Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

The J Street lobbying group that defines itself as “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace,” is leading a campaign to show support for “60 Minutes” correspondent Bob Simon.  Simon has been criticized both for his incisive analysis of the role settlements play in preventing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for showing Israeli soldiers taking over a Palestinian home on the “60 Minutes” program broadcast on Jan. 25, 2009.

Simon’s  piece, entitled “Time Running Out For A Two-State Solution?” can be seen at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/23/60minutes/main4749723.shtml.

The J Street statement of support for Bob Simon can be accessed at http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/2747/t/3251/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=2523.

Bob Simon narrated an excellent segment on settlements as an obstacle to a two-state solution on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Jan. 25, 2009. You can see it at: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/23/60minutes/main4749723.shtml.

Bernard Avishai Dot Com: Hebron Agonistes: Too Much For Israel, Dec. 22, 2008

It has been common for educated Israelis to think, and Israeli diplomats and American Jewish leaders to present, the settler community of Hebron as a kind of radical nuisance. Presumably, the settlers are a side-show of a defensive strategic policy, a touch of hubris gone wrong, a little understandible selfishness after centuries of self-effacement-anyway, a line that can be moved when the time is right, certainly not a country within a country that has grown, SimCity-like, into something the size of the Jewish colony in Palestine in 1946.

In this view-not entirely wrong-the settlers were post-1967 Israelis only more so: people who took classical Zionist ideas about settling the Land of Israel a little too seriously, or took the Jews’ election a little too literally, or accepted cheap mortgages from the Jewish Agency a little too opportunistically; people who have randomly scattered themselves in the occupied territory in a now obviously failed effort to annex the holy land, or just to show that Jews can live everywhere in it.

The settlers, presumably, have settled under the nose of a forbearing, once vaguely sympathetic Israeli government, otherwise preoccupied by encirclement and terror. But they are people whom the Israeli government-if it ever had a real peace partner in the Palestinians, and not jihadist terrorists firing missiles, or sending in suicide bombers-would clear out in a great show of sovereign will. The recent clearing of the “House of Contention” by the Israeli Army is proof, so the argument goes, of the Israeli army’s residual power. The more recent breakdown of the cease fire with Hamas is proof of how Israel faces an existential threat, and dares not be distracted by the settlers.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s picked up the scent of power, is defining a new centrism by triangulating these poles. He knows that Israelis have lost patience with Judeans, or at least the disquieting ones. He’s made a show of purging one of the most fanatic of the settlers, Moshe Feiglin, from the 20th. position in the Likud list for the Knesset (though many more remain in the top 30); and he is simultaneously telling us that both the peace talks Olmert conducted with the Palestinian Authority, and the “time of retreat” in Gaza, are over. No two-state solution will compromise the existence of Kiryat Arba (no more than the unity of Jerusalem), he says. But neither settler zealots nor Palestinian terrorists, presumably, will be allowed to challenge the existence of the state. Each side-some now, some later-will be forced to change their behavior by Israeli state force.

I WENT TO Hebron a couple of weeks ago, as part of a delegation of Israelis hoping to show a measure of solidarity with an Arab family who’s patriarch, Abed el-Hai, had been shot at point blank range defending his home from one Kiryat Arba settler as the House of Contention was being cleared. There is no need to sentimentalize this gruff, stolid man-whose many barefooted grandchildren, sticky from holiday candy and twittering over our cell phones, will be run over by global forces if peace should ever come. But let’s just say that a day in Hebron focuses the mind.

You think out from Hebron, and the holes in the common wisdom become obvious, well, certainly less abstract. A different pattern takes shape, and virtually every premise of the common wisdom falls away.

1. Kiryat Arba, with surrounding settlements, is a solid town of about 10,000 people and growing. Many of its youth were born there, marinating in a peculiar and vicious righteousness. But there can be no Palestinian state if Kiryat Arba remains; to keep its residents under Israeli sovereignty, you would have to cut the southern West Bank in half, and keep checkpoints all along the route from Gush Etzion. Kiryat Arba’s residents would never accept Palestinian citizenship, even if this were offered. Imagine offering Klansmen rule by Stokely Carmichael, or Martin Luther King, for that matter.

