Settler on Palestinian land: “God gave this to us.”
December 7, 2007 4:51 pm National Religious (Religious Zionists), Settlers 
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
In the outpost of Shvut Ami, next door to Palestinian village of Funduq, settler youth plastered the walls of a building owned by a Palestinian family.
Isabel Kershner, Young Israelis Resist Challenges to Settlements - New York Times, December 8, 2007
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.”