable legal wrangling around his criminal record, he was admitted to the bar. He changed his hairstyle and clothing to appear more mainstream and began working from the inside, once saying he represented the “soldiers and civilians who find themselves in legal entanglements due to the security situation in Israel.” Netanyahu made him minister of national security, with authority over the police.

Smotrich also moved into public life after his 2005 arrest by Shin Bet for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He made Shin Bet’s Jewish Department a frequent target of criticism, complaining that it was wasting time and money investigating crimes carried out by Jews, when the real terrorists were Palestinians. His ultraright allies sometimes referred to the Jewish Department as Hamakhlaka Hayehudit — the Hebrew phrase for the Gestapo unit that executed Hitler’s Final Solution.

In 2015, while campaigning for a seat in the Knesset, Smotrich said that “every shekel invested in this department is one less shekel invested in real terrorism and saving lives.” Seven years later, Netanyahu made him both minister of finance and a minister in the Ministry of Defense, in charge of overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank, and he has steadily pushed to seize authority over the territory from the military. As part of the coalition deal with Netanyahu, Smotrich now has the authority to appoint one of the senior administrative figures in the West Bank, who helps oversee the building of roads and the enforcement of construction laws. The 2022 election also brought Avi Maoz to the Knesset — the former housing-ministry official whom Talia Sasson once marked as a hidden hand of Israeli government support for illegal settlements. Since then, Maoz had joined the far-right Noam party, using it as a platform to advance racist and homophobic policies. And he never forgot, or forgave, Sasson. On “International Anti-Corruption Day” in 2022, Maoz took to the lectern of the Knesset and denounced Sasson’s report of nearly two decades earlier, saying it was written “with a hatred of the settlements and a desire to harm them.” This, he said, was “public corruption of the highest order, for which people like Talia Sasson should be prosecuted.”

Days after assuming his own new position, Ben-Gvir ordered the police to remove Palestinian flags from public spaces in Israel, saying they “incite and encourage terrorism.” Smotrich, for his part, ordered drastic cuts in payments to the Palestinian Authority — a move that led the Shin Bet and the I.D.F. intelligence division to raise concerns that the cuts would interfere with the Palestinian Authority’s own efforts to police and prevent Palestinian terrorism.

Weeks after the new cabinet was sworn in, the Judea and Samaria division of the I.D.F. distributed an instructional video to the soldiers of a ground unit about to be deployed in the West Bank. Titled “Operational Challenge: The Farms,” the video depicts settlers as peaceful farmers living pastoral lives, feeding goats and herding sheep and cows, in dangerous circumstances. The illegal outposts multiplying around the West Bank are “small and isolated places of settlement, each with a handful of residents, a few of them — or none at all — bearing arms, the means of defense meager or nonexistent.”

It is the settlers, according to the video, who are under constant threat of attack, whether it be “penetration of the farm by a terrorist, an attack against a shepherd in the pastures, arson” or “destruction of property” — threats from which the soldiers of the I.D.F. must protect them. The commander of each army company guarding each farm must, the video says, “link up with the person in charge of security and to maintain communications”; soldiers and officers are encouraged to cultivate a close and intimate relationship with the settlers. “The informal,” viewers are told, “is much more important than the formal.”

The video addresses many matters of security, but it never addresses the question of law. When we asked the commander of the division that produced the video, Brig. Gen. Avi Bluth, why the I.D.F. was promoting the military support of settlements that are illegal under Israeli law, he directly asserted that the farms were indeed legal and offered to arrange for us to tour some of them. Later, a spokesman for the army apologized for the general’s remarks, acknowledged that the farms were illegal and announced that the I.D.F. would no longer be promoting the video. This May, Bluth was nonetheless subsequently promoted to head Israel’s Central Command, responsible for all Israeli troops in central Israel and the West Bank.

In August, Bluth will replace Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, who during his final months in charge of the West Bank has seen a near-total breakdown of law enforcement in his area of command. In late October, Fox wrote a letter to his boss, the chief of Israel’s military staff, saying that the surge of Jewish terrorism carried out in revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks “could set the West Bank on fire.” The I.D.F. is the highest security authority in the West Bank, but the military’s top commander put the blame squarely on the police — who ultimately answer to Ben-Gvir. Fox said he had established a special task force to deal with Jewish terrorism, but investigating and arresting the perpetrators is “entirely in the hands of the Israeli police.”

And, he wrote, they aren’t doing their jobs.

‘Only One Way Forward’

When the day came early this January for the Supreme Court to hear the case brought by the people of Khirbet Zanuta, the displaced villagers arrived an hour late. They had received entry permits from the District Coordination Office to attend the hearing but were delayed by security forces before reaching the checkpoint separating Israel from the West Bank. Their lawyer, Quamar Mishirqi-Assad, noting that their struggle to attend their own hearing spoke to the essence of their petition, insisted that the hearing couldn’t proceed without them. The judges agreed to wait.

