West Bank Outpost Settlers: A View of Israeli-Palestinian Talks
A few months ago I visited Avigail, an illegal West Bank outpost founded in 2001 by four idealistic Israelis who dreamed of expanding Israel’s line of settlements over the Green Line.
At the time of my visit, the U.S. administration was demanding a settlement freeze as a precursor to Israeli-Palestinian meetings and on my visit I wanted to gauge the mood and ask if they were worried that a freeze may lead to eventual dismantling and evacuation.
Months later a building freeze is in place. Israelis and Palestinians are meeting directly for the first time in nearly two years to review options for arriving at a final stage agreement. Palestinian and international pressure for the ongoing construction freeze persist and talk of settlement dismantling looms closer.
So it seemed natural to check back in with Avigail’s young community leaders as Palestinian and Israeli principals readied to reconvene in Sharm el Sheikh.
Thirty-year-old Avigail founder Elisha Medan admitted that he may be naïve but his expectations for any outcome from the current talks are low:
It’s almost like a ritual. Every few years Israel gets a new prime minister and to keep the Americans and Israel’s left happy, they sit down with the other side. It’s like: See, we’re talking. Look at us. Nothing came out of Oslo because they don’t accept what we offer. So we’re not worried about these talks either.
But if the sides were to ultimately reach an agreement stipulating land concession and settlement evacuation, Medan maintains he is still not troubled because, in his opinion, there’s no reason to move Avigail residents from their spot.
We are very close to the Green Line and we are a block of Jewish settlers. Why not move the border or the fence around us? There’s no reason not to keep us where we are.
Medan seems to be overlooking the simplest of all reasons: negotiating power. In a bargaining chip effort at negotiating the status of larger settlements like Kiryat Arba, the “fringe outposts” deemed illegal and disallowed building permits from the get-go may be the Israeli government’s first proverbial “sacrificial barter” in getting to tougher final status agreements.
Avigail was originally given the green light by Judea and Samaria’s head of council who, literally, directed founders to the exact spot for setting up pre-fab, easy-to-deconstruct homes. The site choice was tactical: it constituted a continued link in a West Bank settlement chain and the hilltop area served as an overlook for a road being targeted at the time by Palestinians pulling hits on Israeli drivers.
In light of recent deadly Hamas attacks on settlers near Hebron coinciding with the talks in Washington, Medan underplays speculation of continued vengeance as each new round of meetings gets underway.
This is nothing new. They try to kill us whenever they can, all the time. It just happens that this time they succeeded and it happened to be during the talks. But we’ve been at war with them since Isaac and Ishmael were born to Abraham. They always say it’s timing and that there are attacks during peace talks. But you tell me: When is the timing ever right to kill a pregnant woman?
If evacuation is ordered Medan says his community won’t go down without a fight.
Shira Recanati, a 30-year-old mother of three young children voiced her safety concerns in our meeting of months ago. She was uncomfortable venturing out at night in the car and she worried about her children’s safety.
Currently she sees the negotiation efforts as purely diplomatic and she isn’t troubled about their outcome. Recent events linked to the talks, however, have compounded Recanati’s trepidation:
Where I used to be frightened of driving at night, I’m now scared to go out during the day too. Let’s face it: I’m living in the Wild West. I’m constantly thinking: “How will I protect my 10-month-old if I’m shot?”
Unlike Medan, if there is an evacuation Recanati says she will not put up a fight.
“My daily life is such a struggle that I don’t want to be in the situation of fighting against soldiers,” she says. “If they tell us to go, I’ll pack it up and go. I can’t even imagine it. … But no, I won’t fight.”
When the deal is done…the Jews need to be moved from the ‘Westbank’.
What happens with the arabs in Israel?
I mean, if Jews are not allowed on the ‘Westbank’……
What about giving those Jews in the West Bank the choice of relocating behind the Green Line or remaining where they are, but under Palestinian sovereignty?
