Zar, 41, head of security for the nearby settlement of Itamar, was struck by a barrage of bullets then finished off at point-blank range five weeks ago, a killing that sent a spasm of rage through his community. Hundreds of angry settlers converged on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Jerusalem office to protest the killing, carrying Zar’s bullet-riddled corpse. “A lot of us get frustrated,” Behar says, as a hot wind whips across the mountaintop. “We’d love to go to Huwarah and shoot at a few cars, but then we’d stoop to their level, and that would be barbaric.”
These are desperate times for Behar and her brethren. Israel’s 200,000 settlers almost unanimously supported Ariel Sharon in last February’s election. But as the uprising the Palestinians call the Al Aqsa intifada enters its 10th month, many say they feel abandoned by the man they helped bring to power. Nearly 80 settlers have been shot dead since the intifada began–most killed, like Zar, by snipers while driving in their cars along the “bypass roads” that skirt Palestinian villages. And the tenuous ceasefire signed by Sharon last month has done nothing to ease their sense of vulnerability. Ten settlers have been murdered since the truce went into effect, and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat has said that stopping violence in Areas B and C–the West Bank and Gaza zones still under Israeli control–is not his responsibility.
“We’ve felt let down by Sharon ever since Shahlevet Pass was killed,” says David Wilder, spokesmen for the settlers of Hebron, referring to the infant girl who was shot dead in front of the Abraham Avenu settlement in Hebron by Palestinian snipers in March. With anxiety and anger at a peak, some settlers openly say that conditions are ripe for another Baruch Goldstein–the settler who murdered 29 Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994–to strike at the Arab enemy. “Could it happen? Sure it could,” Wilder admits.
The settlers’ rage is fueled by the knowledge that they are increasingly isolated–both physically and politically. Most Israelis have little sympathy for them, and many Palestinians regard them as land grabbers who deserve to be killed. International sentiment against them is also growing; the Mitchell Report, the blueprint for resuming peace talks that was prepared last spring by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, identified the settlements as a primary cause of the intifada and warned that Israel would have to halt all construction as a first step toward peace.
Although Sharon has long been known as a defender of the settlers, he faces mounting pressure to declare a freeze. Last week Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer ordered the Israeli army to dismantle 15 “illegal outposts” in the West Bank–clusters of trailer homes built without government approval on land expropriated by settlements from their Palestinian neighbors. Sharon rebuked his defense minister upon his return to Israel from Washington, but the Israeli leader will be hard pressed to continue defending settlement expansion in the face of growing scrutiny. Thus the settlers find themselves in an increasingly perilous position–and more inclined than ever to take matters into their own hands.
Bracha is one of seven Jewish settlements that make up what the Israeli media has dubbed “The Wild East,” because of their history of illegal construction and clashes with Palestinians. “We’re considered the most extreme,” admits Hagit Bar-On, 23, a native-born Israeli who married a Bracha yeshiva student and moved into the settlement last year.
Bracha and its partner settlements, including Itamar, Kfar Tappuach, Yitzhar, Alon Moreh, Shilo and Elire, are populated almost exclusively by religious Jews who claim a historic right to all the land of what they call Judea and Samaria. The early Jewish tribes settled around Nablus, which settlers refer to by its ancient Hebrew name Shechem, and many Jews believe the Biblical figure of Joseph is buried in a tomb there. Unlike the inhabitants of nearby West Bank settlements such as Homesh, who moved there primarily because of cheap housing and other economic incentives–and are now eager to leave–the settlers of Bracha feel deeply tied to the land. “If you don’t live here for ideological reasons, it’s hard to find a reason to stay,” Behar admits.
Behar’s religious fervor is typical. A dark-haired, pleasant-looking woman in her late thirties, she was born into a secular Jewish family in Canada, and became a baalut tsuva–a returning Jew–while in her teens. In the mid 1980s she enrolled in an orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem, where she met her future husband, Jonathan, a U.S.-born Zionist. The couple lived first in the settlement of Bar El; three years later friends invited them to join them in Bracha, then a tiny outpost of caravan homes. “We came up during the Sukkos holiday,” she says. “There were six families living here. Jonathan took one look and fell in love with the place. He said, ’this is it’.”
