Israeli settlers: Obstacle or path to peace? Part 2

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Host Noam Weissman explores the complex and often controversial history of Israeli settlements in the second episode in a two-part series. Noam unravels the strategic, religious, and political motivations behind the settlement movement, from the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War to today. Featuring firsthand accounts, expert analysis, and surprising perspectives from settlers and Palestinians, this episode challenges assumptions with an an in-depth look at one of Israel’s most debated issues.

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I’m not a poetry guy. The closest I get is like, something from Nathan Alterman or Chayim Nachman Bialik or brilliant quotes from smart people like Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. But I’m gonna start off this episode by quoting part of a poem that most of us probably haven’t thought about since we slogged through it in 10th grade.

In his 1892 poem Song of Myself, Walt Whitman asks:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

An Israeli settler prays on a hill overlooking the Ibrahimi mosque or the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the West Bank town of Hebron on February 25, 2021. (Photo by HAZEM BADER / AFP) (Photo by HAZEM BADER/AFP via Getty Images)

I. Contain. Multitudes. You contain multitudes. We contain multitudes. And that’s a very, very important reminder as we close out our two-part series on Israeli settlers and settlements. Because you’ll hear from some people you might not instinctively agree with. Whose motivations are confusing or foreign to you. You don’t need to accept or endorse anyone’s actions or opinions. I am inviting you, however, to listen with an  open mind and remember: we are all complicated. And we are all responding to the time and place and circumstances we have been given. 

If you haven’t listened to part I, go back and start there. I mean, you can start here, but you’ll be missing a lot of important context. For those who listened to Part I but are like, I have forgotten everything that happened more than five minutes ago, first of all, welcome to the club, and second of all, here’s a very quick recap of everything we covered last week. 

In 1967, Israel was facing down what seemed like a war of annihilation. Egypt had massed troops on the border. Syrian radio was promising war. Israelis were digging graves and cracking macabre jokes about their imminent deaths.

Instead, Israel won the war that Egypt had promised. And far from being annihilated, the Jewish state quadrupled in size, now holding Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The mood in Israel was euphoric – and for the religious, it was further proof of a divine hand at work.

But with that victory came very practical questions.

Like: what do we do with the territories we just acquired?

And: what about the 1.2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza?

And: Why is the UN telling us to return the land and make peace with our neighbors when our neighbors have announced that as far as they’re concerned, we don’t exist? No, seriously. In September of 67, the Arab League adopted a resolution known informally as the “three nos.” No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel. Two months later, the UN passed a resolution calling for peace. You gotta wonder what was going through their minds then.

Israel never got a satisfactory answer to its third question. But as for the first two, the Israeli government answered in stages.

For the Israelis, keeping the eastern part of Jerusalem, or East Jerusalem, was a no-brainer, for reasons we’ve explored in other episodes – as always, link in the show notes. And keeping the Golan Heights was very, very, very attractive. For religiously and historically inclined Israelis, the Golan Heights was part and parcel of the promised land – a documented region of Biblical Israel assigned to the tribe of Menashe. In the Torah, it’s known as Bashan. And the historical resonance was hard to miss. The Golan was the scene of multiple battles waged by Jewish rebels – from the Maccabees to the anti-Roman rebels of the Second Temple period. Until the 700s CE, the Golan was quite Jewish territory.

But there were practical considerations, too. The Golan is a mountainous region, which made it strategically valuable. It’s much easier to defend territory from highlands than from lowlands. And defense was first on most Jews’ minds. Israelis in the north of the country were tired of acting as target practice for the Syrians next door, who used their strategic high ground to terrorize the communities at the base of the Golan’s plateau.

So the government allowed, and even incentivized, small communities of Jews to spread through the north. The more “Israeli” the Golan became, the less likely Israel would be to return it. Also, low key, ever go to the Golan? In a game of overrated vs. underrated, it would absolutely be underrated. Such a gorgeous and serene place – when it isn’t a battlefield, that is.

And what about the West Bank slash Judea & Samaria, and also Gaza, and also the Sinai?

Much of that land was extremely important, from a strategic standpoint. But to understand why, you have to understand the region’s geography. If you look at a map of Israel, you’ll see that most of the country’s population is concentrated in the coastal plain, partially ringed by the north-south mountain ridges of the West Bank. As we explained with the Golan, it’s a lot easier to mount a defense from the high ground. Whoever controls the West Bank’s mountains has a pretty good shot at either devastating or defending major Israeli population centers – not to mention most of the country’s industry and infrastructure. Plus, roughly one third of the country’s water comes from the underground aquifers underneath the West Bank’s low mountains. And in a water-poor region, that’s significant. 

Not to mention the West Bank held particular emotional resonance for the Jewish people. This was the site of some of Judaism’s most important moments. This was where Jacob dreamed of a ladder that stretched to the heavens, where our forefathers and foremothers were buried; where Joshua made the walls of Jericho fall down and where he was eventually laid to rest. This was where the holy Tabernacle lay for hundreds of years, where King David first built his capital before he moved it to Jerusalem. This was where Bar Kokhba made his doomed last stand.

This was historic, and holy, ground for Jews.

And yet, for the first decade after the Six Day War, it was largely ignored. The Israeli government greenlit a couple of Jewish communities there, like Kfar Etzion, which had been destroyed in 1948. In the immediate years after 1967, some zealous Jews had established outposts there, while the Israeli government looked the other way. But that doesn’t mean the government wasn’t planning for possible eventualities.

Just a month after the end of the war, Labor Minister Yigal Allon presented a plan to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, which hinged on the following premises.

  1. It is possible to make peace with the entire Arab world, including the Palestinians, without sacrificing Israeli security.
  2. Any plan, moving forward, would have to protect Israel as a Jewish-majority democratic state – meaning that any peace plan hinged on there being two separate states.
  3. Palestinians deserved a state – whether it was a part of Jordan or its own thing – as long as it didn’t compromise Israeli security. And when that state came, the Israelis were open to establishing a diplomatic relationship.

Check out the show notes for the bibliography as always. Hey, it’s good to see the primary sources every now and then.

I want to put a caveat in here. If you Google the so-called Allon Plan, you’ll find a lot of unflattering assumptions. The part about maintaining a Jewish majority is often held up as an example of how awful and racist Israelis are. As far as I am concerned, every nation has the right to establish and maintain its own national character based on its national values. Israel was established as the only Jewish state in the world – and I see absolutely no issue with wanting to maintain a majority-Jewish democracy. But we’ll talk about that in another episode in 2025. 