2. According to army intelligence, and demonstrated precedent, a substantial number of Kiryat Arba residents would be willing to violently resist the Israeli army. Reserve army units-young men from Herzliya or Netanya-will tell you the settlers are out of their minds. But this is not the only army. An increasing number of junior officers conducting the occupation come from the movements and homes of the settlers. The army is there, soldiers say, to keep the peace. But in any case, this means enforcing the status quo, in which settlements naturally expand.

3. There is nothing random about what the settlers are doing. In Hebron, the idea is to create a land bridge from Kiryat Arab to the Tomb of the Patriarchs. It is Abed el-Hai’s bad luck that is home is in the way, in the wadi below Kiryat Arba, which the settlers want to turn “Jewish.” Most nights, Kiryat Arba residents throw rocks, garbage, and bags of urine into his yard.

In the area known as H-2, where the settlers have rights under the Wye Agreement (you know, the agreement then-prime minster Netanyahu negotiated in 1998), the Arab population has declined from about 35,000 to 18,000.

The road from Kiryat Arba to the Tomb has a yellow (that’s right, yellow) line on it, indicating that no Arab is allowed to walk on it; the settlers push their baby-strollers freely, while army jeeps patrol up and down, and Arab kids watch from third floor windows, many of them with iron screens to protect them from rocks, etc.

The settlers have set up a synagogue on the land of Ja’abri family-another family in the way-which the Israeli High Court has declared illegal, and the army has taken down over 30 times, only to have the “minyan” rebuild it. During prayers, their children often throw rocks, etc., onto the homes of the Ja’abris. A stone’s throw in the other direction is the grave of, and monument to, Baruch Goldstein.

4. Multiply the Hebron problem by twenty, and you have the real, grotesque problem that occupation has engendered. Jerusalem is the radioactive core of it. Try to evacuate Kiryat Arba by force and tens of thousands will stream down from yeshivot in Jerusalem to stand with them.

No Israeli leader wants to deal with facing down the new Judeans-or can, without destroying Israeli social solidarity. I have written here before about how all fanatics live within concentric circles of support. No matter who wins a majority in the next election, about half of Israeli Knesset members will be from circles which the settlers count on-National Orthodox, Shas, Leiberman’s Russians, Haredi-people concentrated in and around Jerusalem, whom the settlers will tell you would be in settlements themselves if they had the guts; people who will nevertheless apply the “values” the settlers stand for to Jerusalem.

Again, Netanyahu has demoted Feiglin. But the government he will form will rest on this Judean coalition. And if Livni-Barak win, they will face an opposition nearly the size of their own, with many sympathetic members, and a fear of resting their coalition (as they will have to) on the Arab parties.

5. Hamas is growing in power-in the West Bank, too-directly as a result of this grotesquery. It is absurd to think of Gaza as a separate matter. Nor will the Hamas leadership be intimidated by shows of force. Actually, they thrive on it-precisely because eruptions of violence allow them to be seen as the steadfast opposition to the inertial expansion of Israeli occupation. An Israeli attack on Gaza, which must be bloody, will be play right into Hamas’s hands.

6. True, Israelis on the coastal plain are increasingly appalled by the settlers, and will tell you so. Livni’s biggest applause line at the Globes business conference last week was her insistence that, under her leadership, peace talks with the Palestinians will continue. But taking on the settlers is another matter. It is more politic to talk about smashing Hamas, whose missile attacks on Shderot truly are insufferable.

7. Netanyahu speaks of “economic peace” as alternative to the peace process. This is also absurd. Palestinians cannot build businesses with 500 checkpoints across the West Bank. Those checkpoints are mainly to protect the settlers.

WHERE DOES THIS leave us? The simple fact is, this problem is too big for Israel. We will need the world’s involvement; anyone who tells you different is either covering for the settlers, or afraid for electoral reasons to appear squishy about Israeli autonomy, or arrogant, or ignorant, or thick, or all of these at once. This post is not the place to describe what involvement means, though the contours of a two-state deal have been obvious for many years. The point is, what Hebron represents cannot be solved by this deal in a few decisive months, like the evacuation of the Sinai was. New changes to the landscape will take years. Or the landscape will look like Bosnia.

