Smotrich Party Releases AI Campaign Video Threatening Settlement-Style Land Seizure in Galilee and Negev

An animated Palestinian character warns another, by phone, that a man named Smotrich is coming for his land next. That is the premise of an AI-generated campaign video posted August 27 by Israel's Religious Zionism party, led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

The video, shared on Smotrich's official account under the Hebrew slogan "Ahmed is right to be afraid," depicts two Palestinian men in distress. One, presented as a resident of the occupied West Bank, tells the other, inside Israel, that Smotrich is bringing "the same thing he did to us."

"He will seize lands, establish towns and farms; everything is now lost for us," the animated character says.

The line is an unusually direct acknowledgment, inside a party's own promotional material, of what Palestinians and human rights groups have long argued is the practical effect of Israeli settlement expansion: land seizure, new towns, and the displacement of existing residents. The video's dialogue and the tweet publishing it are the primary record here; the clip itself is the evidence.

According to The New Arab's reporting, Smotrich has separately announced a plan to "Judaise" the Galilee and Negev, two regions with substantial Palestinian populations inside Israel's 1948 borders. The plan reportedly calls for bringing one million additional Jewish Israelis to the two areas, building 40 new communities, dozens of farms, expanding existing towns, and constructing hundreds of thousands of housing units. Smotrich has also said he would replace local officials he considers insufficiently "Zionist," and has been reported as claiming Arabs had "occupied" the Galilee and Negev, though a direct quote for that specific claim was not available in the source reporting.

Smotrich has framed the plan explicitly as an extension of what he calls the settlement "revolution" in the occupied West Bank, where more than 500,000 Israeli settlers now live in communities considered illegal under international law. Settlement expansion there has repeatedly displaced or restricted Palestinian communities through land seizure, outpost growth, and demolition.

The video surfaces roughly two months before Israel's October 27 election, in which Religious Zionism is fighting to clear the 3.25 percent Knesset threshold. A recent Channel 12 poll placed the party below that line; other surveys put it at four to six seats. Analysts cited by The New Arab suggest the ad is aimed at shoring up Smotrich's hard-right base amid friction with national-religious voters over his support for mass military-service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox factions.