Daniella Weiss Israels settler godmother has a hotline to Netanyahu and plans for Gaza

As far back as she can remember, Israeli settler leader Daniella Weiss was a Zionist. 

“Zionism was the crown of our family talk, our family atmosphere,” the 79-year-old tells Middle East Eye over the phone from her home in Kedumim, a settlement in the northern occupied West Bank.

“God gave me pride that I’m Jewish. Love of our homeland. Love of the Bible. God gave me that unexchangeable trait of optimism.”

Weiss, a figurehead for the settler movement, has, in her own words, spent 50 years “dedicated to building the land of Israel”, playing a role in establishing each of the 141 settlements and 224 outposts that dot the landscape of the West Bank, which was occupied by Israel after the 1967 Middle East war.

The settlements are illegal under international law. The outposts – settlements established since the 1990s without government approval – are illegal under Israeli law.

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Between 1 January 2024 and 31 March 2024, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) recorded 1,804 attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank. Settlers, either attacking alone or with the Israeli army, killed 11 Palestinians. 

Homes were attacked, vehicles burned, water supplies cut off, orchards destroyed and roads blocked. Settlers also attacked aid convoys heading for Gaza. Ocha says that 844 Palestinians were “displaced  due to settler violence and access restrictions”.

Last month Weiss came to prominence when she appeared in Louis Theroux’s BBC documentary The Settlers, which described her as “high profile extremist settler leader”. This week she was sanctioned by the UK government for being “involved in threatening, perpetrating, promoting and supporting, acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals” as part of its harder approach towards Israel’s war on Gaza (she spoke to MEE before the announcement).

But when Theroux put it to her that settlements are considered war crimes under international law, she laughed.

“It’s a light felony.” 

Once dubbed "the queen of the Knesset cafeteria" because of her regular informal contacts with members of the Israeli parliament, Weiss has returned to prominence during the past few years, and especially since 7 October 2023,  as the godmother of a settler movement whose current leaders, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, hold major positions in the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Theroux dubbed her lack of concern for Palestinian lives “sociopathic”: Weiss has said that there is “no such thing” as settler violence.

Experts are divided on Weiss’s significance. But all agree that, despite being one of the last of the founding generation of settler leaders left alive, she still has an energy and charisma that help power her activism.

“I didn’t sing or act, but when I give lectures, I do some stand-up presentations,” Weiss says. “That’s my nature. When I speak people like to listen because I make it vivid.

“I do mobilise all the things that God gave me for enhancing the Zionist dream. And I do by being aware of it. In full awareness.”

Hagit Ofran, the director of advocacy group Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project, tells MEE that Weiss believes that occupation is good and that she is proud of it.

“She’s very articulate and very straightforward about what she believes in, and I think this is why she’s famous – because she’s clear about her intentions.”

Gaza: 'We are the owners of the land'

With her allies in government and settlement building accelerating across the West Bank, Weiss says that now is a “good moment for our movement”. Having spent five decades extending Israeli Jewish presence, she now has her sights set on Gaza.

“The plan has become so famous,” she says. “People stop me in Tel Aviv and ask me to keep a place for them in Gaza. I tell them to enrol in our long list of 900 families and we will find a good plot for you.”

In January 2024, Weiss’s organisation, the Nachala Settlement Movement, sponsored a conference, attended by 11 Israeli cabinet ministers and thousands of other public figures, calling for the resettlement of Gaza.  The event, entitled “Conference for the Victory of Israel - Settlement Brings Security,” called for Palestinians to be expelled from the besieged enclave and featured maps of proposed settlement sites. 

'It can take a year, it can take three years, but it will happen. It’s started' - Daniella Weiss

In November 2024, the Israeli military took Weiss into northern Gaza, where she surveyed those possible sites, including the former settlement of Netzarim, despite orders restricting civilian access to the devastated enclave. Netzarim is significant for Weiss and her followers: first settled in 1972, it was the last community to be evacuated under Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in August 2005. 

Just as in the West Bank, Weiss  explains, the process of settling Gaza will begin with army positions, then “envelope communities” of settlers living alongside the army, then finally towns. Weiss is convinced her dream will be realised, but there is resistance to it even from her allies.

“My good neighbour Bezalel Smotrich is doing very good work with the development of Judea and Samaria,” she says, using the Biblical name used by right-wing Israelis to refer to the West Bank. 

“I am less satisfied with his support for settlements in Gaza. I would expect of him – and I told him a number of times – to be more vocal and to speak with more emphasis on the immediate need for settling at least the northern part of the Gaza area.”

The settler leader is a little more critical of Netanyahu, whose aides Weiss says she can call whenever she likes, saying he is “a bit slow with it”. She adds: “I understand he has world pressures and leftist pressures, but the idea is already free in the air.”

