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‘They are afraid and we are not afraid:’ A tour through some of Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements
Israel is pressing ahead with plans to grow settlements in occupied territories even as it inflames tensions in a region where the threat of all-out conflict is rising
At the front of a bus filled with journalists, US-born Israeli political strategist turned tour guide David Ha’ivri holds a map to his chest, running a hand up and down its length. “A map of Israel,” he says. The occupied West Bank, part of the territory supposed to make up any future Palestinian state, was marked on it as “Judea and Samaria”.
Ha’ivri, a long-time settler himself, was leading a tour around Israeli settlements on the same day Israel’s parliament voted to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state, and one day before the Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel had been illegally occupying the Palestinian territories for 57 years.
In an advisory opinion, its judges said Israel must stop new settlement construction and remove the existing ones. This ruling seemed unlikely to make much difference to Israeli settlers, who readily dismiss international law and say they are fulfilling the will of God while protecting the Jewish people.
The Oslo Accords, agreed in the 1990s, were supposed to usher in a new era of peace in this region, paving the way for the so-called two-state solution, but that dream is becoming unviable as Israeli Jews lay claim to new swathes of land while being protected by the force of Israel’s military. The number of settlers across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem has ballooned from just over 110,000 in the 1990s to more than 700,000 today.
The Israeli government has been accused of using a host of tricks to endorse the settlements, including designating areas as “state land”, and denying Palestinians building permits. In a single swipe this year, Israel announced its claim to 800 hectares of land in the Jordan valley – the largest Israeli land seizure in the West Bank in three decades. Last year, Israel’s far right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, reportedly told the government to prepare for half a million more settlers. Itamar Ben-Gvir, who oversees Israel’s police force, is a settler himself.
Since the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023, at least 553 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem have been killed as a result of violence by settlers or Israeli security forces, UN figures show. In the same period, 17 Israelis were killed, according to UN figures.
Palestinians live under the grind and terror of military occupation, but also a two-tier legal system, where they are subject to military law, while settlers live under civilian law. Palestinian areas are increasingly divided, with roads blocked by checkpoints or even – as I witnessed on my first day in the West Bank – by fires ignited by settlers. In its ruling, the ICJ said the contrasting treatment of Palestinians and Israelis in the Palestinian territories amounts to a breach of the international convention prohibiting apartheid.
Amid all of this, I was offered the opportunity to visit some settlements.
The first stop was Chavat Gilad. It was named for Gilad Zar, a security coordinator for a regional council of West Bank settlements who was killed in a 2001 ambush. Settlers from Chavat Gilad have been accused of violence and harassment of local Palestinians, according to Israeli rights group B’Tselem. Palestinian media reported that the harassment included damaging or razing the olive trees of Palestinian farmers nearby. In 2016, the New York Times reported that a Palestinian was killed by Israeli forces for allegedly planning to throw a firebomb on the road leading to Chavat Gilad.
Upon arrival, we were greeted by Yehuda Shimon, a 50-year-old Israeli Jewish attorney, whose family is among around 100 living in Chavat Gilad now. “It’s a very quiet place, [a lot of] happiness,” he said, though his dream is it becoming “a big city”.
Shimon first moved to Chavat Gilad in 2007, staying in a caravan with his wife and five children. At first, Israeli security services tried to remove them but they kept returning, sometimes sleeping in tents. “We won,” he said. Today, the couple has 10 children and a more permanent home. The Israeli government has decided to make the settlement legal but there is still a long process ahead, Shimon said. Once it concludes, he wants to move away “to make a new place.”
In the early days of the settlement, there were “three or four fights a day every day” with the local Palestinians, but now nothing happens. Shimon claimed not to have weapons but said: “They are afraid [and] we are not afraid.” The events of October 7th prompted no change in the settlers’ relationships with Palestinians because they have no interaction with them, he said. “We didn’t speak with them before and we don’t speak with them now.”
