Israeli–Palestinian conflict
In 2003, Shapiro published a column on Townhall stating that Israel must be allowed to "transfer Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper." Citing expulsion of Germans after World War II as a precedent, Shapiro insisted that "expelling a hostile population is a commonly-used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements." In the same article, Shapiro said that "The ideology of the Palestinian population is indistinguishable from that of the terrorist leadership." Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg criticized Shapiro's comments as an example of his "fascist" views. Shapiro later reversed his view on the West Bank issue, saying it was "both inhumane and impractical".
In 2010, Shapiro said "Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage". He later claimed that he had been talking about the Israeli and Arab leadership, as well as terrorist groups in Palestine.
In a 2008 Townhall opinion piece, Shapiro expressed support for Israel's settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank.
In 2019, Shapiro said that Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whose comments about American support for Israel were accused of evoking antisemitic tropes, and the white supremacist San Diego shooter, hold "a lot of the same opinions about Jews".
During the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, Shapiro published an op-ed in The Marshall News Messenger in which he stated that the reason behind the conflict between Israel and Hamas is that "Israel exists, and Hamas wishes it didn't exist". Shapiro additionally stated that Hamas's rocket attacks "would entail an anti-Semitic genocide", adding that Hamas was spending "tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid" on building "terror tunnels and rocket capacity to strike at the Jews." Shapiro argued that Hamas was positioning its rockets in civilian areas, seeking to "force Israel to kill Palestinian civilians so Hamas can propagandize about supposed Israeli human rights atrocities." He stated that Hamas was killing not only Jews but also Israeli Arabs and foreign workers. He also criticized the media coverage of the crisis, labeling it as "absurd" and specifically criticized The New York Times for its opinion article featuring a Palestinian writer titled "The Myth of Coexistence in Israel". Shapiro stated that an image used in the article, a map of Israel, was "so bad that MSNBC, which used the image in 2015, had to retract it and admit it was factually incorrect."
In an October 2024 appearance co-sponsored by The Daily Wire and the Young American's Foundation at the University of California, Los Angeles, Shapiro was asked whether or not he'd condone the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces and Netanyahu-led Israeli government amidst the deaths of over 40,000 people during the ongoing Gaza war. He responded "I don't just condone [their] actions, I celebrate and laud them". In the same statement, he claimed that the Israeli government has gone through "such extraordinary efforts not to kill civilians" that they have managed to have "the best civilian-to-terrorist kill ratio in the history of urban warfare". Furthermore, he blamed the Palestinian casualties on Hamas, which he believes uses civilians as human shields. He did not address use of human shields by Israel.