Perhaps the saddest part of all of this is that first patriarch of Hebron, Abraham, never turned promised land holy. When faced with contention, as his herdsmen quarreled with Lot, he said something unforgettable but forgotten: “Is not the whole land before you? Let’s part company. If you go to the left, I’ll go to the right; if you go to the right, I’ll go to the left.”

Avi Issacharoff, Hebron settler riots can only be called ‘pogrom’ Haaretz, Dec. 5, 2008

An innocent Palestinian family, numbering close to 20 people. All of them women and children, save for three men. Surrounding them are a few dozen masked Jews seeking to lynch them. A pogrom. This isn’t a play on words or a double meaning. It is a pogrom in the worst sense of the word. First the masked men set fire to their laundry in the front yard and then they tried to set fire to one of the rooms in the house. The women cry for help, “Allahu Akhbar.” Yet the neighbors are too scared to approach the house, frightened of the security guards from Kiryat Arba who have sealed off the home and who are cursing the journalists who wish to document the events unfolding there.

The cries rain down, much like the hail of stones the masked men hurled at the Abu Sa’afan family in the house. A few seconds tick by before a group of journalists, long accustomed to witnessing these difficult moments, decide not to stand on the sidelines. They break into the home and save the lives of the people inside. The brain requires a minute or two to digest what is taking place. Women and children crying bitterly, their faces giving off an expression of horror, sensing their imminent deaths, begging the journalists to save their lives. Stones land on the roof of the home, the windows and the doors. Flames engulf the southern entrance to the home. The front yard is littered with stones thrown by the masked men. The windows are shattered and the children are frightened. All around, as if they were watching a rock concert, are hundreds of Jewish witnesses, observing the events with great interest, even offering suggestions to the Jewish wayward youth as to the most effective way to harm the family. And the police are not to be seen. Nor is the army.

Sarah Kraemer, My Story: Olive harvest 5769, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 30, 2008

“Where are we going?” I asked Arik, as we drove out of Jerusalem in his beat up Subaru, with three other volunteers: an older gentleman and a newlywed couple.

I was beginning the New Year of 5769 with a practical mitzva: serving as a “human shield” between Palestinian families, trying to harvest their olive trees in the West Bank, and Israeli settlers, trying to prevent them. My old friend, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, director of Rabbis for Human Rights, had invited me to come with him – to help in a small grove of trees in the southern West Bank. I hadn’t asked for details; scores of volunteers were being assigned daily to olive groves throughout the West Bank – depending on the readiness of Palestinian owners, the weather and the permission of the Israeli Civil Administration. I was happy to be a foot-soldier, and help out wherever I was needed.

“We’ll be in Hebron,” answered Arik, driving slowly past the Beit Jala checkpoint.

Hebron?! Why hadn’t I asked before? A year ago I had visited the old city of Hebron, home of the ancient Tomb of the Patriarchs, burial site of Abraham – the Father claimed by Judaism and Islam. For weeks after, I was haunted by images of humiliation. The Arab bazaar shuttered; Israeli combat soldiers patrolling its eerie, silent streets. Hebrew graffiti, signed with a Star of David – “Policeman, Soldier: I hate you; Death to Traitors” – scrawled on a rusted door. Two Palestinian girls with book bags hurrying to school, heads down under a barrage of foul language from Jewish pupils outside Beit Hadassah. I wondered if I could still get out of the car and go back to Jerusalem.

“We are going to help the Jabari family,” Arik continued, as we drove through the rocky hills. “They only have a few olive trees, but their land is next to the fence of the Jewish settlement in Hebron. Only once in the last seven years have they been able to harvest their olives. In other years, the settlers kept them from reaching their trees and took their olives. We are opening the harvest there, so that doesn’t happen.” As we drove deeper into the Hebron hills, my dread mixed with the joy of a bright, crisp fall day. The clean greens and browns were stunning. The yoreh, first rain, had poured down just two days before, washing the dusty trees and ancient rock terraces after a dry summer, and signaling the start of the olive harvest.

ANALYSIS / The extreme right has sought to establish a ‘balance of terror’ – Haaretz, Nov. 3, 2008
By Amos Harel

The debate over whether to broadcast interviews with Yitzhak Rabin’s murderer should not be allowed to overshadow Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin’s worrying comments before the cabinet Sunday.

