The remains of Or Haim, an illegal settlement outpost, lie strewn across a windswept hilltop in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Two dozen Israeli settlers erected a few flimsy huts there one night last month, and by morning, the Israeli army had demolished them.
But the settlers plan to try again. The most right-wing government in Israel’s history, which includes settler leaders among its key ministers, entered office late last year, and the settler movement has been emboldened, sensing a window of opportunity to expand its enterprise faster than ever before.
“Now I expect things to go differently,” said Naveh Schindler, 19, a settler activist leading the effort to build the Or Haim outpost.
“If I persevere enough,” Schindler said, “hopefully the government will build it themselves.”
Settlers such as Schindler hope to build more Israeli settlements across the West Bank, which is illegal under international law, on land that Palestinians hoped would be the core of a future Palestinian state. Palestinians, meanwhile, are watching with fear and anxiety as settlements expand, and as the number of attacks on Palestinians increase as more settlers come.
While previous Israeli governments and generals have built and protected hundreds of settlements, they have often opposed unauthorised outpost construction by settler activists. Now, open advocacy for settlements by government ministers and the growing ambitions of the settler movement, coupled with a recent surge of violence, are raising fears that it could help incite an explosion in the West Bank.
An unusually intense wave of settler violence against Palestinians and their property swept through parts of the territory last weekend. It followed a month of near daily Israeli military raids into Palestinian cities and towns that left at least 26 Palestinians dead. Palestinian violence against Israelis also continued to rise sharply, compounding the sense of a region on the brink.
United Nations officials documented at least 22 settler-led attacks and vandalism from January 26 to January 30, while Palestinian officials said the real number was roughly seven times higher.
More than 70 settler attacks occurred throughout January, UN officials said — a rate that, if maintained throughout the year, would be the highest in at least a half-decade.
That capped a January in which the Israeli army reported at least 59 Palestinian attacks in the West Bank, nearly twice as high as two months ago, causing several injuries but killing none. At least 35 Palestinians were killed during the same period, sometimes during those attacks. At least two were killed by civilian settlers, in circumstances that Israeli officials described as self-defence, but that Palestinians said was unclear.
Violence from both Israelis and Palestinians has long been routine in the territory, which was occupied by Israel during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, in which Israel defeated several Arab states that were mobilising against it. Hundreds of Israeli settlements have since been built there, impeding Palestinian hopes of sovereignty, and contributing to the creation of a two-tier legal system that tries settlers in civilian courts and Palestinians in military ones.
But now there are expectations of an even greater surge.
Young settler activists, who believe the land in the West Bank has been promised to them by God, have been galvanised by the presence of their allies in the new government.
New groups of young Palestinian fighters have meanwhile emerged in response to the entrenchment of Israel’s occupation and the perceived corruption of their own leadership.
A surge of violence last month highlighted how ripe the situation was for further escalation. An Israeli army raid in the northern West Bank killed 10 Palestinians after a gunbattle erupted, before a Palestinian attacker shot dead seven civilians outside a synagogue in Jerusalem. Both episodes were the deadliest of their kind in years.
Less reported was a subsequent wave of settler attacks against Palestinians, in which settlers vandalised Palestinian shops, homes and cars.
Settlers acknowledge that the violence takes place, but say that it is carried out by a tiny minority, almost always in self-defence, and that if there were no Palestinian attacks — such as the one in Jerusalem last Friday — there would be no settler response. Some portray life in the West Bank as one of uneasy coexistence between two national groups, disturbed mostly by acts of Palestinian violence.
Palestinians killed nine Israelis in the West Bank last year, and 21 more Israelis and foreigners inside Israel. The Israeli military says it has given up trying to record the number of attacks by Palestinians throwing rocks at Israelis in the West Bank because the number is in the thousands.
“So many cases begin with an aggressive act by Palestinians against Israelis,” said Schindler, who added that he personally did not approve of violence. “Then we respond — but the media never covers it that way.”
But to Palestinians, Israelis have not only a monopoly on violence — more than 170 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank last year, most of them by Israeli security forces, in the highest toll for more than a decade and a half — but also do not acknowledge the deep power imbalance that the settlement enterprise in the West Bank has created, as well as the restrictions the occupation imposes on Palestinians’ daily routines and freedoms. -- New York Times
Patrick Kingsley
The writer is a British journalist and is the Jerusalem bureau chief of NYT
Raja Abdulrahim
The writer is a correspondent in Jerusalem for NYT
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