[In the West Bank, I met I so many brave Israelis and Palestinians
who are working together to document obstacles to peace that I can see
a way forward — if America has the guts to help them]
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IN THE WEST BANK, I SAW HOW PEACE WILL REQUIRE CONFRONTATION WITH
ISRAEL  
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David Ignatius
December 16, 2023
Washington Post
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_ In the West Bank, I met I so many brave Israelis and Palestinians
who are working together to document obstacles to peace that I can see
a way forward — if America has the guts to help them _

School children, rural West Bank, by delayed gratification (CC
BY-NC-SA 2.0)

 

Ekram Quran stands on the roof of her house on the edge of Al-Bireh in
the West Bank, pointing to the hill 100 yards away where she used to
roam as a girl among fig and olive trees. “It was a place to
breathe,” she remembers. Now, what she sees is a barbwire fence and,
beyond, arrayed along the hilltop, the buildings of an Israeli
settlement called Psagot.

Four Israeli soldiers arrive about five minutes after we descend from
the roof. They demand to see Quran’s papers and mine, for
“security.” After checking our names, they return the documents
and retreat to their post at the settlement gate. We were lucky. Quran
says that late last month, a 20-year-old Palestinian man was shot and
killed [[link removed]] on the street
next to her house during a demonstration.

“It is injustice,” Quran says when the soldiers are gone. Her
family built this home in 1961. The Israelis began constructing their
settlement 20 years later, after they seized the West Bank in the 1967
war. Today, she is powerless on her own property, which lies in a
sliver of what is known as Area C, the 60 percent of the West Bank
that is under total Israeli control.

The devastating war in Gaza was happening just 50 miles away as we
spoke. But Quran, like most West Bank Palestinians I met over the past
week, doesn’t speak much about the violence. They are angry but also
frightened. Quran runs a graphic design business in Ramallah. She
wants to keep working and survive. Her tone isn’t militant rage but,
rather, a sorrow verging on despair.

For three days this past week, I traveled the West Bank, from the arid
hills below Hebron in the south to the chalky heights of Nablus in the
north. What I saw was a pattern of Israeli domination and occasional
abuse that makes daily life a humiliation for many Palestinians —
and could obstruct the peaceful future that Israelis and Palestinians
both say they want.

Driving the roads of the West Bank is — forgive the term — a
“two-plate” solution. Israeli settlers with yellow license plates
zoom along on a well-guarded superhighway called Route 60.
Palestinians with white plates navigate small, bumpy roads. Since Oct.
7, many of the entrances to their villages have often been closed.
Traveling in an Israeli taxi with a Palestinian driver, I saw some of
both worlds.

I watched backups at Israeli checkpoints near Bethlehem and Nablus
that were over a half-mile long and could require waits of more than
two hours. The delays, indignities and outright assaults on
Palestinians have become a grim routine. “If I’m in a yellow-plate
car, does that change my blood?” asked Samer Shalabi, the
Palestinian who was my guide in the Nablus area.

My tour of the West Bank was a reality check about what’s possible
“the day after” the Gaza war
[[link removed]] ends. President
Biden
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other world leaders speak hopefully about creating a Palestinian state
once Hamas
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defeated. I’d love to see that happen, too. But people need to get
real about the obstacles that are in front of our eyes.

On the ground, amid the grinding daily pressure of Israeli occupation,
the shared hope for a Palestinian state can seem like a fairy tale —
soothing to hear but a version of magical thinking. Standing in the
way are the Israeli settlements and outposts laid across the hilltops
of the West Bank, their high fences and concrete walls symbolizing
their apparent immovability.

“The settlements were put there to prevent the creation of a
Palestinian state,” argued Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who
is perhaps the country’s leading critic of the settler movement. He
offered a guided tour of settlement issues for me and two State
Department officials Monday, explaining the patchwork of the West Bank
from the heights of Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives.

Here’s how the math would work for the “de-occupation” that
Seidemann says would be necessary for a viable Palestinian state. More
than 700,000 Israelis live in West Bank settlements, and at least
200,000 would have to leave, he estimates. Some settlers would resist.
“There is a significant possibility of a civil war between the state
of Israel and the settler state of Judea and Samaria,” he warned,
using the settlers’ biblical terms for the areas of the West Bank.

“If it’s not painful, it won’t be significant,” Seidemann
concluded.

For settlers, obstructing Palestinian statehood is part of the
mission, Yehuda Shaul, a leading Israeli expert on settlements, told
me. He noted that back in 1980, Matityahu Drobles, who was then head
of the World Zionist Organization’s settlements department, stated
his goal bluntly in a broad plan. “Being cut off by Jewish
settlements, the minority [Arab] population will find it difficult to
form a territorial and political continuity,” he wrote at the time
[[link removed]]. “The best
and most effective way of removing every shadow of a doubt about our
intention to hold on to Judea and Samaria forever is by speeding up
the settlement momentum in these territories.”

