West Bank: slowly, determinedly, settlers bid to build new town

Rory McCarthy
guardian.co.uk
23 August 2009

(Not exactly a friend but considering the source it could've been worse. As a matter of fact, on his blog it was worse. Second thoughts can get you everytime.)

Nadia Matar, a leader of the settler group Women in Green, puts an Israeli flag on a hilltop near the former Israeli army post Shdema, where activists are claiming the land. Photograph: Gali Tibbon

Early in the morning, Nadia Matar drove to the hills south of Jerusalem, near the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour, and turned into a dusty, unmarked road. There she planted a sign which read "Welcome to Shdema". She drove on, stopping every few metres along the route to jam into the rocky ground a series of fluttering blue and white Israeli flags. Israeli soldiers let her pass unhindered as she drove up to the concrete ruins of what was until a few years ago the Israeli military base of Shdema.

Here, just a stone's throw from Palestinian homes and only a few minutes from the city of Bethlehem, Matar and her friends are intent on building a Jewish community, the next settlement outpost in the occupied West Bank.

It is a glaring challenge to the Obama administration, which is trying to halt all Israeli settlement growth as a precursor to renewed peace talks. But recent history suggests it is the highly-motivated settlers like Matar, 43, a mother of six born in Belgium and now living in the settlement of Efrat, who may in the end triumph on this particular dusty patch of land.

Tomorrow, the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu arrives in London for a series of key meetings, including four hours of discussions on Wednesday with the White House's special envoy, George Mitchell, and talks with Gordon Brown tomorrow. The continued colonisation of the West Bank, an extraordinarily successful project over the past 40 years, will dominate the agenda. Settlement on occupied land is regarded as illegal by the rest of the international community, but nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers live in east Jerusalem and the West Bank. Shdema is even beyond Israel's West Bank barrier, which runs deep into Palestinian territory and which many believe will one day be the final border of Israel.

Matar's goal is "redemption of the land". In her view, the land on which the Palestinian homes sit belongs by Biblical and historical right to the Jewish people and is, for now, "temporarily under Arab occupation". She is trying to build a "Jewish Shdema" and to prevent the land from remaining Palestinian. After the military evacuated the base there were plans, since shelved, to build a hospital for Palestinians. "They want more pieces of land that belong to the Jews. They want to take it away from us," Matar said.

"The Land of Israel was given by God to the people of Israel," she said. "Some will tell you God gave it to us, others will say Jewish history of 4,000 years is our historical right … You don't have to be a religious Englishman to see London belongs to the British."

This is a rare insight into how outposts get built: with determined settlers and eventually complicit Israeli authorities.

At first, after the army withdrew from the base three years ago, soldiers closed the area off and prevented all settlers from approaching. But the settlers sneaked in and kept coming. Eventually Matar, a leader of the group Women in Green, and her supporters convinced the military to allow them in just once a week, on a Friday. They cleaned the buildings up, painted over graffiti, tidied the rooms and held workshops and discussions. Sometimes they have stayed the night, sometimes they have been allowed to come twice a week and eventually, they believe, settlers will begin to live here.

Similar struggles take place every week on other hilltops across the West Bank. All this is happening even though the Israeli government says in public it will allow no new settlements.

"At the beginning we fought against the army to come up here," said Matar. "But when they saw we were adamant they let us come on a Friday … But it's not enough for us. We don't want to ask permission to be in our homeland."

Now every time they come the army far from preventing them in fact provides them with security, deploying several soldiers and armoured vehicles but not interfering with their activities. In April the military also halted the construction of a Palestinian park, part funded by the US government, because it was at the foot of the hill claimed by the settlers at Shdema.

Already the settlers have produced a glossy brochure with architectural plans of the Shdema they would like to see: it has grassy lawns, lines of trees, a cultural centre and a small but thriving Jewish community.

On this day around 30 settlers of different ages gathered, among them several children, a rabbi and at least two women carrying discreetly holstered pistols. They sat in one room on plastic chairs as Tomer Karazi, 34, a rabbi with five children, discussed a Biblical text and the importance of building a new village in this Biblical land.

Later Karazi said he and his wife Hannah were ready to move from their home in the settlement of Nokdim to Shdema as soon as possible. "It's our duty not to escort the process of redemption from the outside but to be involved and active from the inside," he said. "We don't need to wait for things like water and electricity. And we really love the place. It's beautiful."

Then out came large tubs of white emulsion paint and several brushes and the group began painting over the grey concrete walls, stopping occasionally for glasses of water and slices of watermelon.

Yosef Ziggerman, 18, a settler from Efrat had been involved in several other, often unsuccessful, attempts to establish new outposts on nearby hills. "I believe every single piece is ours and I don't see many pieces of land as beautiful as this," he said. "We aren't doing anything crazy or fanatic. We're painting and making it look nice."

Several spoke of their frustration with other Israelis who enjoy the more secular lifestyle of cities like Tel Aviv or Eilat but who seemed not to understand or endorse the settlers' millenarian ideology and their effort to claim the West Bank as their own. Since Israel withdrew its settlers from Gaza four years ago, many fear more compromises and would rather take a more radical and practical stand to expand Jewish settlement of the West Bank.