Back to the Allon plan. By the way, if you have a map in front of you, this is a lot easier to understand – just saying, if you’ve got the time, check out the YouTube version of this episode, because it makes all of this a lot clearer.

Allon proposed that Israel would cede much of the West Bank to Jordan, with the exception of a few strategic areas. To start, Israel would annex all of Jerusalem, full stop, as well as a 15-km-wide portion of the Jordan Valley, from the Mehola Junction til just above Jericho, maintaining strategically, religiously, and historically significant communities. They’d also annex a 25-km-wide stretch of the Judean desert, from Mitzpe Yericho down past Sussiya, which includes the communities of Tekoa, Ma’ale Adumim, and Kiryat Arba. An Israeli-controlled and presumably highly fortified road would link the two regions. The Jordanians would get the rest of the West Bank, including major population centers like Ramallah, Tulkarem, Bethlehem, and Hebron, linked by a Jordanian-controlled road. Israel would negotiate with the Arab states and the Palestinians to figure out what to do with the Arab-majority towns in annexed Jewish areas. And a road would be built to easily ferry Jews and Arabs between the West Bank and Gaza.

And if you’re like, hey, wait a sec, I’m not hearing anything about a Palestinian state here, well, that would be for Jordan to work out with the Palestinians. It should be said that most Israeli officials favored an independent Palestinian state over the so-called “Jordanian option,” based in part on the fact that they had very, very little trust in the Jordanian king. (If you’ve listened to our Six Day War episodes, you’ll understand why.)

But the plan was never actually implemented. During negotiations, Palestinian leaders informed Eshkol he’d need the approval of the rest of the Arab world. The Jordanians said the same. And so the plan languished, and the problem of settlements and military presence and occupation of people and lack of Palestinian autonomy persists to this day.

In the meantime, some Israelis were making their own plans. By 1974, a growing number of religious Zionists coalesced into a group that would officially become known as Gush Emunim, or “the bloc of the faithful,” whose motto is “The Land of Israel, for the people of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel.” But it wasn’t until 1977 that the so-called “settlement movement” really took off. And that is where today’s story starts – with the historic election of 1977, which upended Israeli politics forever.

Part Three: The Green Light

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you already know that if there’s ever a contest for the position of president of the Menachem Begin fan club, well, I’ll win. (No, he was not perfect. See, my heroes don’t have to be perfect. No, I don’t agree with everything he said and did. But still.)

If you started listening today and are like, who’s Menachem Begin, first of all, hi, bold of you to start on Part II of a two-part series, that’s some chaotic energy right there.

One day, I would LOVE to do a full episode about Begin’s story, which we’ve so far told only in bits and pieces. But until then, here’s what you need to know about him for the purposes of this episode.

One: He was the first right-wing Israeli Prime Minister to unseat the lefty establishment that had ruled Israel since Day One.

Two: As a co-founder of the Likud party, he’s remembered as a hardliner… but he was also the first Israeli PM to ink a peace deal with an Arab leader.

And three: Unlike prior leaders, Begin was cool with settlements – and with the Gush Emunim settler movement. Here he is, giving a speech to the Orthodox Jews of Elon Moreh, which was, at the time, an unrecognized outpost. (Nerd corner alert: Fittingly, Elon Moreh was named after the BIblical location where God promised Abraham that Israel would belong to his descendants forever.)

Begin wasn’t religiously scrupulous in terms of ritual observance, but he respected the Jewish faith, loved the Jewish people and the Jewish homeland.

So Begin appointed Ariel Sharon as Minister of Agriculture and “Settlement Czar.” (You may remember Sharon from other episodes of Unpacking Israeli History – of course, link in the show notes.) Unlike Begin, Sharon did not have the same appreciation for religious Judaism. But he had another reason for promoting settlements throughout the West Bank.

“Prevent territorial compromise” is a pretty anodyne way of saying – well, I’ll let Shaul Arieli, an Israeli political scientist and researcher, explain it. 

Sharon’s plan was to create the containment process by building the western security zone along the Green Line in order to seize the hills overlooking the coastal plain. That’s where he focused his settlement efforts. But because of the cooperation with the Gush Emunim movement, they extended the settlement enterprise into the mountain ridge. The objective was to bisect the West Bank, disturb the continuity of the Arab settlements, and prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Now, this is a little hard to hear, right? According to Arieli, their objective was to disturb the continuity of Arab settlements, and prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state? I mean, why? Why do that, why would you prevent a Palestinian state? Well, before you make your mind up, I’d like to remind you that this is 1978. And back in 1978, Palestinian leaders like Yasser Arafat were busy planning events like this one.

“My first memory is of a loud noise. Mom was wounded. Everyone started yelling. I remember the words hunters, hunters! As children, we were in a state of shock. Noise, the sound of gunfire. There were screams because some on the bus were already wounded. The driver and my mom were wounded in the first volley of bullets.”

Eran Boshkenitz was a kid when 11 Fatah terrorists infiltrated Israel from south Lebanon. First, they murdered an American tourist on the beach. Then they hijacked a taxi, killing everyone inside it. And then, they hijacked a chartered bus full of families. They sprayed the passengers with bullets and tossed grenades out the windows at passing cars. By the time Israeli forces managed to stop them, 38 civilians had been murdered – including 13 children.

And let me just be clear, because I know that sometimes all the different parties can get confusing. The people who did this were associated with Fatah, the party of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Today, much of the world views them as moderates. But back then, Arafat and his party were considered out and out terrorists – the kind Israel vowed they’d never talk to. 

Say what you want about Sharon, and about Begin, and about settlements in general. But it’s hard to not discount the fact that when Israel looked at Palestinian leadership, the representatives of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause, this is what they saw. So when you ask yourself why would Sharon want to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state, well, attacks like this were a big, big part of the reason.

So under Begin and Sharon, West Bank settlements expanded. And it wasn’t just the West Bank. In 1981, the state officially annexed the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem – 13 years after winning those areas from Syria and Jordan. But Begin was a complex man, a man who contained multitudes. (Seriously, gotta do an episode on him one day.) It was under his watch that Israel uprooted a settlement, too. (By the way, more than two decades later, Ariel Sharon would also uproot a bloc of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip – but we’ll get there.)