As usual, the initial media reports of these remarks were not entirely accurate: According to Diskin’s office, he never explicitly mentioned the possibility of another political assassination.

He merely said that right-wing violence has “gone up a level,” and that further diplomatic concessions could “create a situation in which live weapons would be used to stop the process.”

However, the Shin Bet confirms that a political assassination is one of three main possibilities that Diskin foresees. The others are attacks on Arabs and attacks on members of the security services.

Less than a year ago, in December 2007, the Shin Bet assessed the likelihood of a right-wing extremist attack on what it believes to be the two primary targets – Israeli politicians and the Temple Mount – to be relatively low.

Even though the Annapolis peace conference had taken place a month earlier, the security service argued that as long as extremists saw no real prospect of settlements being evacuated, they were unlikely to resort to violence.

So what has changed since then?

Primarily, the “price tag” policy launched by extremist settlers has become a major factor in developments in the West Bank.

The policy’s roots lie in the August 2005 disengagement from Gaza and the subsequent destruction of nine houses in the West Bank outpost of Amona about six months later.

Ever since then, the extreme right has sought to establish a “balance of terror,” in which every state action aimed at them – from demolishing a caravan in an outpost to restricting the movements of those suspected of harassing Palestinian olive harvesters – generates an immediate, violent reaction.

Even if this reaction cannot stop an evacuation, the theory goes, the damage it causes – whether the victims are Palestinians or Israel Defense Forces soldiers – will cause the government to think twice before ordering additional evacuations.

Diskin said that hundreds of people are regularly involved in extremist violence, and if necessary, they could recruit another few thousand people for a violent confrontation.

In recent months, the Shin Bet has discerned a gradual rise in right-wing violence. Even though settlers still see no great likelihood of settlements being evacuated in the near future, the fact that senior government officials such as outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert, Kadima leader Tzipi Livni and Labor leader and Defense Minister Ehud Barak all speak constantly of the need for such an evacuation increases the sense of being under pressure.

Olive harvest season begins in West Bank, B’Tselem, 30 Oct. 2008

The harvest season began in the West Bank several weeks ago, and is expected to end in two weeks. In light of the rise in settler violence in the last year, the olive-picking is accompanied by fear of settlers attacking Palestinian farmers. In a grove belonging to Burin, for instance, near which the Yitzhar settlement has been built, settlers threw stones at farmers picking olives for over an hour, while soldiers stood by and did not intervene. One farmer was wounded in the head and hospitalized. In a grove by ‘Azmut, near which the Elon Moreh settlement was built, settlers attacked a family who were picking olives. The settlers stole the family’s sacks of olives, emptied the contents on the ground, and beat the father of the family.B’Tselem reiterates that soldiers are fully authorized, and in fact obliged, by law, to act against all lawbreakers in the West Bank, be they Palestinian or Israeli. While the police are primarily responsible for law enforcement, if soldiers and not policemen are present on a scene, it is their duty to detain suspects until the police arrive. This obligation was reconfirmed by the Israeli Supreme Court in a 2006 ruling.

In light of the frequency of attacks on Palestinians during this season in previous years, B’Tselem gave out 50 additional video cameras this month, most of them in the northern West Bank, as part of its camera distribution project. The major goal of the additional distribution is to reduce violence during this volatile season and use footage both to ensure law enforcement and to raise public awareness in Israel.

The following clip, comprised of sections of footage shot by activist Yossi Ya’akov in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron, shows settlers harassing international activists who came to take part in the harvest. A settler is seen holding a camera he stole from a Palestinian photographer who was filming the event. He then punches an activist who tries to take it back from him, and then throws the camera on the ground. Further on, policemen are seen violently removing activists from the spot.

Gideon Levy, Yes, hate – Haaretz, October 26, 2008

My settler colleague, Israel Harel, his community’s champion at rolling his eyes, playing innocent and speaking with a honeyed tongue, is once again grieving and playing the victim. In a column published here last week (”Have we become Sodom?” October 23), he complained that the reason for what he termed destructive criticism of the settlers is hatred. And indeed, Mr. Harel, this time, you’re right: Large segments of Israeli society do indeed hate. But this is not baseless hatred, not hatred for the sake of hatred, to use your words. It is hatred for your enterprise. You have earned this hatred honestly – the only honest thing about your enterprise.

