Resolve of West Bank Settlers May Have Limits

Of the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, those who live in unauthorized hilltop outposts like this one, a hardscrabble unpaved collection of 20 trailers, are considered the most dangerous.

They are fervent believers that there is a divine plan requiring them to hold this land. With many of them armed and all of them furious over the 2005 withdrawal of Jews from Gaza and four West Bank settlements, they live by the slogan: “Never forget! Never forgive!” The building of a Palestinian state would require them to move, and Israelis fear that any attempt to force them out could cause a bloody internal clash.

But scores of interviews over several months, including with settler firebrands, produced a different conclusion. Divided, leaderless and increasingly mystical, such settlers will certainly resist evacuation but are unlikely to engage in organized armed conflict with the Israeli military. Their belief that history can be best understood as a series of confrontations between the Jews and those who seek their destruction, and their faith in their ultimate triumph, make them hesitant to turn against their own, even in dire circumstances.

“We are idealists, but we are not crazy,” said Ayelet Sandak, who was removed from her Gaza settlement home and is helping to build an unauthorized outpost, Maoz Esther, with the goal of both expanding the Jewish presence and diverting the military. “By building outposts we are keeping the army away from the main settlements. We are sure that if we are strong, we will not be forced to move.”

As part of its commitment to a two-state solution, Israel has promised to dismantle two dozen outposts like this one in the coming months. The Obama administration’s Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell, is back in the region trying to set up a summit meeting for new peace talks. Yet officials have been slow to act on these outposts, worried that the move could break this society in two.

Certainly, some settler leaders speak in ominous tones. “They’ll have to kill us to get us out of here,” said Itay Zar, founder of Havat Gilad, sitting in the outpost’s unpaved central square, a pink sun setting over the majestic Samarian hills before dropping into the Mediterranean.

And Boaz Haetzni, who lives in Kiryat Arba near Hebron and is part of a movement to repopulate destroyed settlements, said, “People no longer view the army and state as holy.”

Jewish terror is not new. A religious student assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and a settler, Baruch Goldstein, killed 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994. Yitzhak Fhantich, who used to lead the Jewish section inside the Shin Bet security agency, said that based on recent history and the goals of extremists, “I cannot exclude that there will be violence, that the prime minister could be targeted or that mosques could be attacked. They are looking to stop any peace process.”

But interviews with settlers suggest that the threat of violence is largely a political strategy. The great majority say they realize that if the bulldozers arrive, their fight is over.

“We cannot allow ourselves to wait until the soldiers are at our doors,” noted David Ha’ivri, a spokesman for the northern West Bank settlers. “We must prepare strategic maneuvers in advance.”

By that, he mostly means politics. If the soldiers do come, the settlers are unlikely to fight. “People won’t leave their homes peacefully but they will not shoot soldiers,” predicted Shaul Goldstein, who is the leader of the regional council of the Gush Etzion settler bloc and is considered a moderate.

A senior Israeli general in the West Bank agreed. He said the army was awaiting orders to evacuate the two dozen outposts and was preparing for everything, including soldier refusal and settler bloodshed directed both at Palestinians and at security forces. But, he added, speaking under army rules of anonymity: “I don’t think there will be a lot of resistance. Deep inside, most settlers love Israel and love the Israeli Army.”

A Nation’s Moral Core

That assertion may seem surprising, especially after the army’s removal of 8,000 settlers from Gaza four years ago, an operation that burns in the hearts of the settler community. But there are several reasons to take it seriously.

First, the Gaza operation splintered the settlers, discrediting the traditional leaders in the eyes of the new generation.

Second, many settlers believe that they and their supporters are inheriting the mantle of Zionism, so promoting an internal war would be counterproductive.

Finally, the direction that many of the most radical settlers have taken has been toward the esoteric, not combat.

Settlers tend to believe they inhabit the Jewish nation’s moral core, that they are the rightful heirs to the kibbutz farmer-soldiers who founded the country and whose descendants, they say, have grown soft with materialism and individualism.

Effie Eitam, a former minister, rightist politician and himself a settler in the Golan Heights, promotes this view. He says Israel’s religious conservatives, with their blend of modern savvy and traditional values, will inherit the country’s leadership. The settlers will therefore do everything they can, he argues, not to contaminate themselves with the blood of their brothers.