Here’s how I introduced this surprising turn of events, all the way back in season 4:

“Seven years into his tenure as head of state, President Sadat addresses the Egyptian Parliament. And among the bluster, Sadat went off-book. He says something extemporaneous, from the heart. Quote, “I am ready to go to the end of the world if this would prevent the wounding, let alone the killing, of a soldier or an officer of my boys…. Israel will be surprised when it hears me say that I won’t refuse to go to their own home, to the Knesset itself, to discuss [peace]”.

From his office in Jerusalem, Menachem Begin was listening. And when a reporter asked what he thought of Sadat’s offer, Begin responded: “If President Sadat really means it, then Ahlan wa-Sahlan.” Arabic for “Welcome.” Two days later, Begin addressed the Egyptians via radio broadcast. “We, the Israelis, stretch out our hand to you… No more wars – peace – a real peace and forever.”

Less than a week later, Sadat was on a plane to Israel.”

It took a while to hammer out the details, but Egypt and Israel finally signed a peace treaty in 1979. But peace came with compromises. Like returning the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.

There were sixteen Israeli communities in the Sinai, including the town of Ofira, right on the coast of the Red Sea, and the settlement of Yamit. Today, Ofira is better-known by its Arabic name, Sharm al-Sheikh – though Egypt’s tourism authority website neglects to  mention that this gorgeous resort town was actually built and handed over, intact, by Israel. (By the way, I wasted 20 minutes dreaming about learning to scuba dive so I can go diving in Sharm al-Sheikh.)

Yamit was the biggest of Israel’s settlements in the Sinai – though that’s not saying much. There were only 600 houses in the whole town. It should have been relatively easy to evacuate. But the residents of Yamit weren’t interested in leaving. Some even threatened to blow themselves up if the IDF entered their homes. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. When push came to shove, neither the IDF soldiers nor the Yamit settlers were ready to actually hurt one another.

The evacuation worked. Ever since Sadat and Begin signed the peace treaty of 1979, Egypt and Israel have had peace. Evacuating the Sinai communities seemed a small price to pay for peace with a formidable enemy. Was land for peace the winning formula that would finally end the Arab-Israeli conflict?

Short answer: no. 

In fact, as the 80s dragged on, the conflict seemed more intractable than ever.

As you know from past episodes – link in the show notes, of course – as 1987 bled into 1988, the First Intifada plunged Israelis and Palestinians alike into half a decade of violence. But even as the Israeli army cracked down, Israeli citizens were building new settlements just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Palestinian cities seething with violence.  

Not that you’d know it from looking at their communities. In 2016, the journalist Johnny Harris visited multiple Israeli settlements across the West Bank. Low key, our Unpacked YouTube team – shout out to them, learn a lot from the production of Jonny Harris. Anyway, here’s how he described them:

“Spend ten minutes in the settlements today and you can sometimes feel like you could just as easily be in a New Jersey suburb… Clean roads, big houses, quality parks, good schools, close-by shopping, a university.  You ask people why they moved here and instead of the original mission to push forward the Israeli state, you hear things like.. Great educational system. There’s a very nice country club. We wanted to be in a bigger place. It’s a great place to raise kids. This is such a beautiful view and it’s our land and we love looking at it all the time. 

We were looking for a Jerusalem suburb that we could afford that was a manageable commute. Close to Jerusalem.. Extremely close to Jerusalem. The quality of life is so much better. It has nothing to do with politics. Having a bit more quiet…. “

Sounds surprising, I know. But the Israelis who live in the West Bank are just people. They want the same things that most people want: a good quality of life.

So in the early 1990s, when it came out that the Israeli government was secretly talking to the PLO about a potential peace deal, many Israelis were absolutely outraged. 

Which brings us to… 

Part 4: War and Peace

Here’s how I described the Oslo Accords a few seasons ago, and yes, link in the show notes:

“the first installment of the Oslo Accords — signed in September of 1993 — set forth some ground rules.

First, the Accords established that there would be a democratically elected “Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority” that would rule the West Bank and Gaza for five years. At that point, there would be a more permanent, democratically elected government.

To ensure a smooth transition into self-determination, the Accords mandated that the Palestinian interim government would establish all kinds of entities to deal with infrastructure. (It’s amazing how incredibly mundane the business of government is, when you get down to it. Someone has to make sure the lights stay on and the sewage stays out of the street.)

Finally, to ensure this government actually had land to rule, Israel would withdraw from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank, starting with the ancient city of Jericho…”

Listen closely. There’s not a word in there about freezing settlement construction. Yes, Israel would “withdraw” from some Palestinian territories. But according to the US State Department, this “withdrawal” applied only to the military. Israeli settlements would all be left intact – although Prime Minister Rabin did make plans to discourage settlers from moving into the West Bank, like a freeze on the paving of roads throughout the West Bank.

Such moves left Israeli settlers seething. They remembered the dismantling of Yamit. They had no desire to be ripped from their homes in the name of a peace they didn’t even believe would come. Because as Rabin was moving ahead with his plans, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were sending suicide bombers into Israeli cities. At a closed-door sermon at a mosque in Johannesburg, Arafat was calling for Muslims to liberate Jerusalem through “jihad.”

Rabin wasn’t trying to win over the settlement movement. But he really put his foot in his mouth in early 1995, when he responded to a terror attack by saying, quote: “We don’t want the majority of the Jewish population… of whom 98% live within sovereign Israel… to be vulnerable to terrorism.” Which, to many settlers, sounded a whole lot like “screw you. I don’t care if you get killed.”

Even as some Israelis were thronging the streets to sing songs of peace, tens of thousands of counter-protestors were mobilizing, hoisting signs with Rabin dressed as a Nazi. One of those counter-protestors was Yigal Amir. And in November of 1995, he did what so many of Israel’s right wing had vowed to do.

They’re chanting “with blood, with fire, we will expel Rabin.” But chants are one thing. Murder is another. And despite the division that roiled the Jewish state, despite the anger of citizens who felt like Rabin was selling them out, despite the fervent protests, the country went into shock when Yigal Amir killed their prime minister with three shots to the back as he exited a peace rally.