They described themselves as a frontline in a wider struggle against what they see as radical Islam, insisting that settler outposts protect the larger settlement blocs, which in turn protect Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and which in turn protect the Western world.

"People like to present us like crazy lunatics," said Matar. "But one day these people in the West will see. The Muslims are taking over there too. You better be on our side for your sake, but you guys in Europe are not. Those who curse Israel will be cursed, and those who bless Israel will be blessed.
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Routine, Expulsion, and Eretz Israel

by Nadia Matar

(The B'Sheva newspaper asked me to write about "4 years to the expulsion- What are the lessons?" Here is the translation of the article written in Hebrew)

Four years after the destruction of Gush Katif and northern Samaria. What are the lessons? What must we learn from the expulsion, so that in another four years we will not have to write, Heaven forbid, of the lessons to be learned from the expulsion from Judea and Samaria?

In my humble opinion, we must, first of all, internalize the fact that we do not have the luxury of immersing ourselves in routine life. Rather, each of us must take part in the struggle. I will never forget that meeting in Neveh Dekalim, about a year before the expulsion, that was organized by the more hard-line activists of the Gush, in which a proposal was already raised to double or even triple the number of Gush inhabitants by bringing new residents into the houses, or even in tents in the yards. One woman stood up and angrily declared: "I don't agree! I refuse to ruin my lawn, and I won't agree to turn my settlement into a refugee camp! I want to continue with my everyday life!" One of the speakers turned to her and wondered: "Don't you think that it's worth it to somewhat undermine routine life for a few months, in order to preserve the routine in the long term?"

Related: Remember Gush Katif

The proposal, however, was rejected, and the leaders of the Gush preferred to continue everyday life, taken to an extreme, to the extent that supporters from the outside, with their families, who wanted to move to the Gush, live in the settlements, and be partners in the struggle, had to pass an acceptance committee, even a few weeks before the expulsion. Many were not accepted, and they had no choice but to leave the Gush. Our family, too, was not accepted in Neveh Dekalim. Apparently because we were identified with the "activist" wing. And so our family and additional Women in Green members stayed in Kfar Yam with the family of Arik and Datia Yitzhaki, who received us with open arms.

It is difficult for me to commit those memories to writing. Our brothers from Gush Katif suffer enough, and I don't intend to hurt them by raising these matters, but I feel obligated to speak about the subject, as the learning of lessons for the struggle over Judea and Samaria. I do not mean to say that we should erect tents in our yards now, but today, in light of the bitter experience undergone by our brothers from the Gush, we must understand that "routine" and "expulsion" are connected to each other. [In Hebrew, routine is "shigra" and expulsion is "gerush"-both words with similar roots].

Already now, when there is just talk of the destruction of the outposts, that everyone knows is the first stage of the destruction of the settlement enterprise as a whole, with the goal of establishing a Palestinian state instead, we must make the mental switch and internalize that each of us has the responsibility and obligation to leave our everyday lives and participate in the struggle for Eretz Israel.

Here is the place to raise an additional subject, one that is no less painful: in my humble opinion, we lost the struggle for Gush Katif and northern Samaria because we did not relate to Eretz Israel as a supreme value for which self-sacrifice is needed. If there had been some preposterous government decree that IDF soldiers must enter the homes of Jews on Yom Kippur and forcibly feed them nonkosher food, I assume and hope that a wall-to-wall consensus would take shape among our public on the need to refuse to obey this anti-Jewish and anti-moral order. The victims of the "force-feeding" would not begin a "With Love We Will Be Victorious" campaign, but rather, they, too, would vigorously resist.

And I ask: Why is what is so clear regarding Shabbat and kashrut observance is not clear regarding Eretz Israel?

This is the one million dollar question I have been asking myself for the past four years since the expulsion.

If Eretz Israel is a supreme value, like Shabbat and kashrut, then the way to struggle against the decrees of the destruction of settlements and the handing over of parts of the homeland to the enemy entails self-sacrifice. For us, we can translate this self-sacrifice into refusing orders and mass nonviolent civil disobedience. I am certain that if these two methods of struggle had been implemented in 2005, we would have saved the Gush.

And thus,in my opinion, the main lesson to be drawn from the expulsion, is that we must understand that Eretz Israel is a supreme value for which we leave our everyday lives and go forth to a real struggle, and not only to symbolic protest demonstrations. It is ironic that it is the peoples of the world who teach us of the importance and centrality of Eretz Israel. The peoples of the world don't care if we all study Torah, eat kosher, or observe Shabbat. But if five Jews climb some hill in the area of Judea and Samaria and dare to build a hut on it - the UN, the European Union, the Obama administration, and who knows who else go out of their minds and try to prevent us from doing this.

Undoubtedly, in light of the brazenness of the Obama administration and the Europeans, that are returning us to the time of the White Paper, more and more elements within the people of Israel are coming to their senses. With G-d's help, the tremendous forces inherent in our people will be realized, and this time we will succeed in defending Eretz Israel, and increase building, settlement, and development.
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