The remains of Or Haim, an illegal settlement outpost, lie scattered on a windswept hilltop in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Two dozen Israeli settlers erected a few shabby shacks there one night last month, and by morning the Israeli army had demolished them.
But the settlers want to try again. Most right government in the history of Israel, which counts settler leaders among its most important ministers, took office late last year and the settler movement was emboldened as it saw an opportunity to expand its enterprise faster than ever.
“Now I expect things to be different,” said Naveh Schindler, 19, a settler activist who is leading efforts to build the Or Haim outpost. “If I hold out enough,” Mr. Schindler said, “hopefully the government will build it themselves.”
Settlers like Mr. Schindler hope to establish more Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank. what is illegal under international law, on land that the Palestinians hoped would be the nucleus of a future Palestinian state. Palestinians, meanwhile, watch with fear and concern as settlements expand and attacks on Palestinians increase as more settlers arrive.
While previous Israeli governments and generals have done so built and protected In hundreds of settlements, they have often spoken out against the unauthorized construction of outposts by settler activists. Now, the open advocacy of settlements by government ministers and the growing ambitions of the settler movement, combined with a recent uptick in violence, is raising fears it could help spark an impending West Bank explosion.
An unusually intense wave of settler violence anti-Palestinians and their property swept through parts of the territory last weekend. A month of almost daily Israeli military attacks on Palestinian towns and cities followed, leaving at least 26 Palestinians dead. Palestinian violence against Israelis also continued to escalate, adding to the sense of a region on the brink.
United Nations officials documented at least 22 settler-led attacks and vandalism from Jan. 26-30, while Palestinian officials said the real number was about seven times higher. More than 70 settler attacks took place in January, UN officials said – a rate that, if sustained for the year, would be the highest in at least half a decade.
That capped a January in which the Israeli army reported at least 59 Palestinian attacks in the West Bank, almost double the number two months earlier, inflicting several injuries but killing no one. At least 35 Palestinians were killed over the same period, sometimes during these attacks. At least two were killed by civilian settlers, in circumstances Israeli officials described as self-defense but which Palestinians said were unclear.
A new wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence
Violence by both Israelis and Palestinians has long been routine in the area occupied by Israel during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, in which Israel defeated several Arab states that mobilized against it. Since then, hundreds of Israeli settlements have been built there, hampering Palestinian hopes for sovereignty and helping to create a two-tier legal system that puts settlers before civil courts and Palestinians before military courts.
But now an even bigger surge is expected. Young settler activists, who believe that West Bank land was promised to them by God, have been roused by the presence of their allies in the new government.
New groups of young Palestinian fighters have now emerged in response to the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation and the perceived corruption of their own leadership.
A wave of violence over the past week has highlighted how ripe the situation was for further escalation. A raid by the Israeli army In the northern West Bank, 10 Palestinians were killed after a gun battle broke out before a Palestinian attacker seven civilians shot dead in front of a synagogue in Jerusalem. Both episodes were the deadliest of their kind in years.
Less reported was a subsequent wave of settler attacks on Palestinians, in which settlers destroyed Palestinian businesses, homes and cars.
Surveillance footage showed three masked men in an attack late Saturday night in the Palestinian town of Turmusaya.
Video showed them jumping over a fence and walking towards a house, then out of camera view. Seconds later, flames erupted from under the house’s red terracotta awning and the men fled back over the fence.
“They believe they are the only ones who have a right to this land,” said Awad Abu Samra, 57, a Palestinian who rushed to the home owned by a Palestinian-American after the attack. “It will only get worse, especially with this new government,” Mr Abu Samra added.
In the northwest West Bank village of Jeensafoot, Wissam Eid, 29, woke up Wednesday morning to find all four tires of her family’s black SUV had been slashed. At least seven other neighbors also found their tires slashed, and residents attributed all eight episodes to settlers.