The villagers finally were led into the courtroom, and Mishirqi-Assad began presenting the case. The proceedings were in Hebrew, so most of the villagers were unable to follow the arguments that described the daily terrors inflicted by settlers and the glaring absence of any law-enforcement efforts to stop them.

The lawyers representing the military and the police denied the claims of abuse and failure to enforce the law. When a judge asked what operational steps would be in place if villagers wanted to return, one of the lawyers for the state said they could already — there was no order preventing them from doing so.

The next to speak was Col. Roi Zweig-Lavi, the Central Command’s Operations Directorate officer. He said that many of these incidents involved false claims. In fact, he said, some of the villagers had probably destroyed their own homes, because of an “internal issue.” Now they were blaming the settlers to escape the consequences of their own actions.

Colonel Zweig-Lavi’s own views about the settlements, and his role in protecting them, were well known. In a 2022 speech, he told a group of yeshiva students in the West Bank that “the army and the settlements are one and the same.”

In early May, the court ordered the state to explain why the police failed to stop the attacks and declared that the villagers have a right to return to their homes. The court also ordered the state to provide details for how they would ensure the safe return of the villagers. It is now the state’s turn to decide how it will comply. Or if it will comply.

By the time the Supreme Court issued its rulings, the United States had finally taken action to directly pressure the Netanyahu government about the violent settlers. On Feb. 1, the White House issued an executive order imposing sanctions on four settlers for “engaging in terrorist activity,” among other things, in the West Bank. One of the four was Yinon Levi, the owner of Meitarim Farm near Hebron and the man American and Israeli officials believe orchestrated the campaign of violence and intimidation against the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. The British government issued its own sanctions shortly after, saying in a statement that Israel’s government had created “an environment of near-total impunity for settler extremists in the West Bank.”

The White House’s move against individual settlers, a first by an American administration, was met with a combination of anger and ridicule by ministers in Netanyahu’s government. Smotrich called the Biden administration’s allegations against Levi and others “utterly specious” and said he would work with Israeli banks to resist complying with the sanctions. One message that circulated in an open Hilltop Youth WhatsApp channel said that Levi and his family would not be abandoned. “The people of Israel are mobilizing for them,” it said.

American officials bristle when confronted with the question of whether the government’s actions are just token measures taken by an embattled American president hemorrhaging support at home for his Israel policy. They won’t end the violence, they say, but they are a signal to the Netanyahu government about the position of the United States: that the West Bank could boil over, and it could soon be the latest front of an expanding regional Middle East war since Oct. 7.

But war might just be the goal. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said he believes that many members of the ultraright in Israel “want war.” They “want intifada,” he says, “because it is the ultimate proof that there is no way of making peace with the Palestinians and there is only one way forward — to destroy them.”

Additional reporting by Natan Odenheimer.

Top photograph: A member of a group known as Hilltop Youth, which seeks to tear down Israel’s institutions and establish ‘‘Jewish rule.’’ Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times.

Read by Jonathan Davis

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Engineered by David Mason

Peter van Agtmael is a Magnum photographer who has been covering Israel and Palestinian territories since 2012. He is a mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Program.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

Israel said that it would send more troops to Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza and the current focal point in the war between Israel and Hamas. Fighting in the city has closed off a vital border crossing, forced hundreds of thousands to flee  and cut off humanitarian aid.

President Biden is pushing for a broad deal that would get Israel to approve a Palestinian nation  in return for Saudi recognition of Israel. But officials need to overcome Israeli opposition.

The Arab League called for a United Nations peacekeeping force to be deployed in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank until a two-state solution can be negotiated , in a statement that also called for the U.N. Security Council to set a time limit for that process.

FIFA Delays a Vote: Soccer’s global governing body postponed a decision to temporarily suspend Israel  over its actions in Gaza, saying it needed to solicit legal advice before taking up a motion submitted by the Palestinian Football Association.

PEN America’s Literary Gala: The free-expression group has been engulfed by debate  over its response to the Gaza war that forced the cancellation of its literary awards and annual festival. But its literary gala went on as planned .

Jerusalem Quartet Will Perform: The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, one of the world’s most prestigious concert halls, said that it would allow the Jerusalem Quartet to perform , two days after it had canceled the ensemble’s concerts amid security concerns.

A Key Weapon: When President Biden threatened to pause some weapons shipments to Israel if it invaded Rafah, the devastating effects of the 2,000-pound Mark 84 bomb  were of particular concern to him.

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