Israeli settlements, and the expanding divide of settlers and Palestinians

West Virginia native Rachel Braslavi says she moved into her new home so that her family could have more space, and more of a community feel. But she faces bigger questions than she might with a typical home purchase. Their community is the Israeli settlement of Karnei Shomron, located inside the occupied West Bank.

Asked if she sees her family of settlers as impediments to peace, Braslavi replied, “No. I don’t. I really don’t. I feel that we have a right to be here. And I feel that the Palestinians have a right to be here.”

“On this land?” I asked.

“Not this house,” Braslavi said. “But I mean, in the area.”

This settlement, like hundreds of others, is carved into Palestinian land, surrounded by a security fence.  The border separating the West Bank from Israel is called the Green Line. It was drawn as part of an armistice agreement following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which was sparked when the modern state of Israel was formed.

But after Israel’s stunning military success in the Six Day War of 1967, Israel took more land, occupying the Palestinian territories, and Israeli citizens began building settlements. 

Today, upwards of 700,000 Israelis live in these communities, which the United Nations calls illegal. They’re scattered inside the West Bank and East Jerusalem. About 15% of settlers are Americans.

But Rachel Braslavi does not see herself as living on Palestinian land: “No. I don’t. I think that some of the first places that Jews arrived to back in Biblical times were in Judea and Samaria. So, to me, this is part of our indigenous right to be here.”

I asked, “How much of your decision to move here to a settlement was cost of living versus ideology?”

“I came from America when I was in my 20s to live in Israel,” she said. “And I kind of thought of that move as, like, my contribution to the Jewish people in our homeland. It didn’t matter where I lived in Israel.

“And my husband grew up here, and he saw it differently. He really thought, to contribute in a meaningful way, it was moving across the Green Line and establishing, like, facts on the ground.”

“What does ‘facts on the ground’ mean?”

“Just strengthening the existing Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria,” Braslavi replied.

“In the West Bank?

“Yes.”

The settler population has grown more than 200 percent since 2000. The Israeli government encourages these moves, paying for the military to guard them, and funding public services like buses and schools.

Judith Segaloff moved to Karnei Shomron seven years ago from Detroit, and says she was able to afford a bigger house here than she would have on the other side of the Green Line. She took us on a tour. “Across the street is our mall,” she said. “We’ve got an ice cream shop. Here’s our sushi shop.”

I asked, “Do you have friends or family who don’t agree with you living in a settlement?”

“For sure,” Segaloff said. “Some of them won’t come visit.”

Segaloff says she’s excited by plans to expand a settlement just up the road. She believes Israeli presence offers security.

“But it’s also a contested place,” I said, “a place considered an occupied territory.”

“By some,” Segaloff said.

“By the international community.”

“Well, they’re gonna have to get over it,” Segaloff said. “You cannot live among people who want to kill you. They’re just gonna have to move over and let us in.”

But not far away, on the other side of checkpoints and a security barrier, we met Palestinian Saher Eid, who lives in the West Bank village where his great-grandfather was born.

Asked about settlers’ claims that – historically, Biblically – the land is theirs, Eid said, “We have documents that prove we own this land, which we’ve farmed since forever. Ask the settlers where they are from?”

He and his wife, Tamador, a high school science teacher, invited us to tea. They say they’re most concerned about rising violence from Israeli settlers, emboldened by Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly right-wing government. Since October 7th last year, the U.N. figures there have been more than 1,400 attacks by extremist settlers against Palestinians or their property.

The Eids are also frustrated that the fence and checkpoints around a settlement have cut them off from their own olive trees. Saher said his freedom was taken away: “He stole my land. He stole my olives. He stole everything.”

I asked, “Is there any space for introspection here? Do you ever think, ‘Maybe we aren’t the best partners to try to find a path toward peace’?

“We believe that if there was a Palestinian state without settlements, there would be wide support for peace,” Saher said.

The differences on this side of the security barrier are stark. Incomes are a fraction of those in Israel, and Israel controls the water and much of the tax revenue.

Saher said he would welcome an Israeli who lives in Tel Aviv into his home, but not a settler: “No, because he’s a thief.”

Assaf Sharon, a professor of political and legal philosophy at Tel Aviv University, noted, “James Carville coined the phrase, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ In Israel-Palestine, ‘It’s the settlements, stupid.'”

In regards to settlers who claim that they did not take anyone’s land, that no one was living there before them, Sharon said, “Well, of course, it wasn’t done individually. Occupying a land doesn’t mean you have a house on it. It can be grazing land. It can be land reserves for future building. And it can be just the area that is reserved for self-determination of a people.”

“Settlers make a security argument, that Israel is safer with the settlements,” I said.

“The security argument is completely bogus,” Sharon replied. “The settlements are not a security asset; they are a security burden, because defending, protecting scores of civilians, deep in densely populated Palestinian territory, is one hell of a burden for the military.”

He added, “The best way to ensure Israel’s security is to have partnership with the state or state-like entity that has an interest in preventing precisely this kind of hostile activity.”

David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said, “We have ideologues on both sides of this equation that are determined to thwart any accommodation.”

In 2013, Makovsky was part of the team trying to negotiate a peace deal. That failed proposal, and two others, would have seen Palestinians keep about 95% of the West Bank.

But today, with the increasing number of settlements – blue dots on the map, some far from the Green Line – it may be even more complicated to determine borders in a two-state solution.

The negotiations changed under Donald Trump, said Makovsky: “Until Trump, all of the U.S. peace approaches were similar. Under Trump, working with Prime Minister Netanyahu, he doesn’t want to pick and choose which settlements make it and which don’t. So, the prime minister convinced the president that every single settlement is called Israel. Now that creates an impossible situation of Swiss cheese. Any Palestinian entity is now going to be dotted with settlements.”

Now, settlers may have another ally with sway in President-elect Trump’s nominee to be the next ambassador to Israel: Mike Huckabee, who has said he’s open to annexing parts of the West Bank.

But there is historical precedent for evacuating settlements. Almost 20 years ago, the Israeli government advocated that leaving Gaza was a path to peace.

According to Makovsky, “2005 is for the settlers their Waterloo, their defeat.” That’s when Israel removed all 8,000 settlers from Gaza.

Back then, I profiled a 17-year-old who was being forced to leave Gush Katif, her settlement in Gaza. Nineteen years later, settlements are still front-page news. “Yes, that’s how it is in Israel,” said Rachel Yechieli Gross. Today, she is now a mom with three kids, and no longer lives in a settlement.

I asked, “The fact that you left your home, your settlement as a teenager, shows that settlements can be closed. Might that be a step toward peace?”

“After October 7th, I’m not so sure anymore, because I really believed that there could be change,” said Gross. “But I don’t feel that anymore.”

Makovsky blamed the terror group Hamas, which he said “has really led to the growth of the Israeli right. If people in Israel thought that a Palestinian state was Costa Rica, they would line up to sign, ’cause they want to end the conflict. They just want to be safe. But if they feel a Palestinian state is a mini-Iran, you can’t find enough people in the phone booth.”

Back in the West Bank, Rachel Braslavi and her family are just five of the 700,000 Israeli settlers who are working to change, as she puts it, “the facts on the ground.”

“I wouldn’t leave willingly, because I’m raising my family here and I’ve, you know, built my dream home,” she said. “Why does the peace agreement have to be at my expense, to give up my home?”

       
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Story produced by Sari Aviv. Editor: Ed Givnish.