For years after Rabin’s funeral, Jews all over the world would slap bumper stickers on their cars with the final two words of Bill Clinton’s remarks after the assassination.

“Because words cannot express my true feelings, let me just say, shalom, haver. Goodbye, friend.”

Despite the shock, despite the grief, and despite the rash of terror attacks that followed Rabin’s assassination, the peace process limped on.

In the summer of 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat met at Camp David, the US president’s country retreat, tucked away in the wooded hills of Maryland. (Shout out to my home state!) Barak offered the Palestinians over 90% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip. But Yasser Arafat said no. That is just the cliff notes or spark notes version, shout out to my gen x and millennial listeners. As if to hammer home the point, the Palestinians then launched another intifada – this one much bloodier than the first. Again, I knowww I’m a broken record, but link to our episode about the Second Intifada in the show notes.

So it might seem strange that at the very end of the Second Intifada – which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 Israelis and 4,000 Palestinians – the Israeli government decided to pull all Israeli citizens out of the Gaza Strip.

And it might seem even stranger that the Prime Minister in charge of this initiative was the guy who had encouraged Israelis to build settlements in the first place: Menachem Begin’s “settlement czar,” Ariel Sharon. 

(Nerd corner alert: Sharon had earned the nickname “the bulldozer” for sending construction crews all over the West Bank to build up new communities in the 80s. But the name wasn’t without affection. A bulldozer is a blunt and lethal instrument. But it also gets stuff done.)

Anyway, we have a whole episode about the Gaza disengagement, as it’s known. And we talk about it in our October 7th series as well. Link to both episodes in the show notes. So if you want to understand why Sharon made this decision, or how Israelis reacted to the pullout, check those out. But for the purposes of this episode, what you need to know is that the so-called Gaza Disengagement left a significant segment of Israeli society deeply scarred. Their army had uprooted them from their homes, kicking and screaming. Two years later, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip.

And yet, somehow, the Israelis kept negotiating.

In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered PA President Mahmoud Abbas 94% of the West Bank. He would make up for the 6% that would remain in Israeli hands with a land swap. And he would ensure the future Palestinian state would be contiguous – i.e., that it would encompass both the West Bank and Gaza. Israel would annex major settlement blocs, including the Etzion bloc, but uproot the rest. Jerusalem’s Old City – and all its holy sites – would be placed under international control, and Israel would absorb a small number of Palestinians, or their descendants, who had been displaced in 1948. Israel would compensate the rest. There would be no more “settlements,” no more “occupation,” no more “disputed territory.” Just two states, side by side.

Abbas said no, claiming he was “not allowed to study the maps,” whatever that means. Plus, he wanted Israel to absorb the millions of so-called refugees descended from the original 700,000 Palestinians who left or were expelled in 1948, essentially asking for Israel to stop being a Jewish state. So he walked away, and the two sides have been at a stalemate ever since. Meanwhile, settlements continue to spring up all over the West Bank. Today, nearly half a million Israelis live in West Bank settlements, cheek by jowl with roughly 3 million Palestinians. Which brings us to…

Part Five: Strange Bedfellows

Okay, I love this. Tekoa is an unusual place. It’s one of the settlements that makes up the Gush Etzion bloc, somewhere between Jerusalem and Hebron, with a reputation for being artsy, hippie-ish, a chill mix of the very religious and the entirely secular. 

Much of that reputation is due to the influence of a fascinating, one of a kind, suis generis rabbi named Menachem Froman. Rabbi Froman was one of the founding members of the Gush Emunim movement and Tekoa’s Chief Rabbi. Like other Religious Zionists, Froman believed that God had given Israel to the Jewish people as a divine inheritance. And he believed that, well, because the Hebrew Bible says it time and time again.

“We haven’t come to [lots of stuttering that we can cut] Tekoa as part of the occupation. We come – I came to Tekoa because I am connected to this land. Yes? I didn’t come in order to be an obstacle to the Palestine state. We come back home.”

Froman was extremely opposed to the 2005 Gaza Disengagement, and spent much of the summer of 2005 in the Gaza Strip to show his support for its soon-to-be-evicted Jewish residents.

So far, you might be thinking, ok, this is what I expected…

But. Unlike many other leaders of the settler movement, Froman nurtured close ties to anyone who was willing to talk to him, including figures like Yasser Arafat and Ahmed Yassin – the spiritual leader of Hamas. Here he is describing his charmingly bizarre (or perhaps bizarrely charming) relationship to Yasser Arafat.

“Why he invited me again and again? And even in his last days he phoned here, to this telephone and say to me, El Chacham Froman, or as we Arafat has excellent sense of humor. Perhaps you, the Palestinians, don’t have having the same impression but he was a joker. But he used to call me Sheikh Froman and I used to call him El-Chacham Abu Amar, yes? So he said, came – I’m coming back to the telephone– came to to me as soon as possible. I said ya rais, why? Come, come to me, and then I understood that he’s ill and he wanted to depart for me. But he knows that I’m a settler! Not only he knows – the reason that he was so interested with the connections with me because I am a settler! “

I’ve heard Arafat called a lot of things, but El-Chacham Abu Amar is a new one. (Chacham, by the way, is another word for rabbi – it literally means scholar.) This kind of conversation is exactly why Rabbi Froman’s obituary in the New York Times called him “startlingly unconventional,” and included juicy little tidbits like this. Quote:

“In February 2008, Rabbi Froman worked with Khaled Amayreh, a Palestinian journalist close to Hamas, to forge a peace agreement that would have released an imprisoned Israeli soldier, lifted economic sanctions on the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Hamas, and imposed a cease-fire there. Hamas leaders accepted the deal, but Israel ignored it.”

Rabbi Froman passed away in 2013 – three years before a Palestinian teenager stabbed his daughter, Michal, who was four months pregnant at the time, yards away from her home in Tekoa.

“I asked God why he stabbed me. It was like… it felt as if it was meant to be me. I felt very strongly that it was aimed at me, and there was a message here for me. Obviously, yes, I’m a person of faith, but it was also very obvious – I just felt it.” 

“I had no hatred. I had this sorrow, that we live in fear in our community, and that young boys like this can just venture out with a knife… I just felt sorrow for both realities. And I believe that no one is to blame. The people of Israel have only the land of Israel. History brought the Palestinians here, and they’re here. No one is to blame. This is the reality. Let’s do the best we can. We have to explain this to the other side as well.”