Biden is the latest president to confront the reality that addressing
the Palestinian issue means confronting Israel — especially over
settlements. The number of official settlements and unrecognized but
pervasive “outposts” keeps growing. A group called Peace Now says
this year marked the biggest increase
[[link removed]] since
the group started tracking settlements in 2012.

And in recent years, there has been a frightening increase in violence
by settlers against Palestinians, in what human rights advocates say
are deliberate efforts to frighten them off land that the settlers
believe God gave to Israel.

Settler violence has surged since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist assault,
which killed approximately 1,200 Israelis. Since then, there have been
343 settler attacks against Palestinians, according to
[[link removed]] the
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. At
least 143 Palestinian households, with 1,026 people (including 396
children), have been displaced by violence. Settlers have killed eight
Palestinians and injured 85, the U.N. organization says.

The violent settlers almost always go unpunished. From 2005 to 2022,
93 percent of the 1,597 investigations opened by the Israeli police
into cases where Israelis were said to have harmed Palestinians were
closed without indictment, according to
[[link removed]] Israeli
human rights organization Yesh Din; only about 3 percent led to
convictions.

The threat to Palestinians is especially severe in Area C, where
Israelis outnumber Palestinians by more than 400,000 to 300,000. The
Israeli military severely restricts travel by Palestinians there, and
settlers regularly attack villages and Bedouin camps.

A last word about settlements before I describe details of my trip. I
have some close Israeli friends who live in settlements, and they are
decent, principled people. Many of them would probably move if the
Israeli government decided that a two-state solution required it. The
violence comes from extremist settlers — and the danger is that they
seem to have support from members of the Netanyahu government.

One sign that the Biden administration might be taking the settlement
issue more seriously was the announcement this month
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settlers believed to have been involved in violent attacks against
Palestinians may be denied visas to enter the United States, along
with their family members. That’s not a solution to this big
problem, but it’s a start.

Let’s begin our tour at the southern edge of the West Bank, in the
dry hills south of Hebron. Israeli settlements have expanded in this
region. A new wrinkle here is the fight over “herding outposts,”
where Israeli farmers have tried to drive off Bedouin shepherds who
have been grazing this land for a century.

Saleh Abu Awad, one of those Bedouin shepherds, met me Monday by the
side of a rocky field sprouting with green shoots in the mild December
weather. He is thin, with a weathered face and trim beard, and was
wearing a dusty sweatshirt emblazoned with a faded Emporio Armani
logo.

Nearby is the Israeli settlement of Meitarim, along Route 317, and an
outpost known as Asa’el. You can watch a video
[[link removed]] in which an
Israeli family at Asa’el celebrates the joys of farming this land,
with children doing cartwheels on bales of hay.

A haggard Abu Awad said that on July 13, he was attacked by settlers
while he was grazing his sheep. “This is our land. You should not be
here,” one of the settlers told him. Abu Awad told me his family has
been grazing its sheep nearby since the time of his great-grandfather.
But the settlers were intent. Abu Awad said a group came back later
and burned six of his tents and drove off 130 of his sheep, which he
estimates were worth nearly $50,000.

Abu Awad didn’t bother complaining to the Palestinian Authority.
“They don’t have any power,” he said. The settlers have
continued raids in the area
[[link removed]].
I’ve watched nearly a dozen instances of harassment captured on
videos by Palestinian activists.

In this area, known as Masafer Yatta, settlers have forcibly displaced
the residents of a number of entire communities since Oct.
7, according to
[[link removed]] human
rights organization B’Tselem. The settlers came back as recently as
last Sunday, the day before I talked with Abu Awad. Many Bedouins have
fled these grazing lands in fear, but Abu Awad said he is staying.

“I don’t have any other place to go,” he said. “We’re not
the [Israelis’] enemies. We just want them to leave us alone.”

For those Israeli settlers who hope to drive Palestinians from Area C,
the farmer-outpost strategy seems to be working. A settler leader
named Ze’ev “Zambish” Hever explained the strategy
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organization, Amana, the main construction company for the settler
movement, in February 2021. “The shepherding farms which have
increased … today they cover close to twice the land that the
built-up communities [settlements] cover,” Hever said. “If it’s
a war, if there’s a battle for Area C, [local settler leaders]
should behave like it’s a war.”

