Unsettling time, illegal space

On the edge, and at the center of history, Israelis at an outpost on the West Bank are facing an unexpected threat - Israel.

By Michael Matza, Posted: January 7, 2007

• MIGRON, West Bank - Itai Harel, 32, compact and taciturn, patrols the barbed-wire-topped fence around the 50-acre outpost that is his home. A cautious man who rarely speaks when he can nod, he slings his automatic rifle across his back and watches for Palestinian intruders.

Harel passes the manned, electronic gate and moves toward the synagogue, the community's emotional and ideological core.

He passes the fenced kindergarten attended by dozens of children, the community's future.

Over broken ground, he comes to a line of hungry guard dogs, tethered to sliding tracks along the outpost's perimeter. They are poised to respond if strangers approach.

Yet despite Harel's vigilance and the fortifications, here in Migron, a hilltop camp overlooking Ramallah, danger is coming from an unexpected source.

The community consists of about 40 white-paneled trailer homes arrayed in concentric loops on the rocky soil. Harel's residence, a stone-faced ranch house - one of Migron's few permanent structures - sits at the end of a dirt track near a cell-phone tower visible for miles. These camel-colored cliffs, so bare and brown, to him are still alive with the Jewish heroes of biblical times.

Patrolling while his pregnant wife, Moriah, son Yaacov-Yedidya, 2-1/2, and daughter Roni, 10 months, sleep, Harel can see the flickering lights of nearby Palestinian villages, and on the horizon, the diffused glow of Jerusalem, about nine miles south.

Never far from his mind is the site, several miles north, of the now dismantled army checkpoint near Ofra, his parents' settlement, where a Palestinian sniper in 2002 killed seven Israeli soldiers and three civilians and wounded four others.

Returning home at 2 a.m. after his four-hour shift, Harel, a social worker with a master's degree from Hebrew University, parks his black rifle on the white tile floor next to the baby's stroller.

He'll rest for a few hours and get up with the sun to join the minyan for dawn prayers.

"It's all part of my duty," he said, as a Jewish person living on the West Bank.

The unexpected threat

Unlike the dozens of decades-old settlements built on occupied land and founded with Israeli government approval, Migron is illegal even by Israeli standards.

In 2002, its settlers lacked the necessary government permits to establish a settlement, but after the sniper attack near Ofra, they proceeded nonetheless in an act of defiance. The government looked the other way.

Critics, including U.S. officials and the anti-settlement group Peace Now, a left-of-center nongovernmental organization, mention Migron as a prime example of the more than 100 illegal outposts dotting the West Bank that inflame the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Peace Now, citing recently leaked maps and figures from inside Israel's government, contends that 39 percent of the land held by West Bank settlements is in fact owned by Palestinians.

Although last summer's war with Hezbollah, Lebanon's Islamic fundamentalists, derailed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's signature plan for territorial concessions in the West Bank, a debate about the outposts persists.

In September, an Israeli lawyer representing a group of Palestinians claiming to own, or be heirs to, land that Migron occupies asked Israel's Defense Ministry to empty the outpost or face a lawsuit seeking evacuation.

The government, in a legal brief, conceded that the outpost was built on private Palestinian land.

"The only questions on the agenda are the timing of the outpost's evacuation" and whether residents will leave voluntarily or require outside force to comply, the lawyers wrote last month. They are now requesting at least six more months to try to reach an agreement with the residents.

A similar lawsuit brought about an evacuation in Amona, a nearby outpost, a year ago. The court's order resulted in a bloody confrontation between soldiers and demonstrators.

In televised scenes that seared Israeli society, thousands of soldiers and mounted police smashed batons and shot water cannons at hundreds of right-wing protesters. Demonstrators rained rocks, paint bombs and cinder blocks on the security forces to prevent the razing of nine sturdy homes. It was the worst violence since Israel dismantled its Gaza Strip settlements - and another traumatizing spectacle of Jew uprooting Jew in this place where symbolism is paramount.

