A History of Settlements

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Speaker 17 There's a highway that runs from Tel Aviv to the northern suburbs, I guess, of Jerusalem.

Speaker 8 It's called Highway 443.

Speaker 17 Much of it runs through the West Bank, and along some parts of it, Are walls with painted murals on them.

Speaker 4 Concrete and brick walls, 20 feet high barriers, and fencing with razor wire on top that separate the highway from the occupied Palestinian territory surrounding it.

Speaker 17 It probably has some security justification.

Speaker 4 The highway makes the trip between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem faster for Israeli citizens, including settlers who live in enclaves in the occupied West Bank.

Speaker 10 Palestinian residents of the West Bank, who are given different colored license plates, are not able to drive on most of the highway.

Speaker 24 To access one part of it, they have to cross a military checkpoint and have a special permit. Most do not.

Speaker 17 So there is a

Speaker 17 kind of out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality that we can superimpose this Israeli reality on this territory with minimal contact or even thinking about Palestinians.

Speaker 17 For Palestinians, it's the exact opposite.

Speaker 17 In order to have that kind of seamless contiguity, you have to disrupt Palestinian society.

Speaker 26 The International Court of Justice says Israel's presence in Palestinian-occupied territories is illegal and should end.

Speaker 17 I think now the international consensus among international human rights groups is that this is a reality of apartheid.

Speaker 2 This is Khaled El-Gindi. He's a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., where he directs the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs.

Speaker 17 Even though we're talking about 700,000 or so settlers compared to 3.1 million Palestinians, they are the marginal community in the West Bank because everything has been set up to serve the settler minority.

Speaker 2 Since the Hamas-led attack on October 7th, 2023, and Israel's invasion of Gaza.

Speaker 2 There's also been escalating violence in the occupied West Bank, the bigger of the two Palestinian territories Israel occupies. It's sandwiched between Israel and Jordan and includes East Jerusalem.

Speaker 27 A Palestinian man was shot dead after a group of armed settlers stormed the village of Jeet, setting homes aflame.

Speaker 4 At the center of the violence is the issue of settlements.

Speaker 10 You might be picturing a few tents on a dusty plain, and there are some like like that.

Speaker 4 But many of the settlements resemble an American suburb with paved roads, nice houses, good schools and playgrounds.

Speaker 16 If you look at a map of the occupied West Bank today, Israeli settlement infrastructure runs throughout the territory, and Palestinian lands look kind of like Swiss cheese, small islands disconnected from one another.

Speaker 33 Today, Israeli settlers are primarily economic settlers.

Speaker 33 They're essentially suburbanites that I believe, if they had been offered the same standard of living at prices that they could afford in other parts of territorial Israel, would have no real reason to be living in the West Bank.

Speaker 2 This is Sarah Yael Hirshorn. She teaches at the University of Haifa and wrote the book, City on a Hilltop, American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement.

Speaker 33 So this leaves maybe

Speaker 33 30% of the Israeli settler enterprise today that identify as religious Zionists.

Speaker 2 Some of whom believe all the land in the West Bank was given to the Jewish people by God and should be part of Israel at any cost.

Speaker 34 I'm saying this very clearly. We will never uproot settlements in the land of Israel.

Speaker 2 The current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been a vocal supporter of the settlements and some of the most prominent positions in his administration are held by extremist settlers, including the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gavir.

Speaker 35 As Israeli police battled Arab stone throwers, right-wing extremist politician Itamar Ben-Gavir showed up and drew his pistol.

Speaker 35 He tweeted that Jewish blood matters and that police should not be constrained by the government from shooting Arab terrorists.

Speaker 36 In this episode, we're going to explore how the settlement movement grew from a small religious mission to one of the central tenets of the current Israeli government.

Speaker 4 It's a story that intersects with other topics we've covered in our series relating to this conflict.

Speaker 19 The history of Hamas, the rise of the Israeli right wing, Hezbollah, and Zionism.

Speaker 2 Coming up, the birth of a city on a hill.

Speaker 39 This is Dr. Robin Neinfeldt from Alaska, and you are listening to ThruLine with NPR.

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Speaker 40 Part 1 on the seventh day.

Speaker 41 Imagine if you were observing a group of people several hundred years ago who boarded a ship called Mayflower

Speaker 41 crossing the ocean and landing on the eastern shores of North America.