Yes, there are Israelis who do not want to see their countrymen despoiling the vineyards and burning the fields of poor farmers. Yes, there are Israelis who do not want to see troops of masked settlers beating elderly shepherds with clubs. Yes, there are Israelis who do not want to see other Israelis sicking their dogs on and puncturing the tires of the soldiers who protect them. Yes, there are Israelis who are embarrassed by the fact that tens of thousands of their fellow Israelis live on privately owned lands that were robbed, stolen and extorted, both in broad daylight and under cover of darkness.

And yes, there are Israelis who think that you have brought disaster upon us, a tragedy that will last for generations. That via your actions, you have brought wars and bloodshed and the brutalization of society upon us. That if you were not there, none of us would be there any longer, in a land that is not ours. That just as we withdrew from occupied South Lebanon – solely because, fortunately, you were not there – we would also long since have been able to withdraw from the areas you have occupied. Yes, there are Israelis who hate all this.

Harel complains about the fact that Israeli society is angry at the settlers as a collective. Unfortunately, he does not get out enough, for their enterprise is flourishing. Every class and institution of Israeli society defends the settlements, finances them from its own pockets, and is a full partner in the theft, even if some of them are disgusted by it. The collective guilt is justified: Every settler and every settlement is equal. There are no illegal outposts and legal settlements – they are all illegal, according to both international law and universal justice, which have no need of legal sophistries. There are also no moderate and extremist settlements: No one who chooses to live in occupied land is a moderate.

Settlers vandalize Muslim graves after IDF razes outpost – Haaretz, October 26, 2008

Settlers smashed headstones and poured paint over graves at a Muslim cemetery near the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba on Sunday, after Israeli security forces evacuated a nearby illegal outpost earlier in the day.

Right-wing activist Noam Federman had established the outpost, a farm, which was evacuated by contingents of the Israel Defense Forces, the Border Police and police earlier Sunday.

IDF tractors demolished the outpost after its residents had been evacuated.

Rightists came to the site and threw stones at the security forces in response to the evacuation. A number of them were arrested for attacking a police officer, and two young women were arrested after they tried to set a police car alight.

During the rioting, settlers hurled abuse at the members of the security forces, called for a “revenge attack” against them.

“We hope they will be defeated by their enemies, that they will all be [kidnapped IDF soldier] Gilad Shalit, that they will all be killed and all slaughtered because this is what they deserve,” they said.

In addition to vandalizing the graves, settlers also damaged over 80 Palestinian vehicles by smashing windows and puncturing tires. Two police cars were damaged during the altercations.

Settler leader: Palestinian olive farmers destroy their own groves – Haaretz, Oct. 19, 2008
By Nadav Shragai

Many settlers say the accusations that they harassed Palestinian olive pickers are libelous.

Benzi Lieberman, the former head of the Yesha Council of Settlements and Samaria Regional Council, recalls going with tree-clearing expert Yitzhak Scali of the Scali farms outpost to examine olive trees that Palestinians claimed were cut down by settlers.

“This expert, who didn’t have any stake in either side of the dispute, saw the trees and determined they were most likely cut down by Arabs in order to maintain the grove, as is traditionally done,” said Lieberman.

Lieberman is convinced Palestinian farmers often stage scenes of destruction.

“They benefit twice,” he said. “Cutting the trees down benefits the groves, and they also benefit financially because the damage supposedly was caused by settlers.”

Lieberman also recalled how leftists “torpedoed” an agreement between residents of the Itamar settlement and their Arab neighbors.

“Village representatives would have gone to the community and, along with Itamar residents, evaluated the crops’ yield, and determined the sum Palestinians would receive for the harvest. The extreme left prevented this,” he said.

Lieberman admits, however, that the so-called “hilltop youth” of the surrounding outposts of ten clash with the farmers.

The New Jewish Terrorism, By Sadie Goldman with IPF Staff, Israel Policy Forum
October 16, 2008/Volume 6.39

One of the settlers pulled out a knife, pressed it to the neck of the company commander and said: ‘well, what will you do now, Nazi?’