So while Harel, in his routine patrols, defends Migron against Palestinian infiltrators, a different threat to his community is coming from Israel's government and its courts.

Dreams compete for ownership

Perched 2,000 feet above sea level, with sweeping views of Jordan, the Dead Sea, and the two-lane highway that veers between Jewish settlements and Arab villages, Harel's community of 45 Jewish families and three single men enjoys the beauty and shares the pride of connecting with the land.

But the assumption of ownership infuriates Palestinians, who want the West Bank (and Gaza) for a state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Migron is also an impediment to the U.S.-backed road map for peace, which calls for the removal of all illegal outposts built after March 2001 and for a halt to Palestinian violence.

The outposts are flashpoints in the increasingly polarized debate about the future of settlements on occupied land.

On the other side of the argument are the settlers and their supporters who call this land Judea and Samaria and regard it as Israel's biblical birthright. It was in Nablus, settlers say, that God promised Abraham that his descendants would inherit this land.

Watching an Arab goatherd lead his flock with a crooked staff near Migron's electronic gate makes that long-ago era seem not so distant - even as the juxtaposition of Arab and Jew illuminates the competition for every square inch of this historic land.

Starting out as little more than shipping containers outfitted as living quarters, the outposts create ubiquitous "facts on the ground," unilaterally imposed. Critics say settlers seized control of vacant West Bank land with little or no regard for its actual ownership.

In some cases the ground is considered "public land," which was vacant or acquired by Israel after the 1967 war as "abandoned property." In other cases, the land is ostensibly private property that the settlers have seized or purchased from Palestinians. Sometimes the ownership is a muddled mixture.

Often the settlers say they cannot publicly name the sellers because a Palestinian selling land to a settler in the volatile Middle East would be subject to retribution. The unconventional manner in which Jordanian land deals were recorded - granting virtual ownership rights to anyone working the land for 10 years - further complicates the picture.

Despite the difficulties, these settlers hope the outposts can eventually be turned into legal settlements approved by the military and civil administrations under Israeli law.

The United States, for its part, insists the outposts be dismantled.

"Our policy . . . is clear and unchanged," said Stewart Tuttle, U.S. Embassy spokesman in Tel Aviv. "Israel should remove the outposts."

'A lot less innocence now'

In November 1998, Ariel Sharon issued the call:

Everyone, he said, "should move, should run, should grab more hills, expand the territory. . . . Everything that is grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don't grab will be in [Palestinian] hands."

The foreign minister in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his appeal on Israel state radio after comments by Yasir Arafat hinting at armed conflict and at a politically charged moment. Under pressure from President Bill Clinton that very year, Netanyahu agreed to continue implementing the Oslo peace accords by turning over West Bank land near Hebron to the Palestinian Authority.

For Migron's Harel, an army reservist who also helped found Amona, the settlement movement's new militancy is welcome.

As a former soldier who views himself as a patriot, Harel does not like to see fighting between Israel's citizens and its government forces. But as a religious Zionist redeeming what he believes is his biblical birthright, he supports a strong defense.

"I was disappointed that the situation came about," Harel said referring to Amona's violence. "But in retrospect, some good things came out of it. We weren't cows going to the slaughter. There is a lot less innocence now."

Morphing into existence

About four miles north of Migron, on the bluff-lined road where Palestinian snipers have killed and maimed Israeli settlers and soldiers, lies the settlement of Ofra. Itai Harel was raised there. It is still home to his father, Israel Harel, 68, an early theorist behind and former leader of the settlement movement.

Founded in 1975, Ofra is one of Israel's oldest West Bank settlements and the first one established north of Jerusalem. It began with the support of then-Defense Minister Shimon Peres as a temporary work camp for laborers building a security fence around Ba'al Khatsor, a nearby military installation.

But two years later, after construction of the fence was complete, the work camp was growing. Before long, Ofra was planted with a cherry orchard. Apartments and a synagogue were added to accommodate more families.