When asked whether he felt that Israeli settlers are effectively participating in ethnic cleansing, Shimon saw fit to joke: “Every morning, the people that live here, when they wake, we go to some Palestinian village around us and we kill 100, 200 Palestinians, just for the sport.”
He is unfazed by international condemnation. “International law, it’s a joke, okay? It’s a lie. There is no international law.” Many of his friends have also been placed under “ridiculous” international sanctions but they’re still living their normal lives – they don’t affect people who don’t travel or bank abroad, he said.
He sees international judgment as irrelevant “because this is my land, I live here, not you and not other people in the world.” He believes outsiders criticise settlers because “this is the Jewish nation . . . We came from the Bible . . . they’re jealous.” He said: “If you believe in God, you have to go to the place that he gives you . . . This place, that’s it, there’s no other place for us.”
The next stop was Evyatar, a small settlement near Nablus marked by a blue Star of David painted on a concrete block at the entrance. An armed soldier guarded the approaching road. Nearly 20 Jewish Israeli families live there, locals said.
Evyatar was set up 11 years ago, reportedly on land from the Palestinian villages of Beita, Qabalan and Yatma: at least eight residents of Beita were shot and killed by Israeli Defence Forces troops during their weekly protests against it.
Techiya Chaim, a mother of ten, said Evyatar is strategically important because of its elevation and location. They “feel a great amount of public support for our activity here”, she emphasised. Last year, about 50,000 Israelis, including eight ministers and 20 parliamentarians, marched calling for the settlement to be legalised under Israeli law: that was approved by Israel’s security cabinet in June. In the coming year, Evyatar will open its first kindergarten.
Serah Lisson, a 37-year-old originally from France, lives a “very simple life” there with her seven children. Her husband is currently a soldier in Gaza – she said he is fighting on behalf of “all the Jewish people in the world . . . All the world want to kill the Jewish people.”
Twenty years ago, Lisson and her husband lived in Gush Katif, a bloc of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. She believes they will return “not just to Gush Katif, to all of Gaza . . . And I hope, very soon.”
She perceives anyone who backs a two-state solution as “not very smart.” Palestinians are “a guest in our country, and if you are a guest you can choose to go to the work, to have a family, to have a good life. They choose another life. They choose every single day to do terrorist attacks. To send their children to kill us.”
She said people supporting a Palestinian state “need to come here and see how Arab people live . . . [they] don’t work, don’t take their child to school”. Her voice raised as she claimed Palestinians beg for money, then buy guns with it.
“I think after the 7th of October we can’t talk about two countries,” her neighbour Ayelet Shlise (38) said. “Any nation in the world would not give a present to the murderer of her nation.”
Standing nearby was Malkiel Bar-Hai, the settler in charge of security, who repeated a common Zionist claim that “the land of Israel was empty, no one came here”.
On his back was an Emtan Rifle – it’s like an M40, he told me – and what looked like two smaller pistols in a holster. But when asked about widespread settler violence against Palestinians across the West Bank, he said: “We’re a nation of peace ... Where do you see violence? ... It’s a false accusation.”
A short drive away in Ariel, Yair Chetboun stood in front of a green and brown map. The recently elected mayor of one of the West Bank’s largest settlements had recently made headlines for blocking the access road to the nearby Palestinian city of Salfit three times, against the wishes even of the Israeli army, after saying it was necessary for security reasons.
Ariel is home to about 22,000 people. Chetboun talked proudly about its hotel and multiple pools, and noted that housing is more affordable than in cities like Tel Aviv.
Almost none of what Chetboun called a “city” is accessible to Palestinians. Since October 7th, Chetboun explained, they have been banned from everywhere except for an industrial area on the outskirts and a new neighbourhood, where Palestinians can go only with work permits. He called this necessary because the Israeli Jewish settlers are “very afraid now.”
They plan to have 40,000 Jewish Israeli settlers living in Ariel in the next 10 years, and 80,000 of them 20 years from now – about 20,000 new housing units could be the next decade.
