Tamal Sikurel strokes her belly, swollen from her sixth child, and smiles. “It’s part of the war effort,” she says. Behind her lies a school without students and houses without former residents. Behind the buildings are dry hills that slope down to the Jordan Valley.
“For thousands of generations we have always had to struggle to justify our existence… I feel the power of this story every day. We have every biblical right, historical right and moral right to ensure our safety here,” Sikurel said.
This 35-year-old and the other 500,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank are now at the center of a growing storm of violence and controversy as the war between Israel and Hamas enters its seventh week.
Some are motivated by religious or nationalistic reasons, others by a lower cost of living. What was once considered a pioneer lifestyle is now often very comfortable: some of the early settlements, once tiny, rudimentary “wildcat” outposts, are now well-established and prosperous, with security guards at the entrance and fences with cameras and barbed wire. Their population has increased by 16% in the last five years.
Israeli human rights groups say settlers, already empowered by the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, have exploited the conflict to further their own agendas and stepped up efforts to drive Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank.
Last Thursday, the French government condemned this as a “policy of terror” and called on the Israeli authorities to protect Palestinians from “violence clearly aimed at forced displacement.” President Joe Biden, a staunch Israel ally, said last month that the attacks by “extremist settlers” amounted to “pouring gasoline on the fires already burning in the Middle East.”
This criticism may explain the Settlers’ recent PR efforts to improve their image. Regavim, a pro-settler nongovernmental organization that is usually hostile to international journalists, drove a busload of reporters into the hills south of Hebron last Thursday while lecturing them on the conflict.
One stop on the tour was Zanuta, a village where the Guardian previously reported that weeks of intense settler violence had forced the 150 Palestinian residents to make a reluctant collective decision to leave by the end of October. Armed settlers – some wearing reserve uniforms, others covering their faces – had begun breaking into their homes at night, beating the adults, destroying and stealing belongings, and frightening the children.
Naomi Kahn, a spokeswoman for Regavim, denied there was any campaign to evict Palestinians, saying the former Zanuta residents were “squatters” and the “foot soldiers of Palestinian independence.” Since they were being paid by the EU to live in the village, they had simply decided to “move on” when the payments stopped.
“Israel is powerless due to international pressure. “The EU is creating a situation that can only be resolved by force,” said Kahn.
Many of the settlers who spoke to the Observer said they were vindicated by the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in southern Israel that killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, in their homes or at a festival.
Yochai Damari, head of the Har Hevron regional council, which governs settlements in part of the southern West Bank, claimed the Oct. 7 attacks had “given Arabs courage and inspiration.”
“Above all, there is a very strong feeling that this is the moment to destroy Hamas and destroy the same agenda among Arabs here,” he told the Observer.
After an Israeli soldier was killed at a checkpoint on Route 60 in the West Bank, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, said last week that Israel must deal with Hamas in the West Bank “just like we do with Gaza.”
The Jewish settlement of Efrat in the West Bank. The settler population in the region consists of around half a million people. Photo: Mahmoud Illea/APAccording to health authorities in the Gaza Strip, at least 12,000 people have been killed in the Israeli bombardment and ground invasion – more than 5,000 of them children. At least a million were displaced.
Many of the tougher settlers say they want peace but are “on the front lines of the war.”
Sikurel claimed last month’s attacks were a “wake-up call” and showed “that we live on different planets.”
“We in the Western world want to live in faith and security in the normal world, and time and time again they show us that they do not believe that Jews have a right to exist,” she said.
Such rhetoric has been common across Israel following last month’s attacks, but has long shaped the views of many settlers and has led to accusations of racism.
“I’ve heard so much… about settler violence and it’s so strange. When I leave my settlement I am afraid. They work with us, we give them coffee, but I don’t know if one of them will kill me,” said Orit Marketinger, a 24-year-old from the Otniel settlement whose father was shot dead by a Palestinian in 2016.
“We want peace and we believe in the law. They believe in hate and kill us just because we are Jews,” she said.
According to the United Nations, a total of 138 Israelis and 1,012 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank from 2008 to September this year. Since October 7, the Israeli security services have been aware of four cases in which settlers shot Palestinians, the local newspaper Haaretz reported.
About a kilometer south of Zanuta is the line where the West Bank – occupied by Israel after the 1967 war – ends and the internationally recognized territory of the Jewish state begins.
For many settlers this demarcation is different. They refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria, two ancient Israelite kingdoms. These terms are also used administratively by the Israeli government.
“These are the biblical lands that were promised to the patriarchs thousands of years ago, and they walked in these lands, and now it is my generation that walks here,” Damari said.
The settlers scoff at the widespread view that their presence represents not only a major obstacle to possible peace progress, however unlikely at this point in the conflict, but also a cause of much of the violence rife in the occupied territories.
This year has already been the deadliest for West Bank residents in at least 15 years. According to the UN, around 200 Palestinians and 26 Israelis were killed. Earlier this month, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, blamed “a tiny handful of people” for the violence [among the settlers] who take the law into their own hands.”
Nathalie Sopinsky, originally from Delaware in the USA, has lived in the Susiya settlement for 16 years and runs an initial medical service for settlers.
Sopinsky said she had been very busy with “normal injuries, injuries from terrorism” but had made a “lifestyle choice” to live in the occupied West Bank.
“There is no traffic, plenty of parking,” she said. “I go for a walk with my daughter in the morning. There are goats and shepherds. It’s all fresh and natural.”