Critics of the settlements say they were often established using subterfuge. Some began as temporary work camps, or archaeological digs, or bases for cell-phone towers. Then, because the tower needs a watchman, and the watchman needs a family, and the family needs some neighbors, and the neighbors need a school . . .. a new "fact on the ground" takes hold.

Migron seems to have morphed along those lines. It began in 1999, when Itai Harel and two friends began guarding an archaeological dig and cellular antenna on the ridge above Ramallah. The outpost was rapidly populated in an act of defiance against Palestinians after the sniper attack near Ofra in 2002.

Today, Ofra's population exceeds 2,200. The attractive, gated exurb is made up of landscaped one- and two-story houses topped with red terra-cotta tiles. Short palm trees and beds of daffodils line the roadway medians. Sidewalks are paved with red brick.

The vision of an idyllic bedroom community can be deceptive. Four of Ofra's residents have been killed in Palestinian attacks since September 2000. Ambushes on the roads around Ofra have claimed victims from other settlements.

In Ofra's two synagogues, so close to Palestinian villages, the devotions of Jewish worshipers compete daily with the muezzin's call to prayer.

The price of commitment

Israel Harel, Itai's father, is more talkative than his son. He was born to Holocaust survivors who moved to Israel from Ukraine in 1954. A soft-spoken man with large eyes, he wears wire-rim glasses and an easy smile. He favors a blue-stripe shirt open at the collar, shirttail out, pale blue jeans, white tennis-sneakers, and a hand-knitted yarmulke, the style worn by most settlers.

A longtime journalist, he was the founding editor of Nkudah, the house organ of the settlement movement. In 1979, he helped found the Yesha Council, the settlement association whose name is a Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza. He served as its secretary-general and chairman for 15 years. More recently, he has been an op-ed columnist for the left-of-center Israeli daily, Haaretz.

Israel Harel's parents settled in Haifa, where his father, a religious Zionist who eschewed kibbutz-style secular socialism, felt ostracized. He could have had a good job working in the Haifa port if only he agreed to join the national union, but he refused, preferring independence, Israel Harel recalled. Instead, his father opened a small kiosk selling fruits and vegetables.

Sticking to your principles, the son learned, has a price.

After Israel Harel married, he moved to Petah Tikva in the nation's center. As his family grew, so did his belief in his religious duty to settle "God-given" land.

Ofra gave him that opportunity. When he arrived there in 1976, a year after its founding, he joined 14 families. Today there are more than 500.

Harel believes his country needs a higher degree of "nationalist enthusiasm" to compete with Palestinians. Decisions must be made as if Israel's very existence as a Jewish state is at stake. Harel believes that it is. The demographic threat to Israel's Jewishness, he says, is not just in the West Bank, but also west of the 1967 armistice demarcation known as the Green Line - in other words, inside Israel proper, too.

"Israel now more than before," Harel said, "without an ideology, without a commitment, won't exist."

Surreptitious approval

On the 32d floor of a modern office tower east of Tel Aviv, lawyer Talia Sasson, a 25-year veteran of the State Attorney's Office, does not mince words. Sharon appointed her in July 2004 to investigate the government's role in the establishment of illegal outposts.

"The outposts are a way of building established settlements in the territories, even though the government of Israel is on record since the early 1990s [as not permitting] new official settlements," said Sasson, now in private practice. Her 315-page report on the subject alleges widespread government complicity.

Working for six months with just a secretary to schedule appointments, Sasson, 55, a petite dynamo with a steely precision as a cross-examiner, began sending out demand letters and knocking on ministry doors. She eventually interviewed about 100 officials.

In researching land-title records, she found that about half of the outposts are situated on land registered as at least partly belonging to Palestinians. Her report also details how ideologically sympathetic officials inside the ministries surreptitiously approved illegal outposts so they could be hooked up to water mains and electricity grids.

