Under the shadow of war, West Bank settlers are pushing Palestinians from their lands

Patrick Martin is a former foreign editor and Middle East correspondent for The Globe and Mail.

Under the cover of conflict in Gaza, and with Israelis preoccupied by threats from Iran, Jewish West Bank settlers are conducting a campaign of terror against Palestinians throughout Judea and Samaria, the name that settlers and many other Israelis use for the West Bank.

There has been a huge growth in the number of Israeli settlements in recent years, with most illegal “outposts” now being accepted as full-fledged settlements and others becoming “farms,” a new category of settlement. All are illegal under international law as the area became occupied territory in the Six-Day War in 1967, but they are generally supported by the Israeli government.

“This war has been an opportunity for the settlers to expand their operations as never before,” Rabbi Arik Ascherman, a U.S.-born human-rights activist for 30 years, told me, as we looked down into the stony valley known as Wadi as-Seeq.

Since the horrific Hamas attacks on Israel, the United Nations has recorded more than 700 incidents of settler violence on Palestinian communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem between Oct. 7 of last year and April 3, with soldiers in uniform present in nearly half of the attacks, according to Human Rights Watch. The violence has displaced more than 1,200 people, including 600 children, from rural herding communities. At least 17 Palestinians were killed and 400 wounded by settler violence, while Palestinians have killed seven settlers in the West Bank since Oct. 7, the UN reported.

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As the Israeli human-rights organization B’Tselem wrote in a 2023 report, these actions are part of a “longstanding policy to make life so miserable for dozens of Palestinian communities in the West Bank that the residents eventually leave, seemingly of their own accord.”

In short, settlers have put the fear of God in them.

Another clash arose on April 12, when a 14-year-old Israeli boy from a settler outpost northeast of Ramallah was killed. Binyamin Achimair had taken his family’s herd of sheep out to graze in nearby fields. The herd returned home a few hours later, but Binyamin did not.

Searchers from nearby settlements scoured the area and attacked several Palestinian villages and communities. Yesh Din, an Israeli human-rights group, reported that four Palestinians, including a 17-year-old boy, were killed in these incidents, and that houses and vehicles were set on fire, and livestock killed.

A 21-year-old resident of Duma, one of the towns that was terrorized, was arrested and charged with the murder 10 days later.

Of the many communities targeted by settlers, the most vulnerable are the camps of Bedouin, a traditionally nomadic Muslim Arab group considered in the West Bank as Palestinian. Many of their encampments were established during the period of British and Jordanian rule.

In the area of Wadi as-Seeq, just a few kilometres from Binyamin’s outpost, many of the Bedouin already have been driven away. The largest exodus took place within two weeks of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.

The settlers and soldiers used heavy-handed tactics – allegedly taking three men captive and subjecting them to torture and degrading treatment, then uploading photos of the assaults to social media for all to see. It was effective.

Rabbi Ascherman, the Harvard-educated former director of Rabbis for Human Rights and now leader of Torat Tzedek (Torah of Justice), positions himself as a human shield to protect unarmed Palestinian farmers and shepherds in the area.

But there’s been a lot less support for his actions from his fellow Israelis these days.

“There were always a significant number of Israelis who, at least passively, supported and agreed with what we were doing,” the rabbi said. “Today there’s almost no support, and little Israeli sympathy for the plight of any Palestinians.”

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He pointed across the valley to the location of HaMahoch Farm, an illegal but government-supported settler outpost established by a man named Neriya Ben Pazi, one of three extremist settler leaders sanctioned by the United States in March. The U.S. State Department accused Mr. Ben Pazi of having “expelled Palestinian shepherds from hundreds of acres of land,” and of having “attacked Palestinians near the village of Wadi as-Seeq” in August last year.

Rabbi Ascherman is piggybacking on the U.S. charges and, on March 20, brought a petition against Mr. Ben Pazi to the Israeli High Court. He is asking the court to order the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and the Civil Administration, the Israeli body that oversees the West Bank, to evacuate and demolish HaMahoch Farm. “These settlers have constantly and daily attacked and harassed Palestinian residents who use private Palestinian lands in the area, harming them, their animals and their property, destroying trees and vegetation, and causing them to abandon the area after decades in which these territories were cultivated and used by Palestinians,” the petition alleges.