Speaker 41 At that time, you were not aware of the fact that actually you are watching

Speaker 41 history.

Speaker 13 What did it look like when you first got there?

Speaker 41 Only bare mountaintops. No, no settlements.

Speaker 37 This is Gideon Aran.

Speaker 36 He was an anthropology and sociology professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for many years.

Speaker 31 And back in the mid-1970s, he spent several years doing research, closely observing one of the first settlements built in the occupied West Bank, Giriat Arba.

Speaker 41 When they have political meetings, when they prayed, when they played with their kids at home, when they were guarding their settlement, I was there all the time, 24 hours, seven days a week.

Speaker 21 Giriat Arba is located just a mile outside the city of Hebron.

Speaker 24 or Khalil in Arabic.

Speaker 40 Hebron is considered a holy site by Muslims, Christians, and Jews, where Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, is buried.

Speaker 21 Gideon learned that this new movement was hoping to settle further and further into what they call the land of Judea and Samaria, which they believed was the birthright of the Jewish people.

Speaker 19 Land that was already inhabited by Palestinians.

Speaker 41 The idea of pushing the frontier, it is inherently violent.

Speaker 20 They called their movement Gush Amunim, Gush Amunim, the block of the faithful.

Speaker 19 Their spiritual leader, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, tied settlements to a religious mission.

Speaker 41 We were walking in the canyons leading from Jerusalem to Jericho,

Speaker 41 late night.

Speaker 41 all dark

Speaker 41 and he looked to me and pointed to a certain hill and said here there'll be a yeshiva

Speaker 41 and here there'll be a school and here there'll be some industry

Speaker 41 i said to myself oh

Speaker 41 this person is cooking

Speaker 41 is dreaming while awake

Speaker 4 Rabbi Levinger and some of his followers had arrived in the city of Hebron with that vision for the future a few years earlier.

Speaker 21 Posing as Swiss tourists, they checked into a hotel to spend Passover there.

Speaker 33 And then they sent a telegram to the head of the military command saying, you know, we had a lovely Passover holiday and we've decided to stay here.

Speaker 4 We've decided to stay here indefinitely in a hotel in the middle of a Palestinian city.

Speaker 44 If the government did say that you had to leave, would you fight the government?

Speaker 45 We won't leave

Speaker 44 under any circumstances.

Speaker 45 Under any circumstances.

Speaker 43 For the followers of Gusha Munim, this was the logical next step in God's plan in the aftermath of what some saw as an act of divine intervention.

Speaker 46 For the third time since its birth as an independent state, Israel is embroiled in a war with the Arab nations that surround it.

Speaker 2 On June 5th, 1967, following an increase in tensions in the region and a series of minor skirmishes, Israel launched a surprise attack against all of Egypt's Air Force bases.

Speaker 33 That was the real superpower of the region was air power.

Speaker 2 War erupted between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. With the shock of the surprise attack and help from Western weapons, Israel swiftly took command of the war.

Speaker 17 And the total humiliation of the Arab militaries across the board in a sweeping way.

Speaker 2 The Arab states concede defeat just six days later.

Speaker 17 I think it's impossible to overstate the elation, euphoria that Israelis felt after the war. I mean, many of them looked at it as a miracle to defeat their enemies in six days.

Speaker 2 It was known as the Six-Day War.

Speaker 41 And from day seven, the question arose: what is to be done with the territories?

Speaker 2 Before 1967, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were separated from Israel by something called the Green Line.

Speaker 2 Very simply, the Green Line was an actual line drawn in actual green pen on a map in 1949 at the end of a bloody war when borders for the new state of Israel were being solidified.

Speaker 2 On one side was the new state of Israel, and on the other side, no Palestinian state was created.

Speaker 2 Instead, Jordan was given control of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Egypt was given control of the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 17 After Israel's creation, none of the Arab states recognized Israel's existence, particularly since Israel had been created at the expense of the local population.

Speaker 17 So about 75% of Palestine's Arab population were expelled or forced to flee and were never allowed to return.

Speaker 2 The 1967 war disrupted all of that. Israel seized control of the territories over that green line.

Speaker 17 The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, plus the Gaza Strip. And Israel also captured Egyptian territory, all of the Sinai Peninsula, and Syrian territory in the Golan Heights.

Speaker 33 The summer of 1967 was spent in the Knesset debating and dithering over what should be the future of these territories.