We drove north, along settler superhighway Route 60. We entered
Hebron, a dusty industrial town that for 40 years has been skirmishing
with a settlement called Kiryat Arba, planted near the heart of the
city.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, one of the far-right
members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, lives in
Kiryat Arba. In August, he told a journalist
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“My right, and my wife’s and my children’s right, to get around
on the roads in Judea and Samaria is more important than the right to
movement for Arabs.”

Road closures make travel a nightmare for Arabs. We passed the
entrances to a string of Palestinian towns and villages traveling
north; most have been blocked by the Israeli military with big piles
of dirt or metal gates. Palestinians who want to travel outside their
villages in Area C must pass through checkpoints staffed by often
capricious Israeli soldiers.

You can see the toll of this harassment in the terraces of derelict
olive trees along the road north, near Hebron. Palestinian farmers
have been afraid to pick their olives — or have been physically
prevented from doing so. A Western diplomat told me olive oil
production in the West Bank might be 35 percent below average this
year as a result.

Jerusalem is the jewel in the center of this land. It’s also the
most volatile battleground between settlers and Israelis — and the
place where the United States will have the biggest challenge in
framing a compromise. Seidemann showed the two State Department
officials and me how this sacred battleground looks. His worries are
summed up in the title of a study he prepared this year for political
and religious leaders around the world: “The Strategic Encirclement
of Jerusalem’s Old City.”

From Mount Scopus, in East Jerusalem, Seidemann pointed across the
hills toward a big settlement called Ma’ale Adumim, which houses
some 40,000 people. For several decades, Israeli leaders have hoped to
vastly expand it with a project known as E1. Seidemann calls that a
“doomsday land bridge” that would cut any future Palestinian state
in half, separating south from north.

Seidemann took us southeast to the Mount of Olives and a view of
Jerusalem’s Old City, which is sacred to three religions. We saw the
golden Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosques revered by Muslims;
the Garden of Gethsemane and other Christian holy sites; and beyond
the Temple Mount where the mosques are located, the Western Wall —
the “Wailing Wall” — that’s sacred for Jews.

One big goal for conservative, religious Israelis is to increase their
presence throughout the Jerusalem area. To the south, Seidemann
pointed to where settlers plan to build a cable car over the
predominantly Palestinian district of Silwan that would reach the
walls of the Old City. To the north, where the Christian sites are
located, there’s talk about constructing a biblical theme park that
would be overseen by the Israeli parks authority. The political
struggle over Jerusalem “has been driven by religious
pyromaniacs,” Seidemann told me.

Inside the Old City, I visited with young protesters who are trying
to block construction
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a new luxury hotel inside the city walls in the Armenian Quarter, on a
parking lot and adjoining ground leased by the Armenian patriarch to
an Australian Israeli developer. The patriarch has since filed papers
with Israeli authorities withdrawing consent for the lease, but the
bulldozers have tried to enforce it nonetheless. They have been
blocked so far by a round-the-clock sit-in by Armenians, explained
their leader, Hagop Djernazian.

North of Jerusalem is Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority’s seat of
power. It’s a tight, almost claustrophobic center for residents of
Area A, which makes up 18 percent of the West Bank and is nominally
controlled by the Palestinians. But even here, their writ is limited.
On the morning I visited, Israeli soldiers swept in and arrested two
young Palestinians in front of a little shop called the Olive Market.

Palestinian security forces are supposed to keep order here. But local
residents complain that Palestinian forces’ main job is liaison with
Israel and that they can’t protect Palestinians from Israeli
violence. I drove past three separate offices for the security forces,
each one a gleaming, modern building. They have money, obviously, but
little power.

I visited Sabri Saidam, a member of the Fatah Central Committee that
was long the dominant political group in the West Bank but is
challenged increasingly by Hamas. He was dressed all in black, in an
office decorated with images of Yasser Arafat, the iconic leader of
the Palestine Liberation Organization and the first president of the
Palestinian Authority.

Fatah and the Palestinian Authority are said to have prepared a
“vision statement” about what comes after the war, and they claim
to have as many as 40,000 Fatah members in Gaza who could be
reactivated for security duties. Maybe the Palestinian Authority could
be revitalized for this role, as the Biden administration hopes. But
right now, they aren’t doing a very good job even of controlling the
fragments of the West Bank that are their responsibility.

Traveling north from Ramallah is like slicing through a layer cake.
You pass a Palestinian village, then a hilltop settlement, then
another village, then an unofficial outpost, mile after mile. In
February, the Netanyahu government embraced nine of those outposts
and made them official settlements
[[link removed]].