That “other side” came to visit in the wake of the stabbing. Two delegations, coming to formally apologize. The meeting ended with a recitation of the Muslim prayers right in Michal’s living room – an experience she described as “amazing.”

Does that surprise you? A Palestinian stabs a settler, and his town sends two delegations to apologize? It surprised me when I first learned about it. That’s not in line with the kind of thing we hear about settlers. That’s not in line with the media coverage of the West Bank. And neither is the fact that 33 settlements are home to Arab residents, too. 

Now, I’ll be the first to say that this is rare. The Israeli government officially recognizes 132 settlements in the West Bank (plus, an estimated 20,000 Israelis live in unrecognized outposts that the government considers illegal.) So 33 settlements out of 132 isn’t exactly the majority, and the number in each community varies. But still! A quarter of the settlements have Palestinian residents! Close to 600 Palestinians live in the Jewish settlement of Ariel so they can attend the college there. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about Israel – I do host a podcast about it and everything – and until this episode, I didn’t know that any settlements are home to Arabs. But when it comes to Israel, things are always more complicated than they initially appear.

But back to Tekoa, where many of Michael’s neighbors share her sorrow. They want to live on ancient Jewish land – and they also want Palestinians to have basic human rights.

People. Contain. Multitudes. 

“It’s important to me to live in a Jewish country. It is! When I plow my fields and find a clay pot, it takes me to places that I love. I feel I’m in the land of the Jews, and 2500 years ago, there were Jews here who plowed the land that I’m plowing. I’m not exaggerating! On the other hand, there are many Arabs here. They’re human beings too. Everyone has rights. They should have rights too. How do we integrate all this with the fact that there’s a bloody conflict and people are being killed? It’s not easy. When you look around, it’s heartbreaking.” 

But is there a contradiction here?

After all, critics of the settler movement say that settlers are the reason that Palestinians in the West Bank don’t have all the rights they deserve. They say that the settlements are nothing more than a land grab, designed to steal land earmarked for a Palestinian state.

But even many people who are ideologically opposed to settlements take issue with this argument. They say, if the Palestinians wanted a state, they would have accepted the terms that Israel offered, multiple times. If they wanted a state, they wouldn’t commit murders so brutal that podcast hosts have to warn their listeners to skip ahead to avoid graphic descriptions of violence. 

Kobi Mandel lived in Tekoa. I don’t know if he had any personal feelings about Arabs and Israelis, or a two-state solution, or Palestinian autonomy. Most 13-year-olds don’t think about stuff like that. 

Most 13-year-olds aren’t murdered over stuff like that. 

“15 years ago, my son Kobi, who was a 13-year-old boy who grew up in America, went for a hike with his friend Yosef Ish-Ran near our home in Tekoa. Two boys… they cut school. They walked around the outside of our community down along dirt paths and proceeded to do what they thought would be to spend the day exploring this beautiful canyon. 10 o’clock in the morning, the two boys were trapped in a small cave by four or five Palestinian terrorists and beaten to death with boulders the size of bowling balls. It was a very brutal crime.”

The terrorists who murdered Kobi and Yosef mutilated their bodies so badly that Israeli authorities had to use dental records to identify them. The killers were never found. Their murder came seven weeks after a Palestinian sniper shot 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass in the city of Hebron, meaning the sniper targeted her… and a few days after an Israeli tank shell killed four-month-old Iman Hiju in Gaza. Since 2008, over 160 Israelis have died in the West Bank as a result of Palestinian terror attacks. Hundreds more have been grievously wounded. Some of the attacks – like the one on Kobi and Yosef – have been particularly chilling. 

Take the story of the Fogel family, murdered in the settlement of Itamar in March of 2011. I won’t describe it in detail, because frankly I can’t. Just know that in a matter of minutes, two teenage Palestinians brutally slaughtered five members of the same family: Mom, Dad, and three kids, aged 11, 4, and three months. The bodies were eventually discovered by 12-year-old Tamar Fogel, who had been out at a youth meeting. She came home to find her two-year-old brother desperately trying to wake up their parents. It’s heartbreaking. Even now, almost 14 years later, I can barely say those words without wanting to cry.

But if the murderers were hoping to drive the settlers away, they failed completely. Rabbi Yaakov Cohen was the first adult on the scene. His testimony is horrifying. And yet, he says the murders had a surprising effect on the community.

“It sounds weird, but the murders had a positive effect. The settlement got stronger in terms of population and construction. All the parameters of normal life have improved since the incident.”

And it wasn’t just the settlement of Itamar. In the wake of the massacre, the Israeli government approved the construction of hundreds of new housing units in the highly-populated settlement blocs of Gush Etzion, Maale Adumim, Ariel and Modiin Ilit – all areas that Israel plans to hang on to, in the event of a peace deal with the Palestinians, though the prospect of any deal has been vanishingly slim. 

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, quote, “They shoot, and we build.” 

It’s been nearly 14 years since the massacre, and Israeli support for settlements has only grown. A 2024 Pew survey found that 49% of Israeli Jews believe that settlements help Israeli security. In fact, the report goes on to say, quote:

“Among the Israeli public overall, the view that settlements enhance security has increased 13 points since we first asked this question in 2013. Over that same 11-year period, the share of Israeli Jews who think building settlements helps Israel’s security has steadily grown.”

But why? How? How do you look at a massacre of five innocent people, and think “yep, these communities make us feel safer!”

Well, for some, it comes down to simple geography. Remember: before 1967, Israel was only nine miles wide at its narrowest point – a situation that Abba Eban once described, memorably, as “Auschwitz borders.” The West Bank expands Israel’s borders, making the country overall more defensible. 

But it goes way beyond mere geography.

Israel devotes a lot of resources toward keeping settlement communities safe. The IDF has a significant presence in the West Bank. The more Israeli civilians live in the West Bank, the more deeply rooted the IDF becomes. And that has very practical consequences for Israeli security.

After Israel left Gaza in 2005, the Strip became a hotbed of Hamas terror. For nearly a decade, Hamas’ rockets terrorized the border communities of Israel’s south. By 2014, those rockets were able to reach central Israel, with its major population centers. So Israel went to war, entering Gaza and losing 66 soldiers in the process. In contrast, Hamas has never been able to fire a single rocket from the West Bank, despite their active presence there, simply because the army can keep them in check.