Jews stay? Abbass flat out rejected it!!!and they can’t Fakestinians will KILL THEm or burn them out-
ISrael is called racist apartheid!!!! with a 1.5 million arabs and hostiles in Knesset-
all their nations are apartheid and already ethnic cleansed JEWS out—long ago-
no more land for no peace!!
as for
Nothing came out of Oslo because they don’t accept what we offer. So we’re not worried about these talks either.
something did come out of OSLO!! INTIFADA—————> MORE DEATH OF JEWS
otehrwise I agree A FARCE- but in this case a DEADLY GAME
Sounds like you have painted yourself into a nice tight hysterical little corner in which you believe that the Jews/Israelis have nothing left to lose, so why not just forcibly expel all the Palestinians into Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon?
Well? Why not? Isn’t that where your logic is leading you to?
In my humble opinion….
What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
If they don’t let the Jews stay in Judea and Samaria they are guilty of ethnic cleansing.
They can hardly complain about Israel where non Jews have the same rights as Israeli citizens.
I am fed up with those double standards!
Those non Jews in Israel are the indigenous people of that land not invaders as Jewish settlers and are a small remnant of the original population the most of whom had been evicted by Israel and never allowed to go back to their lands which has been confiscated by Jews. I guess Jewish settlers have all the right to stay in the settlements IF they go back where they came from, apply for immigration and their application was approved by Palestinian Authority
As so many have said, Israel lacks strategic depth.
If it gives up Judea and Samaria an already extremely vulnerable situation will become un-defendable.
It will then only be a matter of time before Israel ceases to exist.
Oh, nonsense. Before 1967, Israel did not have Judea and Samaria, but still would have been happy to make peace under that status quo. If the Arabs had been willing, they could’ve had their Palestinian state in those territories any time before 1967, with no objections from Israel.
The U.S. has a lot of nerve dictating to Israel where Jews can and cannot live in the land of Israel. North America is itself a colonial / settlement enterprise after all. Unlike the Jews and Israel, white Europeans did not return to their historic homeland. White European settlers expropriated American Indian land. Give this history, why are the Americans so self-righteous?
Jews should be able to live where they like anywhere in the world–just not always under Jewish sovereignty, that’s all.
yeah b/c life in other countries has such wonderful history for JEWS
/sarc
So, then: everywhere that Jews live (Montreal, Marrakesh, Budapest, Ariel, Hebron, etc etc) HAS to be under Jewish sovereignty in order for Jews to feel safe there?
Israel’s ceasing to exist is the ultimate goal of this administration and the Arab nations. We listen to the liberals tell us how G.W. Bush was alienating our allies. The question is, under the Obama administration do we have any allies left?
And yet…The Obama administration will be gone in two years, or in six, and Israel will remain.
You do (or will when the One is done) have new allies: Iran, North Korea, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Libya, Zimbadwe.
And no, I don’t think he will go down in 2012, or 2016 (Venezuela had a 2 term presidency which Chavez got overturned for himself, no reason it can’t happen in the US where it has indeed happened in the past with FDR whom the One so often compares himself with).
Same hysterical claptrap one heard about how Bush was going to cancel the elections and make himself president-for-life because he was a fascist dictator blah blah blah….
Stephanie, repeat after me – there is NO such place as the West Bank. It is a pejorative foisted upon us by European anti-semites who are wedded to the Arab cause. It is, has always been, Judea & Samaria.
As a writer you surely realize that language matters, it sets the tenor of the article and presents the thesis.
While NO westerner would ever dare to question Muslim title to Mecca and Medina, or to any of their other 23 odd states, why make it easier for them to steal our heartland by using their mendacious lexicon, even IF Bibi has become captive to Stockholm/Oslo Syndrome too?
Besides, the PA people have only been in existence since Arafat deemed them a ‘separate’ people, but only after they lost the war in 1967.So, under what normal realm is the Jewish biblical and historical heartland theirs, either through legal ownership, or, through the spoils of war?
This should be your starting point….
yeah! well said! and, as Romans, we should reclaim back the whole Western Europe and the Mediterranean, which was Roman founded and built, and integral part of the Roman state. Including Gallia, because France and the French did not really exist until the XVI century. Today’s French are impostors, real French are Romans! and Iberia, because Spain and the Spaniards did not really exist before the XV century, and the whole North Africa (Lybia, Tunisia, etc.), which was actually the Roman province of Africa. Under what normal realm is the Roman heartland theirs???
these calls for Jewish sovereignity on a land that was Jewish two thousands years ago are seriously ridicolous, and hurt Israel.