Attacks on Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians by West Bank settlers, like this one described by an Israeli reservist after the evacuation last month of the West Bank outpost Yad Yair, have nearly doubled in 2008 from 291 incidents in 2007 to 222 in the first half of 2008, according to a recent UN report. In the last month, the number of attacks has skyrocketed. Israeli attempts to evacuate West Bank outposts in Yitzhar, Yad Yair, and Shvut Ami have been met with groups of settlers—many of them teenagers—throwing stones, yelling curses, vandalizing cars, and worse.

The roughly 100 West Bank outposts are settlements unauthorized by the Israeli government. They usually start as either uninhabited trailers or small mobile-home communities that are meant to be used as bargaining chips with the government: “we’ll evacuate from here if you let us stay there.” These outposts are usually deep in the West Bank, far from the area that Israel would like to incorporate into its territory as part of a final peace deal, and are often built on hills that overlook Palestinian towns and villages.

The settler violence has not been random but rather coordinated in advance. As Israeli soldiers were making their way to Yad Yair, two hundred settlers were already on the scene. Text messages were sent to thousands of settlers calling on them to stop the evacuation, the daily Yediot Acharonoth reported.

In response to the removal of the settler installations at Yad Yair, settlers not only attacked soldiers who were removing the outpost’s trailers, but also launched retaliatory attacks against Palestinians in several West Bank cities and towns. Israeli newspapers reported that settlers attacked Israeli soldiers in Talmon, threw stones at Arab vehicles in Yad Yair and at Palestinian civilians in Hebron, and set fire to fields near the settlement of Yitzhar.

The recent West Bank riots have been followed by brazen threats of more to come. Extremist leaders have been promoting a retaliation doctrine they have labeled the “price tag.” Twenty-four year old, New York-born Akiva HaCohen, who is considered an architect of the price tag doctrine and one of the leaders of the violent outpost movement, has called on settlers to respond “whenever, wherever, and however.” Radical settler leader, Daniella Weiss, has also warned that there will be a response to evacuating outposts throughout the West Bank.

Prof. Sternhell: Supporters of occupation are not Zionist – Haaretz, September 29, 2008
By Akiva Eldar

Professor Zeev Sternhell’s house on Jerusalem’s Agnon Street is easily located by the iron gate with the broken glass. Sternhell says the bombing could have ended with him having to have both legs amputated.

Fortunately, last Thursday night he and his wife Ziva had returned from abroad and their suitcases, left in the narrow hallway, separated him and the pipe bomb that had been attached to the door.

The living room is filled with flowers and the telephone doesn’t stop ringing. The news is quoting ministers’ statements from the cabinet meeting.

Sternhell, while still in the hospital, drew a direct line between the state’s surrender to the extreme right rampaging in the territories and the terrorist or organization that tried to kill him.

“What are those ministers talking about,” he asks, when Vice Premier Haim Ramon blasts the government on the television news for fearing “those hooligans,” as Ramon called them.

Sternhell: “Who has to deal with the outposts? Me? You? Who’s to blame for the semi-autonomous state in the territories? Groups of settlers do whatever they feel like. Police officers and reserve soldiers go home with broken arms. How did they let things deteriorate to this lack of control in the West Bank? I told my students that not intervening for a weak child who needs help against a strong child is intervening for the strong child. Whoever fails to enforce the law and protect the Palestinians from the settlers who attack them is cooperating with the hooligans and lawbreakers.”

Jonathan Cook: Israeli Outposts Seal Death of Palestinian State, Counterpunch, August 25, 2008

Migron, West Bank

Yehudit Genud hardly feels she is on the frontier of Israel’s settlement project, although the huddle of mobile homes on a wind-swept West Bank hilltop she calls home is controversial even by Israeli standards.

Despite the size and isolation of Migron, a settlement of about 45 religious families on a ridge next to the Palestinian city of Ramallah, Mrs Genud’s job as a social worker in West Jerusalem is a 25-minute drive away on a well-paved road.

Mrs Genud, 28, pregnant with her first child, points out that Migron has parks, children’s playgrounds, a kindergarten, a daycare centre and a synagogue, all paid for by the government — even if the buildings are enclosed by a razor-wire fence, and her husband, Roni, has to put in overtime as the settlement’s security guard.