So that’s the security argument for the settlements. 

But there’s another, much more immediate argument for living in a settlement. And that is simple economics. Property is crazy expensive in Israel. And though the West Bank isn’t cheap per se, it’s certainly cheaper. Sometimes, that’s all it comes down to – bang for the buck.

This is Talia. She lives in the West Bank community of Peduel, whose official website bills it as a “settlement with a soul.”

“About a year ago, we decided to move to Peduel in order to make a change in our lives. We opened a new business. We have a little pastry shop. The reason we moved here is because financially we couldn’t manage with the life in Tel Aviv, Hod HaSharon, or whatever.”

Another settler we spoke to, who asked to remain nameless for personal reasons, told us, quote: “I would say that 95% of settlers have not moved to this area, myself included, as ideology. I moved to my house because it’s beautiful and large and spacious and costs about like a quarter of what the rest of the country costs. That’s why I moved here. I’m 20 minutes outside of Jerusalem and it’s beautiful and that was all the calculation I made.”

So, yeah, pretty reasonable, I think. But why is the West Bank more affordable? Because it’s extremely heavily subsidized by the Israeli government.

In 2023 alone, the government devoted 25% of its transportation budget to building or improving roads in the West Bank—even though just 5% of Israel’s population lives there. These subsidies create huge incentives for Israelis to move to West Bank communities. We’re talking about towns 20 minutes from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with affordable housing, well-funded schools, and tight-knit communities. And, according to Raja Shehadeh, the Ramallah-born founder of Palestinian human rights organization al-Haq, settlers can easily keep their distance from the Palestinians they live beside.

“This is the Palestinian city of Beit Jala. And the idea of this very expensive two tunnels and a bridge is to shorten the distance for the settlers and make it possible for them to reach their settlements and Jerusalem in a matter of eight minutes. It allows Israelis to pretend that they have never left Israel, although they have left Israel of ’67 and gone to their illegal settlements on the Palestinian side. They are able to move to this two places, Israel and the West Bank, without feeling that they have moved away from sovereign Israel.”

I hear the frustration in his voice. I understand it. In his eyes, the settlements do not belong to Israel. He believes Jews in the West Bank are living on stolen land. That’s how he sees it. And so the bridges and roads that allow them to zip between “mainland Israel” and their homes simply perpetuate the ugly myth that there is no one else on this land. That they can live separately, and well, without ever looking their neighbors in the eyes.

And whether or not you agree that settlements are built on stolen land, whether or not you think Raja is characterizing settlers fairly, one thing is unquestionably true. Settlers, and the Palestinians they live next to, rarely interact meaningfully with one another. We mentioned the handful of Palestinians who live inside settlements, as well as the occasional delegation that comes to visit in the wake of tragedy. And some Palestinians have permits to work in the settlements, often in construction or other blue-collar jobs. But opportunities for real interactions, let alone friendships, are vanishingly rare. Here’s our unnamed settler again explaining why:

“I was offered a lot of money by somebody to build any project that would have my town and Palestinians work together. I could not get interest on either side. And that was way before October 7. Let’s say we create a soccer afterschool program. The amount of security you would need to get me to send my kid there would be beyond belief.”


And that means that most interactions between Palestinians and settlers are incidental – passing by in a shared supermarket, driving on the same road, enjoying the same playgrounds. That’s two groups existing in the same place. It’s not a relationship.

Which means that many of the interactions between Palestinians and settlers are violent ones. We’ve talked already about some of the atrocities committed against settlers. But, as hard as it is to admit it, the horror flows in both directions. And there’s a small but violent fringe contingent of the settler movement that menaces Palestinian villages. 

Part Six: On the Hilltops

One of the fascinating aspects of Israeli society is that often you can meet people from Tel Aviv or Haifa or even Jerusalem who have never been to a settlement. They never met a certain kind of settler that you hear about in the news. And for me, I was fascinated to learn a bit more about this reality and also one specific group of people. They are known as the hilltop youth. They have this really special kind of Zionism though. An attachment to this land, a commitment to a Jewish presence in ancient Jewish land that is different.

I’ll be the first to say that I don’t understand the Hilltop Youth. I’ve sought them out in their own homes, venturing deep into the West Bank, to Chavat Gilad, for instance. I wanted to get to know them. To hear them describe themselves in their own words. But when they did, I still didn’t really understand them. They seem like mavericks. Ungovernable, headstrong, with absolutely no interest in what other people think about them – including their fellow Jews. 

The Hilltop Youth – in Hebrew, na’ar hagvaot – is a loose coalition of young extremists who have latched on to a messianic anarchism, which they’ve followed to its most violent conclusion. They believe the West Bank belongs to the Jewish people alone, and they’re willing to fight anyone who disagrees – including Palestinians, the IDF, the Israeli government, and “leftists.”

They took their name from a 1998 radio broadcast, delivered by then-Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon. As Netanyahu and Arafat were haggling over a peace deal, Sharon urged Israelis to quote: “Grab the hilltops, and stake your claim. Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” (Again, ironic that he ended up dismantling the settlements in Gaza, just a few years later.)

So these young people stake a tent or a trailer on a random West Bank hilltop and just… live there. The Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem reports that the IDF doesn’t stop settlers from erecting new structures for what are effectively illegal settlements. In some cases, the soldiers will even help the settlers with construction.

But other outposts have very little in the way of quote, unquote “construction.” These are people living in a tent with no water, no electricity, and no real protection from the elements… or the people who live nearby. And there are many, many clashes with the Palestinians who live nearby.

Some start with Palestinians, who throw rocks or stab or shoot any settler they see. Others start with the Hilltop Youth themselves, who sneak into Palestinian villages to set fire to mosques, destroy crops, and steal livestock.

And sometimes, things are even worse.

In June 2015, Palestinian terrorists hiding on the side of the road opened fire on four Israeli civilians in the northern West Bank, murdering 26-year-old Malachy Rosenfeld as he and his friends returned from a basketball game. And then, a few weeks later, a small group of hilltop youth took their revenge. Before dawn one Friday morning, they crept into the Palestinian village of Douma, near Nablus, aka Shechem and graffitied the words “revenge” and “long live the Messiah” on two homes. Then they smashed the windows and threw firebombs inside.