Since the couple moved in 17 years ago, Bracha has grown to 90 families–an even mixture of Sephardic, Ashkenazi and Yemenite Jews–and steadily expanded its territory, taking over surrounding hills with the blessings of successive Israeli governments. The settlement includes a large population of young Jewish scholars who are enrolled in the yeshiva hesder–a five-year program that combines two years of Jewish studies with three years of military service. The past few months have felt “like a lifetime,” Behar admits, pouring a visitor a glass of orange juice in her tidy home as two of her five children play in their bedroom.
A single bypass road connects the isolated settlement with Jerusalem. But Palestinian snipers still fire shots from vantage points overlooking the highway, and traffic must still pass through the heart of the Palestinian town of Huware on the way to the holy city. “I’ve had stones thrown at my car several times,” Behar says. A fleet of armored buses makes the journey between the Wild East’s settlements and Jerusalem every morning, returning around 7 p.m. Children are ferried to school at the nearby settlement of Elon Moreh under armed escort. Behar rarely leaves the confines of the gated and guarded settlement; her husband, a technical-book translator who works in Jerusalem, usually commutes by armored bus. When he travels by private car, he brings along his M-16 semiautomatic rifle and a handgun.
Like many of her neighbors, Behar’s antipathy toward Palestinians has solidified during the last 10 months. Her husband, she says, has always refused to buy from Arabs –“that’s always been his philosophy”–and she herself stopped patronizing Palestinian shops in protest after gunmen drove Israeli soldiers out of Joseph’s Tomb last October. She blames Ariel Sharon for encouraging the killing of settlers through what she sees as his “timid response” to the intifada–and describes as ineffectual even Israel’s May F-16 strike on a Palestinian Authority headquarters in Nablus that killed 12 policemen. “If they’d killed 12,000 in Nablus instead of 12 then maybe they’d have achieved something,” she says.
She says she understands the impulse that drove Baruch Goldstein, the doctor from the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arbah, near Hebron, for his Tomb of the Patriarchs massacre seven years ago. “It was an act of self-defense,” she maintains. “The Israeli army had intelligence reports proving that the Arabs of Hebron were planning a massacre of the Jews on [the Jewish festival of] Purim.” Goldstein decided to foil the plot before it could be carried out, she maintains, and heroically sacrificed his own life: “What choice did he have?” But she falls short of advocating acts of vigilantism by the settlers. Eliezer Malamud, the rabbi of nearby Bet El, has spoken out repeatedly against settlers taking the law into their own hands, Behar says–“The rov [rabbi] said, ‘if someone takes a stone and throws it, I myself will go to the police’”–and she believes that the community has gotten the message.
The Palestinians who live in the Wild East tell a different story. Violence between Arabs and Jews has punctuated the hills around Nablus for years, but in the last few months, say many villagers, tensions have reached a new high. Last November, a 7-year-old boy was struck and killed by a settler on the main road through the village of Huwarah. Armed settlers now patrol the highways, throwing stones at buses and taxis and intimidating pedestrians. One group of Jews attacked and burned a community agricultural center during the winter, locals claim; and settlers regularly vandalize homes, claim Palestinians and chop down the olive trees of their Arab neighbors. “It’s our livelihood,” says Asfad Al Khuffash, an employee of the World Vision relief organization who lives in Marda, a few miles south of Bracha. “It’s almost like losing your children.”
Khuffash says that incidents of violence and intimidation have only increased since Sharon and Arafat agreed to a ceasefire in June. “This situation will only end when the settlers leave our land,” he says. But that’s unlikely to happen soon. During the last year, Behar says, 14 families have moved into Bracha and only a handful have left; the settlement is planning to erect new caravan homes on adjacent mountains when–or if–it receives permission from the Sharon government. Walking along the top of Mount Bracha, Behar extends her hands toward the bare brown hills that surround the settlement–a vast expanse of emptiness just waiting to be built on. “All this is ours,” she says exultantly. Arabs and Jews have been fighting over that claim for decades–and the resolution still seems nowhere in sight.
