A Piece Of The Peace

Yitzhar was founded in 1983, on a towering, rocky perch with biblical views that stretch from Shiloh to Shechem. When a colleague and I visited earlier this month, one of the settlement's leaders, Yigal Amitay, insisted we bring along a Bible as a kind of guidebook. Wearing a blue polo shirt, sandals and a scraggly black beard, Amitay at first claimed that the reports on settlement expansion were wrong; there were only four new buildings in the community, he said. "The government isn't allowing anything," he explained. "There's a lot less building than there should be." Still, when I asked about a horseshoe of 10 new-looking caravans on the outskirts of the settlement, Amitay just grinned, saying, "You can ask your American satellites about those." The newly constructed trailers now house young couples who have arrived in the past six months.

This June, Israeli authorities raided Yitzhar, sending 200 border police to the settlement. After clashing with stone-throwing demonstrators, they dismantled a trailer on a winding path outside the center of the settlement, evicting the young newlyweds who lived there. Still, the settlers are shrewd enough to realize that the crackdowns are partly political theater designed to please U.S. officials like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. I asked Rivka Ben-Jacob, a 28-year-old mother of four who moved to the settlement three years ago, how often the police tear down an illegal caravan. "Every time Condoleezza comes," she said. "It's this game, and everybody knows it." As for the newlyweds, the settlers rebuilt their caravan the same day.

After Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, religious and ultranationalist settlers were widely seen as a spent force in Israel. Conventional wisdom held that most Israelis had begun to take seriously the demographic threat the settlements posed: high Palestinian birthrates meant that if Israel didn't withdraw its troops and settlers from most of Gaza and the West Bank, it would be impossible to preserve Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state. As for the settlers themselves—many of whom had been in denial right up until the successful evacuation—the forced withdrawal was seen as a repudiation from God. "We learned that you can't say it won't happen," says 22-year-old Shifra Schreiber, who moved two months ago into one of the new trailers on the outskirts of Yitzhar. But she hasn't given up. "We'll do what we have to do, which is to keep building."

At first glance, it would be easy to assume that ideologically motivated settlers are now enjoying a renaissance. On a recent trip to Kiryat Arba, a hard-core redoubt near Hebron, settler leader Boaz Haetzni put on a defiant act as he walked me past an illegal outpost. "Condoleezza Rice doesn't sleep at night because of this," he said. "Tell Condoleezza: every time there's pressure, every time there's a peace process, the settlements grow." But later, as we sat around the lunch table, he dropped the macho air. "Look, there's a joke," he said. "Two Jews are riding on a train in London. One sees the other reading an anti-Semitic newspaper. He asks why. 'In our newspaper, there are only problems,' the second rider answers. 'In their newspaper, we're controlling the world'." As for the settler rebirth, "it makes my day to hear it," said Haetzni. "I hope they're right. But I see the other side. I see the empty side."

Indeed, the new settlement figures are "a little misleading," says Hagit Ofran, the head of Peace Now's Settlement Watch unit. Only about 18 percent of the newly constructed housing units are east of the planned route for Israel's separation barrier, which means much of the recent growth has been in settlements within the wide envelope of land around Jerusalem that Israel hopes it can keep in any final peace deal. Many of those approximately 280,000 settlers are secular and moved there for cheap housing—not for religious or ideological reasons. Even as Israeli leaders insist they're committed to dismantling illegal outposts beyond the wall, they may be encouraging construction on its west side, including in East Jerusalem, as a means of staking out their claim to that territory in advance of any deal. On Rice's most recent stop in Jerusalem, Livni (then foreign minister) sharply warned the Palestinian negotiators not to use settlement building as an "excuse" to back away from the negotiating table. Still, Palestinian-rights advocates argue that the Jerusalem-area settlements can be just as dangerous as isolated outposts. "All construction—even in East Jerusalem—is undermining our partner," says Ofran.

It certainly antagonizes Palestinians like Hazem Maali. His wife, Falastine, ended up spending 12 hours in the emergency room, in surgery for a brain hemorrhage. Their daughter, whose skull was fractured by the projectile, still has a baseball-size scar on her forehead and will need cosmetic surgery. Falastin says she gets pounding headaches, and her daughter, when she isn't crying, is more aggressive with her sisters. As for his family's attackers, "I want to break their necks," says Maali.