SHVUT AMI OUTPOST, West Bank — For two months, Jewish youths have been renovating an old stone house on this muddy hilltop in the northern West Bank. The house is not theirs, however. It belongs to a Palestinian family. And their seizure of it along with the land around it for a new settlement outpost is a violation of Israeli law. The police have evicted the group five times but they keep coming back.
Yedidya Slonim, 16, one of the renovators here, who grew up in another West Bank settlement, Tzofim, said of the police: “We come back straight away, as soon as they’ve gone. They come every week for half a day. It doesn’t bother us so much.”
The cat-and-mouse contest here lays bare a key dilemma of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute: Israel has pledged that it will permit no new settlements in the territory it has occupied since the 1967 war, no more expropriation of Palestinian land and the dismantling of unauthorized outposts — like this one — erected since March 2001, but it has never applied the muscle needed to do so.
“Shvut Ami is a chronicle of failure of law enforcement,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer who represents the Palestinian owners of the house on behalf of Yesh Din, an Israeli volunteer organization that fights for Palestinian rights. In this respect, he said, the area is “a jungle.”
So the settlers continue building a patchwork of communities to try to preclude the drawing of a border between Israel and a future Palestinian state. At the vanguard are the hilltop youth, teenagers like Yedidya, who work to complicate the demographic map ever more.
A settler organization called the Land of Israel Faithful has promised to set up an additional seven outposts over the eight-day Hanukkah holiday — and to “strengthen” Shvut Ami.
According to Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that tracks settlement activity, most of the hundred or so outposts already in existence are built at least partially on private Palestinian land.
Shvut Ami sits across a valley from Mitzpeh Ishai, a new neighborhood of the Jewish settlement of Kedumim. Kedumim was established in the 1970s between the Palestinian villages of Funduk, Kadum and Imaten, about seven miles east of the 1967 lines.
Most of the world considers all Jewish settlement in the West Bank a violation of international law. But Israel asserts that the territory is disputed, and the hilltop youth believe it was promised to them by God.
Sometimes, a price is paid in blood. On Nov. 19, a 29-year-old local settler, Ido Zoldan, was shot dead in his car by Palestinian gunmen at the entrance to Funduk. Mr. Zoldan, who grew up in Kedumim, had worked in his father’s construction company, which builds settlement homes all over the West Bank.
The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a militia affiliated with the mainstream Fatah movement headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, took credit for the attack. Three suspects have since been detained — all members of Mr. Abbas’s security forces from the village of Kadum.
Five nights after the killing, hundreds of settlers converged at the entrance of Funduk in protest. They rampaged through the village, smashing the windows of houses and cars.
Villagers said the Israeli soldiers and police accompanying the protesters mostly stood aside while the settlers ran wild.
Military officials said the Funduk protest had not been authorized by the army. Soldiers and police officers had dispersed the riot, detaining two settlers and two Palestinian villagers for throwing stones, they said.
For years, the settlers have exploited the ambivalence displayed toward them by the Israeli authorities.
The Shvut Ami outpost sits on private Palestinian land inherited by the two wives and children of Abd al-Ghani Salah Amar, of Kadum, according to documentation seen by The New York Times.
Mr. Amar built the stone house in 1963, ten years before he died. The roughly 17 acres of land are planted with hundreds of olive and almond trees, some figs and some vines. The estate is managed by one of Mr. Amar’s daughters, Badriya Amar, a 61-year-old widow who still lives in Kadum.
Mrs. Amar filed an official complaint with the Israeli police in early October for trespassing on her family land. Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, said the ownership documents were being examined by the authorities for authenticity.
In the meantime, the site has been declared a closed military zone. Behind the settler youths who are building here are the guiding hands of adults. One of the leading ideologues of the outpost movement is Daniella Weiss, a former mayor of Kedumim. Yedidya says that “someone” from Kedumim connected them to the water mains, and local supporters bring over food and raise funds. Nachman Zoldan, Ido’s father, helped out a lot in the beginning; Ido also provided equipment and advice before he was killed.
Yedidya said the outpost’s synagogue would be named in his memory. Ido was supposed to help put down the floors.
Based on experience, there is no guarantee when Shvut Ami, Hebrew for “my people’s return,” will be restored to Mrs. Amar.
Another illegal outpost, Migron, was established on private Palestinian land in 2002. More than 40 families now live there in trailer homes. Peace Now successfully petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court in 2006 to order its removal, but in Migron, nothing has changed. At the latest hearing, on Nov. 1, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, asked for a two-month extension to allow him to formulate a comprehensive plan for the removal of illegal outposts.
Mrs. Amar last visited her orchards in early November, to try to pick a few olives. She was chased away by the settlers, she said. She was speaking by telephone because the only road to Kadum had been blocked by the army since the killing of Mr. Zoldan.
Yedidya suggests that Mrs. Amar could move to Jordan or Egypt or one of the other Arab states. “God gave this to us,” he said. “Now that we’re here, I don’t think we’re going to move.”
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