Indeed, a year ago, the Civil Administration began action itself to demolish Mr. Ben Pazi’s farming outpost, but the demolition was halted by intervention from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionist Party who, as a special defence minister in the West Bank, represents the highest authority in the Civil Administration. Mr. Smotrich is also an outspoken critic of the Palestinian population at large and makes no secret of the fact that he would like to see the end of them. He’s the Israeli government representative who, after two Israeli settlers were killed driving through a West Bank Palestinian community last year, said: “The village of Huwara needs to be erased. I think the State of Israel should do it.”

He described the U.S. sanctions that target individual Israeli settlers and settlements as “a capitulation to the BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] campaign, which is designed to tarnish the entire State of Israel and bring about the elimination of the settlement movement and the establishment of a Palestinian terror state.” Mr. Smotrich’s push to legalize more West Bank settler outposts is also causing tensions with the United States.

For the settlers, it’s a race against time. They want to frighten off as many villagers and Bedouin as possible before the war against Hamas ends, and, as a result, prevent a two-state solution from being viable.

Mr. Ben Pazi succeeded a few months ago in frightening people away from two other communities in Wadi as-Seeq, and there was little Rabbi Ascherman could do to persuade them to stay. In the case of his current Bedouin operation, he is sleeping at the camp most nights, knowing the settlers like to strike in the dark.

Burin, a well-established Palestinian town of about 3,000 people, just south of the Palestinian city of Nablus, has the misfortune of being caught between two of the most radical Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank: the hilltop communities of Yitzhar and Har Bracha, both of which make life in Burin incredibly difficult.

It’s easy to see that this is a relatively affluent community, but you also quickly see that the town is in mourning. Posters announcing the deaths of two young community members are stapled to just about every pole in town. On them are photos of boys, one of them a 10-year-old who was killed on March 4 by a rifle shot while he was sitting in the middle of the front seat of his father’s truck. “The bullet went straight through the windshield and Amr’s head,” said Mahmoud Najjar, Amr’s cousin. Amr’s father, Mohammed, said his son was shot by IDF soldiers. The IDF says they were responding to rock-throwing activity, and the incident is under review.

The other poster was of another boy, Motaz Anas Subhi Mansour, 14, who also was shot dead by Israelis on patrol on Nov. 22, according to human-rights organization Defense for Children International – Palestine.

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While the military shootings leave an indelible impression, the greatest pressure the people of Burin feel comes more directly from the neighbouring settlements. Young men from both Yitzhar and Har Bracha have regularly stoned the Palestinians when they are harvesting crops. Locals say this is done under the watchful eye of the IDF, whose role is solely to safeguard the Israeli settlers.

In the summer of 2011, I was here in Burin with my fixer, Nuha Musleh, reporting a story on how the settlers of Yitzhar and Har Bracha treated their Palestinian neighbours. In the middle of an interview with a local resident, I remember a young man bursting into the room to say that men from Yitzhar were setting fire to the olive trees. Sure enough, you could see a group of young men setting fires, and with the strong wind from the west fanning the flames, the fire spread quickly to the east. The fire truck that arrived from Nablus could not reach the blaze so high up the mountainside, so it was going to spread quickly.

Nuha and I jumped in the car and drove up the mountain to Yitzhar. The settlers were busy watching the young men set the fire and cheering them on, so they didn’t notice a foreign correspondent in their midst discreetly taking notes.

Soon enough, their exhausted, sweaty friends joined them and they proudly admired their handiwork – until they realized that the fire was out of control and might even imperil their own settlement.

It was at about that time that the boys realized I was not playing for the same team. I quickly departed.

The settlement of Yitzhar escaped the conflagration that day, but a very large swath of olive trees was destroyed. Looking out at the mountain again, it was clear that the upper layers of the hillside groves still were barren. I mentioned this to someone at the town hall, who said the very farmer who owned that olive grove would soon be coming by.

Then, Akram Omran pulled up on his tractor. He told us that he lost more than 100 trees in that fire and he never got the land back. He was even forbidden from visiting it.

One year, he crept up after dark on a number of nights and planted olive saplings. He said he thought they were taking hold. But years before they would bear fruit, the settlers noticed them and cut them down.

In the Hebron Hills, the southernmost part of the West Bank, Palestinian Bedouin have been under pressure from Jewish townspeople wanting to move into the neighbourhood. Communities such as Khirbet Zanuta faced years of threats that grew in intensity after Oct. 7. On top of that, the IDF wanted a large amount of land on which to build a firing range.

By the end of October last year, the 150 residents said they had had enough, and the entire Zanuta community chose to move to Rahat, a largely Bedouin area in Israel near Beersheva.