This checkerboard landscape is bound to produce tension, and I saw the
aftermath of two vicious examples on the road north toward Nablus —
where settlers and Israeli soldiers attacked Palestinian villages in
what they said was revenge for terrorist attacks. The State
Department decried one such assault
[[link removed]],
in which soldiers destroyed a family’s home to punish a 13-year-old,
tweeting: “An entire family should not lose their home because of
the actions of one individual.”

About 200 “rampaging settlers,” as Israeli publication
Ynet called them [[link removed]],
attacked the village of Turmus Ayya on June 21. Many came from a
neighboring settlement called Shiloh, and some were masked. According
to Ynet, they burned approximately 30 homes and 60 cars. One
Palestinian was killed, and 12 were hurt.

“The victims decided not to file a complaint due to their lack of
trust in the authorities; they stated that [Israeli] soldiers were
present and did not stop the attack,” a spokesman for Yesh Din, the
Israeli human rights organization that gathered testimony about the
attack, explained to me by email.

One Turmus Ayya resident told me that all his family could do was try
to put out the fire before it destroyed their residence.

At the western edge of town, facing the outskirts of the Shiloh
settlement, four burned Palestinian cars have been stacked in a
charred metal monument to the attack. The Turmus Ayya bloodshed
shocked U.S. officials partly because a majority of the town’s
residents hold U.S. passports. Andrew P. Miller, the deputy assistant
secretary of state who monitors the region, visited the town in
August to express condolences
[[link removed]].

Farther up the road, you come to the town of Huwara, which was
attacked by nearby settlers on Feb. 26. According to evidence Yesh Din
provided me, the settlers burned dozens of cars at a dealership, set
fire to a house with its occupants inside and roamed about the town
torching other cars and homes and attacking one car with an ax.

Two Israelis, one from the Yitzhar settlement and another from an
outpost called Givat Ronen, were later detained, according to the
Associated Press
[[link removed]].

Violence has continued in Huwara, which was once a thriving commercial
center but, when I visited, had only a trickle of traffic on the main
street.

Even funerals aren’t secure. Mourners gathered in Huwara after an
Oct. 6 attack that resulted in the death of a 19-year-old Palestinian
man who allegedly had thrown a brick at an Israeli vehicle. During the
funeral that same day, settlers and troops attacked again, wounding 51
Palestinians, according to
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Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and a leader of
pro-settler groups, visited the town later and said Israel should take
tougher action against Palestinian militants “to save lives and
reinstate security.”

The day I visited Huwara, the town was still shaken. Jassim Audi had
just reopened his tiny coffee stall a few dozen yards from an Israeli
army guard post. “As long as the army is protecting the settlers, I
won’t have a normal life,” he told me.

This army protection for settlers is one of the most dangerous — and
puzzling — aspects of the settlement mess. Shaul, who runs a group
called Ofek: the Israeli Center for Public Affairs, explained that
with the war in Gaza, West Bank duty has mostly been left to
reservists, some of whom come from the settlements and serve in
“regional defense units.” Some settlers who once served in the
military simply put on their old uniforms when they go raiding, Shaul
said.

Drinking his morning coffee on the quiet, wary main street of Huwara
was Ali Hussein, who lives in a nearby village. He shook his head
cynically as we discussed how to end the violence. “When we talk
about a Palestinian state, it’s unreal,” he told me. “Most of
the land has been taken by settlers.” The Biden administration’s
promise of a happier “day after” was like a drug fix, he said.

My last day in the West Bank, I visited the Kashkeesh family. I met
them 41 years ago
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I spent a week with them in Halhul, near Hebron. When I try to conjure
the reality of Palestinian life, I think of them.

Hammadeh, a stonecutter who was the patriarch of the family, died June
10 at 74. He didn’t live to see the Gaza war, which would have
destroyed what shreds of hope he had left in the future. His wife,
Antissar, still youthful at 60, welcomed me along with her son Mouayed
and several daughters.

Like so many Palestinian families, this one has survived by working
and studying hard, and staying out of trouble. I got a rundown on the
two sons, one a mechanic in Minneapolis now and the other running an
electronics store in Halhul, and the five daughters, who include a
nurse, a law student and a mathematics student.

“Living in the West Bank has become a nightmare,” Mouayed told me.
“You are under siege in your town. You can’t take your family
anywhere. You live in cantons, separated from everyone. What you want
in this moment is to survive, and not to lose anyone in your
family.”

Is there a happy ending to this story? Probably not, unless Biden can
make a diplomatic push that we haven’t seen since the days of
Presidents Jimmy Carter
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Bill Clinton. But on my journey, I met so many brave Israelis and
Palestinians who are working together to document obstacles to peace
that I can see a way forward — if America has the guts to help them.

_David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The
Washington Post. His latest novel is “The Paladin.”  Twitter
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