Indeed, viewed outside their conflict with the Palestinians, many settlers can seem a model of selfless devotion, choosing to live in great modesty with little comfort, dedicated to children and community. Many are professionals — doctors, lawyers and teachers.

That said, the approach of some of them toward neighboring Palestinians, especially around Nablus in the north and Hebron in the south, has often been one of contempt and violence. Sometimes placing their communities between Palestinian villages and the villages’ farmlands, the settlers block the villagers’ routes and then take over the “abandoned” areas. Settlers have also set fields on fire and used their arms and power to frighten and push back Palestinian farmers.

The Shin Bet has worked in the past year to reduce such attacks, and violence from both settlers and Palestinians has declined markedly, but law enforcement remains lenient with settlers.

Blood has been spilled on both sides. Many of the West Bank outposts were set up in what the settlers called a “Zionist response” to Palestinian attacks.

Havat Gilad was established after Mr. Zar’s brother, Gilad, was killed by Palestinian gunmen in 2001. Mr. Zar says the outpost sits on land bought by his father, Moshe Zar, a well-known West Bank land dealer who was himself convicted of belonging to a Jewish underground that killed and maimed Palestinians in the early 1980s.

At the same time, the younger ideological settlers are increasingly mystical and have little concern about whether they are causing conflict. They view their goals as at the center of global history. Beards and sidelocks are longer than in the past and the fringed shawl and phylacteries normally reserved for morning prayer are now worn by some all day long.

Their main sources of guidance are ancient Jewish texts and rabbinical pronouncements. After the 2005 withdrawal, Mr. Zar said, his generation of settlers started living increasingly by the motto “God is king.”

Such settlers have also increasingly focused their energies on the veneration of holy places like Joseph’s Tomb, a tiny stone compound in the heart of the Palestinian city of Nablus — or ancient Shechem — that many Jews believe is the final burial place of the son of Jacob, the biblical patriarch.

Once a month, busloads of settlers go at midnight under heavy guard. It is a moment of unparalleled joy for them.

And they view Torah study as among their main weapons. Nearly every day, for example, Rabbi Elishama Cohen and a group of students sneak into Homesh, one of the destroyed settlements in the northern West Bank, to pray and study.

Since Israel forced its residents out of there four years ago in a gesture to the Palestinians, getting back in requires driving through farm fields to evade Israeli military checkpoints.

Stripped of all it once had — houses, a pool, streetlights — Homesh, with its overgrown weeds and stray bits of concrete, feels today like the remnant of a nuclear winter.

But that has not dimmed the devotion of those who keep coming or their conviction that doing so will change the strategic equation.

“We never leave Homesh empty,” said a man who gave his name as Zvi Yehuda as he prepared surreptitiously to spend the night there, revolver on hip. “The creator of the universe gave us this land. It is a commandment to live in it and settle it. Anyone who stands in our way — whether pharaoh or Obama — will be punished by God.”

There are 300,000 settlers in the West Bank (another 200,000 Israeli Jews live in East Jerusalem) and they are not monolithic. A third are politically and socially indistinguishable from most of Israel and moved there for suburban-style housing and close-knit communities. Another third are ultra-Orthodox and do not consider themselves settlers or Zionists, wanting only to live together in an appropriate environment somewhere in Israel.

The remaining 100,000 are ideologically (and, most of them, religiously) committed to staying. They have a fairly uniform view of the situation: most believe that there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation; that if the world wants a state for Palestinians, it should set it up next door in Jordan; that all of the West Bank, which they call by the biblical name Judea and Samaria, is a central part of the Jewish homeland; and that Arabs will do everything they can to destroy Israel in any borders, so staying in the West Bank is a matter not only of history but of security.

Salvation Through Land

While the ultra-Orthodox say life comes above all else, ideological settlers say that holding onto what they consider the entire land of Israel is the essence of life; through redemption of this land comes Jewish salvation.

But half of them live in settlement blocs close to the boundary with Israel that are likely to remain in a deal involving land swaps with the Palestinians. Ideological settlers who live deep in the West Bank number about 50,000.

Taking what they say at face value suggests no room for compromise. One of the five principles of a radical organization called Mishmeret Yesha says: “Every grain of sand and every stone in the Land of Israel are holy to the nation of Israel. No authority is allowed to relinquish any portion of the land.”