"Let's take the ministry of Housing and Building," Sasson said one morning over coffee in her office. "A part of their budget they gave to the territories, to the settlements. But they had a process where they would say some of the money was going to a 'neighborhood' of the settlement. They called it a neighborhood, but it really was an outpost.

"On the face of it, it seemed to be legal. But when you started to look into the papers, the money went to the outposts. And the outposts were illegal."

Migron was among the outposts Sasson targeted. According to her report, it is built on land privately owned by Palestinians from the nearby villages of Burqa and Deir Debwan. And while to her it seemed patently illegal, the housing ministry paid more than $1 million to build its infrastructure and public buildings, including a nearly mile-long road connecting Migron to the highway below.

Her report is more than a scathing bill of particulars. It provides recommendations for changes, including the requirement of better documentation, that would hold the government accountable in the future. While the cabinet committee set up to evaluate Sasson's suggestions finished its review in July 2005, it has yet to take definitive action.

"Most of the report talks about the need for new procedures, about how everything concerning the settlements and outposts must be transparent and legal.

"We are waiting to see what they adopt," Sasson said. "Until now, they didn't do anything."

Settlements' nightmare

The four-seat Cessna scheduled to fly Peace Now's settlement-watch director Dror Etkes over the West Bank for his monthly aerial survey is parked on the tarmac at Tel Aviv's small Sde Dov Airport.

In many ways, Etkes, 37, is religious Zionism's worst nightmare: He is a product of religious schools and the orthodox B'nei Akiva youth movement who doffed his yarmulke to turn anti-settlement crusader. Among his skills is a knack for gathering evidence that raises questions about the outposts.

Over the last four years, Etkes, a perpetually sunburned, muscular man, who speaks fast and provocatively, has logged countless hours on the ground and in the skies over the West Bank ferreting out hidden mobile homes and documenting monthly changes in the size and contours of the settlements. He snaps pictures. He sketches maps. He writes reports. And when he finally takes his shot in court, as he did against the permanent structures at Amona, his persistence can pay off.

On a typical surveillance flight, Etkes' pilot soars south along the blue water lapping the Mediterranean coast toward the Gaza Strip, then veers east over the outpost-rich Hebron Hills at a few thousand feet above ground. From that height, Etkes' practiced eye has no trouble identifying the various settlements and changes in their footprints. The plane continues north, to the vicinity of Nablus and Jenin, before heading back to the airport.

Settlers "used to think of me as Sancho Panza, tilting at windmills," Etkes said one morning, juggling cell-phone calls. "Now they realize when I bite, it hurts."

He believes his religious upbringing gives him added insight into how the settlers view the world.

"I am not one of those people who say the settlers are lying or are totally false when they say they are the real Zionists," he said. "They are not wrong. But the historical circumstances are changing."

Asked to elaborate, he spoke of the difference between pre- and post-state Israel and offered an analogy about the difference between a "start-up" and an established company.

The country's original settlers "never ended the start-up phase or psychologically adjusted to the idea that now they are going to the stock market and asking people to invest money in their idea," Etkes said.

"When people invest money in an idea, they want to know that it is rational." Continued settlement activity, Etkes believes, is not rational.

Although Olmert's plan for settlement withdrawals is largely on hold since last summer's Hezbollah war, it was conceived in response to what Etkes says is a fundamental change in the Israeli psyche.

"After the [2003] election, there was a strong connection between [Israel's] anti-Arabism and support for settlers. People used to translate their anti-Arabism politically into support for the settlement enterprise. What changed in the last three years is that anti-Arabism remained a very strong movement, but it is not being translated anymore into support for the settlers.

"It used to be 'hate Arabs, build settlements.' Now it's 'hate Arabs, dismantle settlements.' Why? Because you hate Arabs and you don't want them within your borders."

Against that backdrop, can Migron survive?

"No chance," said Etkes, sounding more sure than cocky. "I will personally see that it doesn't. Migron is Ramallah."
  —The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 7, 2007