One of the homes was empty at the time. The other wasn’t. 

The Dawabsheh family was sleeping inside: 35-year-old father Sa’ad, 27-year-old mother Reham, four-year-old Ahmed, and 18-month-old Ali. Please skip ahead by 30 seconds if you’re sensitive. Sa’ad managed to pull Reham and Ahmed out of their burning home, but in the darkness and confusion, baby Ali burned to death before his father could rescue him. Tragically, both Sa’ad and Reham died of their wounds days later. Only four-year-old Ahmed survived, with burns on 60% of his body. Ahmed is 13 years old now. A heavily-scarred orphan with few memories of the fire that stole his parents and baby brother.

“I saw the flames. I don’t remember much. I only remember the TV melting on me. Someone named Ayad went inside and carried me out. That’s all I remember.”

The 21-year-old who murdered Ahmed’s parents sits in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison, serving three life sentences plus twenty years. And for those who think the Israeli government merely backs anything the settlers do, it’s just not true. The Israeli Supreme Court has rejected his appeals, writing, quote:

“No words will reflect the magnitude of the horror. These actions contradict and conflict with all moral values ​​and Jewish culture, which teaches patience and tolerance. Hatred of members of other religions, as well as racism for its own sake, is not a path of Judaism.”

For much of Israeli society, the hilltop youth are a menace, a tragic example of what happens to at-risk youth who run away from home to live on isolated hilltops. Our unnamed settler told me “it’s a mental health issue. You want to solve this problem?  Inundate the hilltops with therapists.” Another settler told Corey Gil-Shuster, quote:

“In my opinion, they do things that are very similar to what the Arabs do… They throw stones! …For me, it doesn’t matter what religion. You threw stones, it doesn’t matter where you’re from. You’re a terrorist.”

But the hilltop youth don’t see themselves as crazy or as terrorists. They see themselves as pioneers. Here’s one young man explaining his philosophy:

“We’re sick of being stuck in ghettos, in settlements, surrounded by walls, unable to leave. We venture out in the wild open spaces. We go where we want, where Jews haven’t set foot for years, if not decades or centuries!”

It’s tough to make a definitive statement about the Hilltop Youth. No one’s entirely sure how many there are, or even how to define them precisely. Do you count only the ones who’ve claimed isolated outposts? Do you add in local extremists who live in recognized settlements but spend their time vandalizing Palestinian property? There’s no official group called the Hilltop Youth, no clear mission statement or governing body. 

I feel comfortable saying that anyone who identifies as a Hilltop Youth is attracted to a fundamentalist and anti-democratic version of Judaism, and that I think their idealism would be better-channeled somewhere else. 

Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, sees them differently. (Nerd corner alert: the Shin Bet, or Shabak, is an acronym for Sherut haBitachon haKlali, or the general security services. Think of them as the internal version of the Mossad – a formidable intelligence and security agency that operates within Israel’s borders. We gotta do an episode on them one of these days.)

Anyway, in August of 2024, the organization’s chief warned the government that the movement puts the entire country in danger. In a fiery letter, he wrote, quote: 

“The damage to the State of Israel is indescribable: global delegitimization, even among our greatest allies; spreading thin the IDF’s personnel; vengeful attacks that are sparking another front in the multi-front war we are in; putting more players into the cycle of terror; a slippery slope to the feeling of a lack of governance; another obstacle to creating local alliances that we need against the Shiite axis; and above all, a massive stain on Judaism and us all.”

Both the US and the UK have sanctioned extremist settlers who incite and inflict violence against Palestinians – a move that is largely symbolic. The most extreme settler has little interest in their own government’s laws – let alone the laws of the US and the UK.

For now, the hilltop youth and other extremists are a tiny minority among the half-a-million Israelis who live in the West Bank. And several peace groups are working to counter the threat of extremism across Israel and the West Bank, though they don’t all agree on an approach. 

An enigmatic and charismatic and endearing rabbi named Yehuda HaKohen spent the better part of a day with me. We spent time eating sushi in his car driving through the West Bank – a bit of a non sequitur, but anyway, he is an educator and activist, and this is what he told me:

“The best method of resistance we’ve figured out so far to prevent the division of our land and our displacement is to populate as many mountains as we can in the West Bank. I’ve been part of that. I spent the last two decades being part of that, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not enough to populate as many mountains as we can here. We need to actually find partners in Palestinian society and speak in one voice to the world against a two-state solution.”

Yep, you heard that right. He’s pro-peace, anti-two-state-solution. You know why?? Say it with me. People. Contain. Multitudes. 

“Vision for the future is a single state between the river and the sea where we and the Palestinians can live together as partners. We’re not gonna be some like Western civic national identity. We’re not gonna be Canadians here together. We’re tribal people, they’re tribal people, we have to be allies. Okay, that’s the key.”

And justice, in a tribal society, can be harsh. Or at least… unfamiliar to those of us in the Western world.

“I think it takes a lot of courage and a lot of self-sacrifice to go, and, and I’m not saying it’s right, but I’m acknowledging that the young Jew who overcomes his own fear and, uh, participates in the revenge attack against Huwara or Tumesiya or or anywhere else, is doing something brave and difficult. I mean, I think that needs to be acknowledged whether or not we agree with it, and they’re doing it because they genuinely believe the security forces have let them down. They genuinely believe that security forces aren’t doing their jobs, and that it’s, they have to take it upon themselves to make, uh, a population that wants to harm them, fear them. Okay? They’re coming at it, you know, not from the perspective of colonizer and colonized. They’re coming at it from a perspective of two local tribes that war with each other, and they kind of see the army and the state as like referees. And I know, and you probably know that the state and the army is more often than not on the side of the Jews, than the Palestinians in these situations. Um, the media sometimes not, I think the media and, and sometimes the judicial system is maybe even harsher, and the prison system is even harsher on the Jews who get involved in this stuff, and they are in Palestinians because they wanna make a point and show that we don’t want to be like the Arabs. I think it also kind of comes from a place of racism when we like condemn the Jewish terrorists and et cetera. Uh, but umm, my, my problem with it ultimately is if I relate to the state of Israel as, um, the vehicle through which the Jewish people collectively perform the mitzvah of possessing our land, then vigilante actions undermine the state and weaken the state. And I think that’s problematic. Um, also, um, I think that in many cases, the Palestinians who are being attacked have very little to do with what the Jews have taken a revenge for. Um, like, uh, you know, like for example, um, my wife’s cousin was, was shot in the head, uh, a few years ago by the Barghouti family. Okay. Not by the Palestinians, by the Barghouti family. Okay. And, uh, a a few days before that, uh, a woman who lives in my mountain was shot in the stomach and lost a baby by the Bari family. It was also the bari <inaudible>. Um, if there was a legal framework through which, um, we could take revenge on the Barghouti family, that might interest me, but I don’t think it would be helpful to just find some random Palestinian and kill them. Right? But again, a legal framework that’s part of the, the, the way the state is structured and justice is understood that those who those who are harmed can, can take revenge.” 