Chetboun spoke proudly of Ariel’s university, which advertises itself as “a 21st century university rooted in ancient history . . . proudly situated in the heart of biblical Israel”. An advertisement, broadcast to the Australian Jewish Association in 2022, claimed that the university – with seven faculties, 474 faculty members and more than 16,000 students – has a “great impact on the entire region, improving the health and environment of all residents in the area”. In an online talk afterwards, a senior university administrator said that Israel’s military “very much enjoys” working with Ariel University: staff had helped them design new technology, including a machine to cut Palestinian communication lines.
The university is suffering right now, Chetboun said, as it cannot receive European Union research funding due to boycotts, though he predicted that the EU will reverse that position within the next five years.
“I am responsible for all of the settlements around me. If Ariel will be strong with education . . . all of the settlements around [us] will be strong,” said Chetboun, who used to be a major in a special commando unit of the Israeli military. That experience taught him the importance of eyes and ears in maintaining security and surveillance, he said. “If you have strategic depth, you can defend your country.”
He believes October 7th made “the world understand” the importance of Israeli settlements for “security” reasons. Soon thousands more Jewish people from other parts of the world may move to Ariel, or other parts of the occupied West Bank or Israel, he suggested, because they feel unsafe elsewhere.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement had affected Ariel’s businesses, he admitted, but “in the end everyone wants to work with industry that [makes] money. Chetboun regards Palestinians as a security threat but also an excellent source of labour – something that means, he says, international investment will pour into Ariel. “We are very near to the Palestinians so we have a lot of workers . . . this is the reason that everyone wants to come here.”
The tour’s final stop was a meal in the Humas Eliyahu restaurant in Eli, beside a petrol station where four Israelis were killed in a 2023 attack. There, we met Gedaliah Blum, the director of a non-profit called the Heartland Initiative. Blum explained that his aim is to “normalise” Israeli presence in the occupied West Bank from an “interpersonal cultural level”. That includes raising money through private investors to create an online tourism booking platform called Go East.
“In order to normalise something, you have to have an emotional connection,” he said. After visitors spend time with him he reckons they “probably won’t think I’m a bad person. You might think I’m misguided.”
US-born Blum first came to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories on what is called a Birthright programme: sponsored trips for young Jewish people. He realised this was somewhere “I can actually have influence”, he recalled. Now he lives in a settlement with his wife and eight children.
Blum believes Israeli settlements on occupied territory should be celebrated as “bastions of freedom ... I think the larger they are, the better they are.” When they expand to “go over the Arab communities”, he said, that’s good as “they become part of the ecosystem of a liberal democracy”, even if there is “separation”. He said Palestinans can live together with Jews but “it needs to be under Israeli law”.
In contrast, he said, a Palestinian state would be “the worst thing you could do” because of the need to “de-nazify” and “deprogramme a whole generation . . . there is a terrible epidemic of hate, and it’s not on both sides”. He then compared the idea to “giving your drunk uncle the car keys to your Lamborghini”.
There are many organisations – Palestinian, Israeli and international – speaking out against the settlements and land grans, and saying peace can never be realised without Israel’s occupation coming to an end. One is Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now. When I sent him a list of comments by settlers that I planned to include in this feature, Mauricio Lapchik, Peace Now’s director of external relations, said the actions “described . . . align precisely with the agenda of the current government led by [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir: the official establishment of a state driven by principles of Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea”.
Lapchik said: “It is clear that settlements and illegal outposts do not bring us security; on the contrary, they pose a significant threat for the future of our country and region. The settlement enterprise undermines the security of our country and is entirely illegal, violating the basic rights of Palestinians living under occupation and hindering the possibilities of a future political solution between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Ultimately, he concluded, “the choice is stark. It is either a political solution or perpetual war and destruction. It is either democracy or occupation. It is either two states – or one apartheid state.”
(c) 2024, The Irish Times
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