For years, Israelis from a nearby settlement have entered the village several times a year, smashing tires, smashing windows and writing racist, anti-Palestinian graffiti, including on the village mosque, residents and local officials said. But never in Ms. Eid’s neighborhood.
“I was frozen with fear,” she said after they spotted the wrecked vehicle. “You could have climbed up and entered the house.”
Ms Eid decided not to send her children to school that morning and hours later she was still shaken, wringing her hands and fiddling with her phone.
“Their goal is to scare us,” she said. “They want to send a message, ‘Stay scared, stay scared.’ And I am.”
Settlers acknowledge the violence is taking place but say it is being carried out by a tiny minority, almost always in self-defense, and that if there had been no Palestinian attacks – like this one last Friday in Jerusalem – there would be no answer from the settlers. Some portray life in the West Bank as an uncomfortable coexistence between two national groups, disrupted primarily by Palestinian acts of violence.
Palestinians killed nine Israelis in the West Bank last year and 21 other Israelis and foreigners inside Israel. The Israeli military says it has given up recording the number of attacks by Palestinians throwing stones 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 Mr. Schindler, adding that he personally does not condone violence. “Then we react – but the media never report it like that.”
But for the Palestinians, not only do the Israelis have a monopoly on the use of force — more than 170 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank last year, most of them by Israeli security forces, the highest number in more than a decade and a half — they also fail to recognize the deep power imbalance that the West Bank settlement enterprise has created and the restrictions that the occupation is imposing on Palestinians’ daily routines and freedoms.
Israeli settlements often straddle private Palestinian land; require the mobilization of a vast Israeli military force to protect them; and have led to the legal system in which Palestinians are prosecuted in military courts with a very high Conviction rate, while Israelis are charged in plain clothes, if at all.
Data released this week by Yesh Din, an Israeli law enforcement officer who monitors settler violence, found that just 3 percent of Israeli nationalist crimes against Palestinians since 2005 had resulted in a conviction.
The new Israeli government’s Declaration of Guiding Principles, released late last year, began with a direct assertion of the Jewish people’s exclusive right to Israel and the West Bank.
Another coalition deal promised to formally annex the West Bank and legalize dozens of unauthorized settlements on the territory. There was also a settler leader Bezalel Smotrichnominal control of a Department of Defense department that oversees construction and demolition in the West Bank.
“We hope an opportunity has opened up,” said Yedaaya Stein, 22, another settler activist who is leading efforts to build Or Haim, the devastated settlement outpost in the northern West Bank. “We will continue to ask for more buildings,” added Mr. Stein.
Under pressure from allies, including the United States, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has avoided fully implementing parts of the coalition agreement. Right now he’s acting to hold Mr. Smotrich back.
When Mr Smotrich urged leaving Or Haim, Mr Netanyahu overruled him. And although Mr. Smotrich wanted to tear it down a strategically located Palestinian community east of Jerusalem, the government finally decided to postpone the demolition this week, fearing it could spark a broader Palestinian backlash.
This has led to friction within the settler movement. Younger activists generally want to seize this moment to establish even more settlement outposts, regardless of the local or international repercussions. However, some senior activists believe that more can be achieved by quietly working in the corridors of power to give settlers more long-term control over the West Bank and build more in the future.
“We don’t have to change everything overnight,” said Yisrael Medad, a veteran settler activist.
“With enough undercover planning and strategic direction,” he added, “we can do a lot more.”
But for young settlers like Mr. Schindler and Mr. Stein, now is the time to build new sites like Or Haim. Any crisis over a new settlement outpost will increase the pressure on the government to implement its pro-settler ideals.
Any backlash is inevitable and therefore pointless to worry, Mr. Schindler said.
“It is a national war between two peoples,” he said. “The conflict is about land, there is less and less land to claim and therefore the war over that land will intensify,” added Mr. Schindler.
Gaby Sobelman, Hiba Yazbek And Myra Noveck contributed reporting.