Huwara, by the way, was the site of what the IDF general in charge of the West Bank called a pogrom, though some scoffed at the usage of the term – check out our episode on Kishinev to learn more about that – hundreds of settlers from across the West Bank descended, enraged, on a Palestinian town, in revenge for the murder of two brothers from the town of Har Bracha in the hills of the Shomron. 

I’m not sure I agree with HaKohen about such revenge attacks being “brave.” I view it differently, and that’s ok to see things differently, but I do agree they’re deeply tribal. Deeply Biblical. And in a region that is known for its religious extremism, maybe that’s one path forward. A possibility for what it might look like for two warring people to live side-by-side. But like all the other visions of coexistence, it requires deep introspection from both sides.

Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger is a settler and co-founder of Roots, which brings Jews and Palestinians together. For 30 years, he says, he was living in a bubble, never stopping to wonder how his Palestinian neighbors felt about him.

“I began to see that with all the wonder and the glory and the truth and legitimacy of Zionism and of my presence on the land, there was also a dark underbelly to it and I had no idea. I was blind for over three decades.”

“Here in Roots we talk about a second level of Zionism. A Zionism that serves the Jewish people but serves not only the Jewish people, let’s put it this way, that serves the Jewish people but not at the expense of another people because the Palestinian people exist, they’re human beings, they have an identity, have a connection to land.”

I cannot say this enough: it is my firm belief that until each side acknowledges the other’s connection to the land, the other’s right to be there, there will be no peace. There will be no Palestinian state. There will be way more Hilltop Youth. There might even be more support for Hamas. There will be more sanctions, more extremism, more anger, more grief.

Or… we can acknowledge that multiple truths, multiple narratives, can even coexist. As Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger told me:

“There could be many truths, there could be a kaleidoscope of truths, and they’re all truth. And God, of course, is defined by Kabbalah, by Jewish mysticism, as the kaleidoscope of all the possible truths. And if I want to fulfill the mitzvah, the commandment of working God’s footsteps, I have to be able to see all those divine truths at the same time, and live with them, and balance them.”

So, that’s the history of the settlements, and here are your five fast facts – or, if you want, your multiple truths:

  1. In 1967’s 6 Day War, Israel quadrupled its landmass. Soon after, Israelis began to build civilian communities on this newly acquired territory – partially for strategic and security reasons, and partly for historical and religious ones. To most of the world, these communities are known as “settlements.”
  2. According to the UN, the settlements are illegal – though Israel, as well as several scholars of law, disagree with this interpretation.
  3. In 1979, Israel established the precedent of “land for peace,” returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty that has held ever since. 
  4. In 2000 and 2008, Israel offered a large portion of the West Bank to the Palestinians, while retaining some of its largest settlement blocs in a land-swap arrangement. The offers were rejected, and Israelis continue to build settlements in the West Bank.
  5. Today, some half-million Israelis and 3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank. They are a diverse crowd, with some unexpected opinions – and they live in a kind of limbo, unsure of what the future holds for them.

Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.

I spend a lot of time in Israel. Like, a lot. I’ve spent significant time there – years – years, when I was in yeshiva and when I was in university. I’ve made a career of studying Israel, of teaching about Israel, of exploring Israel. And still, every time I go, I learn something new about its people. Something that reminds me of a fact that is so, so easy to forget: we all contain multitudes.

It is so easy to make assumptions about people from headlines or polls. To impute a whole life story and outlook and belief system to someone based solely on a demographic checkbox. And it is often so hard to remember that these headlines and checkboxes and statistics are so far from the whole story.

Last summer, I took a whirlwind trip to Israel. I met settlers. I met peace activists of all backgrounds. I met people who I expected to dislike but found incredibly charming. I met people I expected to agree with and really, really didn’t. Sorry. But all of them reminded me of the same thing: we are all so complicated.

I’ll be upfront with you. As I ate falafel in the settlement of Eli, which has been the site of so much controversy and so much violence from both Israelis and Palestinians, I met people whose opinions confounded me. Many of them flouted the law. Many espoused positions I might describe as extreme.

But as we sat there pounding away at some Hummus, I found another layer underneath the disagreeable opinions. I found inspiration.

Whether I agree with them or not, many of these people love the land, in a profound and tactile way. They are deeply connected to it, from the dirt under their fingernails to the dust embedded in the soles of their sandals. They cultivate it, cherish it, talk about it like a person. Like it’s a parent, endlessly nourishing. Like it’s a child, in need of protection and care. Like it’s the most precious gift they could imagine.

And I, with my suburban house and my suburban lawn and my suburban pool in South Florida – I looked at that love, and I felt something unexpected. A mingled sense of connection and awe and maybe also a little bit of jealousy or shame. Because I feel that love, too. I feel the story of the Jewish people in my bones. Every day, in my work and in my personal life, I carry the legacy of this magnificent gift we have been given – of four thousand years of history, of this fractured and miraculous land, of this fractious and resilient tribe I am so lucky to be part of. 

But there is no holy dirt under my fingernails. My Nikesare pristine. I even keep the soles extra white. The love I feel for the land doesn’t translate into working it, into physically building it up, into making things grow. And I don’t need to agree with their tactics or their opinions or their approach to the law to feel amazed and humbled by the pure and abiding love that many settlers have for this land.

By the way, that’s a love many Palestinians share. They too feel the connection to their land. They too have ancient dirt under their fingernails and in the treads of their shoes. And many settlers understand that. Many settlers see this love of the land as a point of connection. Something they can agree on. And that shared love just might provide the ground where peace can grow.

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