The 170 people of at-Tuwani, which sits on the other side of Highway 317, next to the Jewish settlement of Ma’on, still refuse to budge.

Bedouin have lived there for generations, many in caves. Their young children walk two kilometres every day to a school on their side of the highway. There is ample land for grazing their sheep and goats.

“We Are Not Leaving” is painted in Arabic on a wall of Fadel Hamandeh’s garage. Mr. Hamandeh has two wives and six children. He has room for all of them.

But the Har Hevron Regional Council “wants to tear up our homes, so they can build another settlement,” he explains. “No,” he adds emphatically.

He says the council already is going ahead – a team was in the community two days earlier, driving black steel bars into the ground along various lines that ran right through some of their best grazing and farming areas.

I intercepted the newly elected mayor of Har Hevron, Eliram Azulay, as he was walking between meetings the next day at the regional council offices. “No one is being forced off their land,” he said. “What we are doing is drawing a line where these people have spread their grazing and growing fields into Area C, which is exclusively Israeli. That’s all.”

Mr. Azulay is correct that according to the 1995 Oslo Accords reached by the Palestine Liberation Organization and the government of Israel, Area C constitutes 60 per cent of the West Bank, and Israel provides administration and security. However, it is not exclusively populated by Israelis. About 150,000 Palestinians currently live in and/or farm in Area C.

Furthermore, the Oslo Accords stipulate that the territory in Area C “will be gradually transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction.” The deal was intended to be a process toward the two-state solution, not a reason to push Palestinians off the land. Since the measures now being taken by the Israeli authorities will mean the loss of much of their farmland, the residents of at-Tuwani aren’t going to like it.

When I decided to return to the region this spring, I wanted to see the degree to which the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 had affected Israeli attitudes and government policies toward West Bank Palestinians and the prospects for a two-state solution.

Late one afternoon in March, while on my way north to Jerusalem, I had a jarring conversation that made me realize how far things had gone.

I picked up a young hitchhiker outside Kiryat Arba. His name was Elieza; I took him to be 20 years old. I told him I was a journalist from Canada.

He was lean, with a scraggly beard and mean-looking with a large knitted kippa and perhaps the longest peyot – untrimmed sidelocks of hair often worn by Orthodox Jews – I had ever seen. He reminded me of a typical “hilltop youth” – young zealots known for attacking Palestinian communities, usually in the dead of night.

His English was not at all good, but it was much better than my Hebrew. By repeating things often enough with words we both knew, we were able to have a successful conversation. I credit him with great patience as he tried to make me understand what he wanted to tell me.

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Elieza lived in the relatively small Jewish settlement of Susya, a few kilometres west of at-Tuwani, known to be home to several Afrikaner Christians who had moved to Israel and converted to Judaism. He studied in Kiryat Arba under a revered rabbi.

No, he said, he was not haredi (ultra-orthodox, who generally do not serve in the military). In fact, he said, he was due to report for military training in two weeks. And he was very excited about it.

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because I get to kill Arabs.”

“Why do you want to do that?”

“Haven’t you seen what they do to us on October 7?” he asked. “If we don’t kill them, they will kill us.”

“Just like the Purim story,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, happy that I understood the story of pre-emptive self-defence contained in the Book of Esther.

“Like Goldstein,” I added, referring to Baruch Goldstein, who carried out his murderous attack on Muslims at prayer during the Jewish feast of Purim in 1994.

“Yes,” he said.

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“But Arabs have been here for hundreds of years,” I pointed out. “Don’t they have a right to stay?”

“No,” he said. “God gave the whole land of Israel to the Jewish people, to Abraham.”

I pointed out that Abraham had two sons – Isaac and Ishmael – and that Ishmael became the father of the Arab people and Isaac, the father of the Jews. “So shouldn’t the children of Ishmael also have rights to the land God gave their father Abraham?”

“It’s a good question,” he acknowledged charitably. “But it’s too hard for me to explain.”

“So that’s it?” I asked. “The Arabs have no right to be here?”

“That’s right,” he replied.

“So it’s all right to force them out of their homes, their villages, their towns?”

“Yes, for sure,” he said.

“And if they don’t go, it’s all right to attack them?”

“Yes, even to kill them.”

We were nearing Jerusalem and I knew he would jump out soon, so I had to ask: “What about the Christians? Many of them live in the land of Israel.”

“It is not their land,” he wanted to make clear. “But they can visit Israel, and they can rent land here. But they cannot own it. They are not our enemies and we don’t have to kill them.”

Well, amen to that.

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