A second principle states that independence for Israel will be achieved only by bringing Jews to the land “and the removal of all hostile elements from the land.”

Mishmeret Yesha, which stands for “Guardians of the Jews of Judea, Samaria and Gaza,” trains armed response teams in settlements to fight off Palestinian invaders, plants vines and olive trees around the West Bank to claim it for Jews and keep it away from Palestinians, and pushes the creation of jobs and development for Jews. It rejects working with or acknowledging any legitimacy to Palestinians.

“The Arabs have to understand that they can’t stay here,” asserted Israel Danziger, who runs the hard-line organization and rejects the word “Palestinian.” “There is no in-between possible.”

Mr. Danziger spoke as a dozen men in their 20s were training with M-16 automatic rifles in the settlement of Yitzhar. Most had served in the army, all were religiously observant and all rejected any legitimacy to the idea of being moved to make room for a Palestinian state.

They also firmly believed that the Palestinian security force being trained with American money and spread through the West Bank would one day turn its firepower onto the settlers who would have to defend themselves.

Some settlers have engaged in, and vow more of, what they call “Price Tag,” meaning that any time Israeli security forces move against settlement outposts, the settlers exact a price from Palestinians, mostly by burning Palestinian fields and orchards or by blocking roads.

Still, they said they would not redirect their training away from the Palestinian threat toward the Israeli Army or police. Mr. Danziger said it would never happen. But he added that he rarely felt so betrayed as on the day in 2005 that the state sent thousands of troops into Gush Katif, the main Jewish settlement grouping in Gaza, to remove Jews. It is his goal, as it is of others, to make sure that never happens in the West Bank.

A Museum of ‘Expulsion’

The military evacuation order delivered to the 8,000 settlers in Gaza four years ago hangs today in the Gush Katif Museum in Jerusalem. The deadline it bears for leaving is Aug. 14, or in the Hebrew calendar of that year, the Ninth of Av, a fast day associated with a string of calamities in Jewish history.

The settlers call the withdrawal the “expulsion.” The new museum, visited by scores daily, contains keys from destroyed houses, poetry of mourning and bottles of sand from the abandoned shores of Gaza. The museum’s theme is a conscious echo of the post-Holocaust theme of the entire country: Never Again.

In fact, most Israelis now see the evacuation as having been a disaster. It led to the Hamas takeover in Gaza and increased rocket fire at Israel. And the former settlers, many of whom vowed to stay together as communities, have fared poorly.

Their advocates say that only about one in 10 is in permanent housing. Some 3,000 are still living in cramped mobile homes in a desolate, temporary neighborhood north of Gaza. This makes talk of another, larger removal of settlers from the West Bank seem a cruel fantasy to some — it could bring rockets to within range of its major population centers and lead to tens of thousands being in homeless limbo.

A few of the younger evacuees from Gaza and their sympathizers have even refused to enlist for compulsory army service or to perform annual reserve duty.

“The state does not exist for me,” said Ofir Ben Hamo, 32, from the razed Gaza settlement of Bedolah. Mr. Ben Hamo, a former tank commander, last did reserve duty four months before the Gaza withdrawal — “like a sucker,” he said.

All this has compounded the settlers’ conviction that no Israeli government would risk a similar undertaking in the West Bank. But as international pressure for a Palestinian state here grows, there is deep worry.

“We can talk as aggressively as we like on the right,” said Anita Toker, a spokeswoman for the Gaza evacuees, “but how many people are we?”

Ms. Toker, a founder of the first civilian settlement in Gush Katif, believes that only the mobilization of the Israeli masses can prevent a further withdrawal. But she is not optimistic. “So far everything is polarized,” she said.

Other settlers are banking on a refusal by Israeli soldiers to obey orders. But in a sign of the divisions racking the settler movement and given the grave external threats to the country, many reject that approach.

“Above all we are dealing with the existence of Israel,” said Israel Harel, a leading intellectual of the settlement enterprise, who established the settlers’ council in the 1970s and whose son, Itai, helped found a nearby outpost.

“Once soldiers do not obey orders,” Mr. Harel said, “it is the beginning of the end of the Jewish state.”