To: Stephanie L. Freid
Please, don’t just listen to Adina, hear it so you KNOW our history, rather then to continue ascribing to a false narrative.
In a Polish village some 100 years ago, the local count called the ghetto’s rabbi to the castle so the rabbi attended with his assistant. The count told him he wants all the Jews gone by the end of the week: “Pack your wagons and go.”
As the rabbi leaves he sees a dog:
“is that your dog?”
“yes”
“he looks intelligent”
“yes, he is” sais the count.
“I can teach him to speak polish but it will take a year”
“ok you have a year but if you don’t succeed you will all have to go with only the shirts on your back. No more nice guy.”
As they leave, the assistant asks the rabbi if he can really teach the dog to speak polish.
“are you meshuge? Of course not. But during the year maybe the dog will die, maybe the count will die, maybe ………”
So in one year Israel will withdraw from Judea and Samaria.
The problem begins with definitions, as Adina explained. If Judea and Samaria are the ‘West Bank’, then on the most literal level the land is Jordanian. Yet the Jordanians stripped the local Arabs of their Jordanian citizenship after the Arab League conferred ‘ownership’ on the PLO. The US and the Israeli governments have both, astonishingly, accepted this diktat and this revocation of Jewish rights to this land. Thus, ‘settlers’ who are considered intruders on historic Jewish land.
This is a critical point, for it also explains the ferocity of attempts to delegitimate Israel as a whole. There is definite logic to the explosions of ‘anti-Zionism’ around the world, especially in the wake of Oslo and Ariel Sharon’s expulsion – ethnic cleansing – of Jews from Gaza. For the cynics who make ME policy for various Western nations, this may be nothing but an excellent lever to bring about ‘the small friendly Israel’ that Kissinger once prophecied. For those who are engaged in religious war against Jewish identity and national revival, the tendency of various Israeli Admins to unilaterally abrogate claims to this critical land, to say ‘it’s not ours at all and we’re merely waiting for the other side to accept our existence so we can dispense with it’ is a disaster. To be fair to our many enemies – including those in the churches and Churches of the Left – the signal has been sent, repeatedly.
The Jewish creed, the Jewish clock, the authentic one, does not run on non-Jewish time, which is almost solely based on pragmatic considerations. This fact greatly discomfits not just the Israeli ‘elites’ but also many in the larger world who wish to supercede Torah and declare, effectively, victory over Jews and Judaism. There is a great book which is based on a series of debates between the rabbi Yaakov Herzog, brother of the general Haim Herzog, and Bertrand Russell. Russell claiming that Judaism was a fossil and had to disappear, and Herzog explaining the legacy and beliefs of the Jewish people.
It makes a great many Jews uncomfortable to carry such a weighty heritage. And those who come from outside and are sympathetic to Israel in principle consistently echo Arab claims and project their own, non-Jewish experience and values onto Jewish nationalists. We are then all ‘fanatics’ and ‘rigid ideologues’, while those who feed the unwinding of the national rebirth – which has value for all humanity – become somehow enlightened soldiers of universalism. This morning I read another sad self-lashing by the Israeli songwriter and poet Yonatan Gefen in Hebrew, at Maariv. The self-abuse and the denigration of the land and people of Israel Gefen displays represents the ‘soul’ of the Jewish left, and also explains (as people like Rubin and Chesler do well) this phenomenon of self-abnegation.
Israel will eventually correct itself, I hope, and march to her own drummer, not to the sounds that dominate Los Angeles, London or Moscow.
Umm, how about a Jewish revolt (‘true’ Jewish, that would be) against the Government of Israel? Cuz that is where your logic is taking you. Oh, wait, I forgot: that was already tried in ’48, with the ‘Altalena.”
Refusing to give up Judea and Samaria means condemming Israeli Jews to minority status in their own land.
Under Jordanian law Jews are not permitted to live in Judea, Samaria or Jerusalem. When Obama and the Europeans refer to “international law” that’s what they mean. International law is Article 80 of the United Nations Charter which says Jews are permitted to live anywhere in Palestine. Article 80 simply endorsed the League of Nations mandate which endorsed the Balfour Declaration. To move several hundreds of thousands of people out of those territories where there are industries, farmlands, and thriving cities is nuts. And who would pay for the dislocation? Chinese bankers?