But the 2.3m Palestinians now living in Gaza – who have survived Israel’s war on the enclave, which has killed more than 53,000 - will no longer be there.

“They lost the right to be there on 7 October,” Weiss says, of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel. “They will find their way to Indonesia, to Africa, to different countries, to the western world. It will take some time, but they lost the right. The massacre changed their history.” Previously, she has said that “no Arab will remain in Gaza” and that, “if we don’t give them food, they will leave”.

In October last year, at a conference that felt more like a festival on Israel’s frontier with Gaza, Weiss said that Palestinians will “disappear” from the territory. Her comments were echoed on that day by Ben Gvir, who told the crowd: “We are the owners of the land.” 

Referring to the prospect of Israeli settlements in Gaza, Ofran says: “It would have been unheard of before 7 October.”

'The history of Zionism is a personal diary'

Daniella Weiss was born in 1945 in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, in Mandatory Palesine. She grew up on a farm in an Orthodox Jewish environment, went to a religious high school and was part of a religious Zionist movement that saw itself as being separate to, and often considered inferior than, the secular Zionism that then dominated Israel’s mainstream society and elite circles.

Her first memory, she says, was of the Tel Aviv area being shelled by Egyptian forces in May 1948, just days after the creation of the state of Israel. “My parents put a carpet under the bed and told me to go and lie down there. I was with my little sister. It was exciting. It was an adventure,” she recalls. “I never felt scared in my life.”

Weiss's father was born in the US and her mother came to Palestine from Poland as a one-year-old. They were, Weiss says, “very smart people”, involved firstly in the Zionist paramilitary group Lehi, the Stern Gang, and then, after Israel’s creation, the right-wing party Likud.

She was one of three daughters. “We were raised in Sparta,” Weiss says, adding that, even years later, she and her sisters still laugh about it. “Life was very tough. We were raised with the idea that we should bless God all the time that we are living in an independent Jewish state. That was the atmosphere at home all the time.”

Part of this, Weiss says, was a dedication to knowing what was happening in the world – and to Israel. “We knew that the time of the news – it was usually every hour – was the holy time of every hour and nobody was to say a word while listening to the news.

“This to me is the core of identifying with the cause of the nation… The pride that we have a state of our own was like an ongoing parade in our everyday life. It was like holding your hand on the pulse of the nation.”

This was particularly true at moments of heightened tension and drama. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Israel, and its allies France and the UK,  invaded and briefly held Egyptian-occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, Weiss remembers clearly “how we followed minute by minute the advance of the IDF [Israel Defence Forces].

“There was so much delight in our power and worry about casualties. For me, the history of Zionism is a personal diary. I remember things so acutely that it’s like an open book all the time.”

This personal diary went hand in hand with Weiss’s love of the Bible. “I am very much with the women all through the Bible,” she says. “If you follow it minutely then you see that women decided the fate of the nation, not men. This is why I thank God so much that I’m a woman, not a man.”

Weiss’s Biblical heroes are Esther, a Jewish queen of Persia who prevents a massacre of her people; Sarah, Abraham’s wife; and Deborah, who Weiss “adopts with both hands in my endless endeavour to prevent any fencing of communities in Judea and Samaria”.

The Bible is also where her concept of the Jewish nation comes from. “The borders of the homeland of the Jews are the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest,” she says, referring to a Greater Israel that would include not just historic Palestine but parts of many other modern countries in the Middle East, including Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt.

Rabin's murder: 'A new era opened up for us'

If the Suez Crisis was evocative for the young Weiss, it was the 1967 Middle East war, in which Israel defeated a coalition of Arab armies and occupied the Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza, that proved truly inspirational.

After the war, Moshe Levinger, a religious Zionist activist and Orthodox rabbi, helped establish a Jewish presence in the territories Israel had occupied.

Levinger, who was charged in 1988 with beating a six-year-old Palestinian boy, and who served 92 days in prison after shooting dead one Palestinian and injuring another that same year, became a mentor to Weiss. Together, they played a key role in the ultra-nationalist movement Gush Emunim - Weiss was later its secretary general - which was committed to settlement building. The movement combined, as Weiss always has, Messianic thinking with pragmatic political institutions aimed at expanding the project. 

It was also violent.

In April 1987, hours after the killing of a Jewish settler and ahead of the First Intifada later that year, Levinger and Weiss spearheaded a wave of brutality in the northern West Bank Palestinian city of Qalqilya, during which settlers attacked homes, vandalised cars and destroyed orchards. 

After days of settler violence, the Israeli military was brought in to quell the rampage, culminating in what became known in Hebrew as the “night of bottles”. The Israeli legal rights group Yesh Din said at the time that Weiss “managed to get away with a fine and a suspended sentence”, marking the “tradition of our courts of being merciful toward hooligan settlers”.

Gershom Gorenberg, author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, told MEE: “The religious settlement movement is in many ways the hard nationalist right of Israel.