From her trailer, she also has panoramic views not only of Ramallah but of the many communities hugging the slopes that gently fall away to the Jordan Valley.

Long-established Palestinian villages are instantly identifiable by their homes’ flat roofs and the prominence of the tall minarets of the local mosques. Interspersed among them, however, are a growing number of much newer, fortified communities of luxury villas topped by distinctive red-tiled roofs.

These are the Jewish settlements that now form an almost complete ring around Palestinian East Jerusalem, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank and destroying any hope that the city will one day become the capital of a Palestinian state.

“These settlements are supposed to be the nail in the coffin of any future peace agreement with the Palestinians,” said Dror Etkes, a veteran observer of the settlements who works for the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din. “Their purpose is to make a Palestinian state unviable.”

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / ‘Tossed out like a dog’ – Haaretz, August 21, 2008

In the lawless South Hebron Hills, things are wild as usual: The settlers continue to attack shepherd children with clubs and stones, to steal their sheep and to make their lives miserable, while the Israel Police continue to abuse anyone who tries to file a complaint against the settlers.

Mahmoud Abu Kabaita, whose children and flocks were the targets of settlers from Beit Yatir and Susia, was left outside the Kiryat Arba police station in the burning sun for four hours, until they even allowed him to enter. The members of the Abu Awad family, some of whose children suffer from a serious skin disease, have already been victims of a cruel pogrom by the settlers of Asael, as described here three weeks ago. Relatives waited outside the police station for two hours, and left without filing a complaint, after being attacked once again last Shabbat. That is how the Israel Police enforces the law here.

After writing in this column about the Abu Awads, all of whose meager property was destroyed and looted by the rioters from Asael, some readers offered to help the penniless family. One prominent figure, who is well known in the political establishment and not necessarily from the left, and who wanted to remain anonymous, gave the family a personal financial contribution which is considered huge by local standards. There was great joy in the miserable encampment, but it was short-lived: Last Shabbat the children and their sheep were attacked once again by the Asael people. A wonderful way to welcome the “Sabbath bride,” as is customary every week.

The Abu Kabaitas, whom Israel decreed would have to live outside the separation fence, along with and adjacent to Beit Yatir, were not very fortunate either. They were also attacked by rioters from the neighboring settlement. They were also abused by the Israel Police, which are supposed to protect them.

Thus there exists, with a distance of an hour and a half from Tel Aviv, a region with its own rules: The settlers rampage as much as they please, and the police don’t lift a finger and even treat the victims of the violence rudely when they want to complain. In the past weeks, as everyone knows, the rioting has mounted, for some reason, but for the police it’s business as usual.

Avi Issacharoff, The land of unchecked settler harassment, Haaretz, August 7, 2008

The carcass of a butchered donkey is still lying in the olive grove of the Sufan family. Every single week since mid-June, the family, whose home is on the southern edge of the village of Burin, near Nablus, has suffered harassment by settlers living in outposts near the settlement of Yitzhar.

The mother, Hinan (Umm Ayman), says she has filed an endless number of complaints with the police, “but everything is kalam fadi (empty talk). They do nothing, and they do not even compensate us.”

On June 16, Musa’ab, the son, took the sheep herd out with his neighbor Munir and his brother Bashir in the hills surrounding the family home. “At some point,” Munir recalls, “we saw a car heading our way from the direction of Yitzhar. Two settlers stepped out of the car, and the vehicle continued on its way, went around a bend and disappeared. But then we saw that eight more settlers were walking toward us, and some had knives in their hands. They set sheafs of wheat on fire and moved closer to the home of Umm Ayman and threw stones at the house. We ran away with our sheep but left the Sufan family’s donkey behind. One of the settlers took a knife and stabbed the donkey over and over until he killed him. We filed a complaint with the police, who came and took photographs of the site.”

Umm Ayman’s home is now surrounded by burned-out hills, the result of repeated arson by settlers. The family home looks like a semi-fortified outpost. The windows in the upper floor are covered with metal nets, to keep stones out, and the windows in the lower level are protected by heavy metal shutters.