The Israeli generals’ tour of the West Bank is the September 2026 New York Times piece John Kiriakou aired on the September 3 episode of his own show, a report of retired senior Israeli military and intelligence officers publicly identifying settler violence, rather than Iran or Gaza or Lebanon, as the graver threat to Israel’s national interests.
The article
The piece, whose title Kiriakou read out on air, was “These Generals Fought for Israel, Now They See Jewish Terrorism as the Threat.” Its principal figure was Major General Amiram Levin, who “spent his life fighting for Israel. He survived the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 when his platoon was nearly wiped out, then went on to command a division in the West Bank and lead Israel’s ground forces in the 2006 war against Hezbollah. But in recent months, he has returned to the Israeli-occupied West Bank touring the territory with retired generals and former Israeli officials like himself.”[1][2]
The line that carried the piece
Kiriakou quoted the line the Times built the piece around, from another retired general named Ben Reuben, delivered “his eyes welling with emotion”: “This, what the settlers are doing here, is the real threat to Israel. This is more concerning to me than Iran, Gaza, or Lebanon.”[2][3]
Sneh, “ethnic cleansing”
“‘This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply,’ Ephraim Sneh, a retired Brigadier General and former Minister of Health, said of Israeli settlers’ attack on Palestinians in the West Bank.”[3][4]
Agmon, the Holocaust comparison
“Assaf Agmon, a retired Air Force General, went even further, comparing it to what some Israelis’ forebears endured during the Holocaust. ‘Not in the scale of the violence,’ he explained, ‘but in the effort to erase the Palestinian presence from much of the West Bank.’”[4][5]
Levin’s coda
“‘Once a society behaves this way, that society is doomed.’ … That society is doomed. I could not agree more.”[5]
The UN totals for 2026
Kiriakou’s baseline for the reporting is that violence has climbed. “According to the United Nations, Israeli settlers have injured more than a thousand Palestinians. That’s just this year, and they have killed dozens. They just open fire on people and then steal their houses. That’s more than twice the number of killings as in 2025 already this year.” He pairs the figures with the American citizenship of the settlers: “most of these settlers are American citizens. Even more specifically, they’re mostly American citizens from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.”[6][7]