Weiss places herself on the radical end of the settlement movement. She was highly critical of the establishment end of the movement for being "too moderate".

Subject to criticism from within Gush Emunim over her strident style, Weiss served as mayor of her home settlement, Kedumin, between 1996 and 2007. 

In 2010, she founded the Nachala Settlement Movement, which has become a vehicle for Weiss to do what Weiss has always done: expand the land of Israel.

Today, Weiss is as animated by this goal as she always has been. She has four daughters and is a grandmother. In 2006, her son-in-law Avraham Gavish, at home on leave from an elite army unit, was shot and killed along with his parents by a Palestinian gunman. Weiss’s daughter and granddaughter survived the attack by hiding under a table.

On the day she spoke to MEE, Weiss had gone to bed at 5am, having stayed up all night to write a “very serious article” about Gaza and the crucial need for Jewish settlements there.

“I slept for two hours, and since then I’ve been working, doing political meetings on Zoom. I have spent three hours already this morning on politics. I have my movement, Nachala… I meet my management and the heads of the different committees on Zoom and at the same time I wash the dishes, fold the laundry, speak to my husband and serve him breakfast.”

She does all this simultaneously, she says. Though her and her husband Amnon Weiss, a successful businessman and former Israeli Paralympian, who has polio, initially moved to the “mountains of Samaria” during the 1970s, the family live in what one visitor described as a “surprisingly bourgeois house” and are clearly wealthy.

Weiss’s organisations have long attracted donations, and in 2023 it was revealed that Leah Dankner, a millionaire who was then 99, had given almost $2m to Nachala.

The settler movement has, more generally, been subsidised and supported by every Israeli government apart from that led by Yitzhak Rabin,  who was assassinated in 1995 by Yigal Amir, a right-wing Israeli ultranationalist who opposed peace efforts and who had helped found a settlement outpost.

Rabin once referred to the West Bank settlement movement as a “cancer”, and was dismissive of settlers’ capacity to endure tough conditions in the name of their project. He underestimated them. As soon as Weiss heard about his murder, she says she “thought history changed, that Rabin’s plan of withdrawal from here, from Judea and Samara, came to a stop and a new era opened up for us”.

The settler movement has also created headaches for Israel abroad. Alon Pinkas, a prominent Israeli diplomat who served under four Israeli foreign ministers, tells MEE that settlement expansion made it “very difficult” for him with other governments. “The West Bank was occupied and you cannot settle an occupied land acquired in a war," according to the Geneva Convention.

“Settlements were illegal according to Israeli law, so how were they defensible? Settlements were justified in Biblical terms, not modern political concepts. That was impossible to argue.” Pinkas also says that the treatment of Palestinians: “Even if it was short of ‘apartheid’, was indefensible."

Amnon Weiss’s breakfast, on the morning of our interview, consists she says of “omelette, avocado, tomatoes, cheese, roll, coffee, chocolate cake, orange juice”. The couple go to Tel Aviv twice a week to eat good food, meet friends and head for the Mediterranean. This, Weiss says, satisfies her husband’s preference for city life, while also ensuring they do not “turn into field mice”.

“I tell my friends, I serve the Caesar so he will be a little more patient with me,” Weiss says of her husband. “He wants two contradictory things to happen at the same time: he wants me to succeed very much in my work because he’s very idealistic and very Zionistic. But he also wants me to dedicate more time to him.”

Weiss spends “five days and nights every week dedicated to building the land of Israel”. But from Friday evening until Sunday, she observes Shabbat with her family, who all come to her house, sleep over and eat several meals together.

“My children and grandchildren, they laugh at me because I do not let them talk when there is a political analysis on the radio,” she says. “While we do the cooking and preparing for Shabbat, they have their earphones on, listening to music, and I have my political programmes, and one doesn’t touch the other. At the table, they do not have much of a choice. There, I give my speeches and my preaching.”

The day after her interview with MEE, Weiss goes to Gaza to once again survey sites for her planned “envelope communities”.

Ofran, of Peace Now, says: “I believe her when she says they are ready to go into Gaza. Right now, with this government, she is much more connected and supported. In any Messianic thinking the war is an opportunity, the redemption comes after it. This is where she lives, this is what she believes.”

Gorenberg points out that Weiss is “not representative of a mainstream view in Israel”, and that “Smotrich represents a small, hyper pro-settlement faction that has outsized influence in the government". But he concedes: “The last thing I would do anywhere in the world today is dismiss extreme movements, particularly those of the right.”

For Weiss, the settlement of Gaza seems pre-determined, part of a “return to Zion” that will end the dispersion of the Jewish people that began after the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE, over 2,500 years ago.

“It will happen,” she tells MEE of her march into Gaza. “It can take a year, it can take three years, but it will happen. It’s started.”

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