The Arabs keep harping on the “refugee” problem. Resolution 242 requires the solution of the refugee problem, not the Arab refugee problem as the Soviets wanted it. There were far more Jewish refugees than Arab refugees and their property losses dwarf those of the Arabs, running into several billions. They are also entitled to compensation for pain and suffering. I haven’t heard one word from the Americans or anyone else since 1993 about implementing Resolution 242 as written. The Americans seem to be counting on these Jews being swept under the rug when the time comes. In this case the bill could be underwritten by the Saudis. But don’t hold your breath.
You forget to mention that it’s the Arabs themselves who created the Arab refugee problem, and did so deliberately to create a body of disenfranchised Muhammedans inside the Jewish state who could then be recruited to form the nucleus of a terrorist force (oops, “anti-Zionist rebellion”) to destroy the Jewish state from within.
That’s how the PLO was formed, and Hezbollah (funded by Suni and Shia interests respectively). Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other groups split from those 2 at later points in time, are really no different (even if maybe more violent at times, more radical).
This was the result of the 1948 invasion of Israel in which Jordan took trans-Jordanian Israel (the “west bank”), and Egypt took Gaza.
The only part of Israel that the Jewish state ever took by force of arms that wasn’t declared part of Israel by the 1947 UN resolution creating the Jewish state is the Golan Heights, a piece of barren land inhabited mainly by Druze people whom the Syrians (from whom the Israeli took it to prevent the Syrian army from having a base from which to fire rockets into major Israeli cities) are glad to be rid of.
Didn’t forget. Brevity. There are no Jewish refugees today because Israel helped them on their feet in their tiny land. The Arabs who fomented the war left their people to rot and live off an international dole. Instead of building the highest skyscrapers in the world and making gargantuan arms purchases, they could easily have integrated these people in the vast expanse of their territories (and still can). Check out Lebanon. They are pegged as third class non-citizens. Arabs are quick to slam Israel for every imagined piddling violation of “human rights,” but they have consigned their own people to a Gulag from which they may never emerge.
Both FATAH and HAMAS and indeed all Muslims want to create a NAZI like ‘Juden Frei’ Palestinian State carved out of Israel while at the same time DEMANDING the ‘right’ for their brothers to live in Israel. We must not forget that the Muslim ARAB Invaders already have TWO States, Syria and Jordan, and over 80% of what was the Mandate of Palestine but still they want more of ISRAEL. Lets face it this is not about land it has never been about land this is about destroying Israel and killing Jews. Another couple of questions you might want to ask yourself as a State called Palestine does not and never has existed how can it be occupied and how can you be a refugee from it? Also why is it that ONLY Muslim ARABS have the ‘right of conquest’ and they and the moonbats deny this right to Jews?
HYPOCRISY thy name is Islam and gullible naive STUPIDITY thy name is left wing Islamophile moonbats everywhere.
Incorrect. Both Fatah and Hamas want to create a single Muhammedan state spanning the entire middle east and north Africa, in which there is no place for Israel at all.
That’s why the Jordanians and Egyptians (and Syrians) are extremely wary of them, why Egypt supports and enforces the blockade of Gaza in cooperation with Israel, why travel between Fatah controlled lands and Jordan is strictly controlled.
Both Jordan and Syria have learned the hard way how these groups work, both have suffered bloody uprisings at their hand, both have dealt with those uprisings the only way a Muhammedan respects, with massive force and bloodletting that left thousands if not tens of thousands dead in its wake and have evicted the PLO (which spawned both Fatah and Hamas, let’s not forget that!) from their lands.
Israel was foolish to allow the “refugees” access to their country and set up their “refugee camps” in Judea and Samaria. Had they refused to do so after seeing what the PLO had done from just such camps in both Jordan and Syria, we’d not have the “Palestinian problem” we have today as there’d not be a large, organised, terrorist state within Israel bend on destroying its host like a malignant virus eating away at a living body until there’s nothing left, then spreading as far as it can before repeating the process in new hosts, never content with what it has.
J.T. what I said was NOT incorrect at all now you might be right about the Caliphate too but that is a nebulous Islamic wet dream not just confined to HAMAS and FATAH. Whereas the destruction of Israel and the Jews is an aim which Mohammedans think they can really achieve NOW with the Islamophile moonbats and Obama’s help of course.