Speaker 41 Should they return them immediately?

Speaker 33 Could they be exchanged for some kind of peace? You know, the land for peace idea that, you know, Arab pride was tied in part to the future of these pieces of land. So Israel understood that

Speaker 33 there was value to this as a diplomatic tool of the Arab world.

Speaker 41 And some said, by no means, never.

Speaker 10 This wasn't just a discussion about land.

Speaker 11 There were people living on that land.

Speaker 5 People who had grown frustrated with Israel and the Arab states controlling their fates.

Speaker 17 It's after 1967 that the Palestinians kind of politically come into their own.

Speaker 16 The Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, emerged as an autonomous political and military entity representing Palestinians.

Speaker 47 At the moment, after

Speaker 47 we are sure that nobody would do anything for us unless we do something for ourselves, we choose our own way to liberate our own land.

Speaker 4 There was one part of the West Bank that Israel decided to immediately annex, incorporating it into the state of Israel, East Jerusalem.

Speaker 17 It's not recognized by any country, but it was annexed.

Speaker 37 The UN Security Council issued a resolution stating that this action was illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Speaker 2 As for the rest of the West Bank, the Minister of Labor at the time, Gigal Alon, drafted a plan for what to do with it, named after himself.

Speaker 17 The Alon plan was about creating bands of settlements across Jerusalem into the Jordan Valley and then along the north-south axis of the Jordan Valley to ensure that Israel had these quote defensible borders.

Speaker 2 In other words, it would create a buffer between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Speaker 17 So initially, the settlement logic was security-based.

Speaker 2 And he proposed that the settlements should be established in isolated areas to minimize interaction with the local Palestinian population.

Speaker 17 Because that would create problems.

Speaker 2 The Alone Plan was never formally adopted, but it would shape Israeli policy for years to come.

Speaker 2 And amid all of this, the government received word that a few dozen Israelis were refusing to leave a hotel in Hebron.

Speaker 3 Eventually, the Israeli government decided to build them a settlement atop a hill a mile outside Hebron, Gidiat Arba.

Speaker 22 And slowly, more settlers began to move there.

Speaker 8 Gidiat Arba would become a model for future Israeli settlements.

Speaker 45 No doubt, the Arab people of Hebron view the Jewish settlement as an act of revenge.

Speaker 17 Palestinians,

Speaker 17 both local communities and political leaders, recognized instantly the threat that the settlements posed because their parents and grandparents remembered the stories of, you know, one day a thriving Palestinian city and then a shell of its former self completely overtaken.

Speaker 17 In October 1973,

Speaker 17 Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel.

Speaker 2 The surprise attacks came early this morning in the air and on the ground.

Speaker 4 Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in the hopes of reclaiming the territory they lost in the 1967 Six-Day War, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.

Speaker 28 Israel was taken by complete surprise.

Speaker 4 This is Avi Shleim.

Speaker 24 He's an Israeli-British historian and author of the book, The Iron Wall, Israel and the Arab World.

Speaker 28 Israel was in a terrible state.

Speaker 33 The 1973 war was a real chilt to the system. Israel had to get off its kind of, you know, pedestal of euphoria and maybe even hubris after the 1967 war

Speaker 28 in the face of almost certain defeat a general in the israeli army named ariel sharon came up with an idea that would change the course of the war he crossed the suez canal and disrupted one of the supply routes for the egyptian army a ceasefire was negotiated soon after ariel sharon emerges as the savior as the really brave, ingenious soldier who managed to turn the tables on the Egyptians.

Speaker 37 A picture of Sharon became iconic.

Speaker 4 He's standing in front of an Israeli tank, head wrapped in white gauze, blood still visible on his face.

Speaker 16 And that newfound fame gave Sharon a pathway to enter politics and push the country further to the right.

Speaker 28 The Israeli right were divided into different parties, and Ariel Sharon was the strategist who united all these right-wing groups together.

Speaker 2 Sharon struck a deal with Menachem Begin, the leader of a major right-wing group, and together they created a new party called the Likud. In 1977, the Likud party ran in national elections.

Speaker 2 This is how its platform began.

Speaker 17 The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace.

Speaker 17 Therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration. Between the sea and the Jordan, there will only be Israeli sovereignty.

Speaker 42 Last night, the conservative Likud Party, headed by Menachim Begin, swept to victory.

Speaker 17 You now have a Likud right-wing government ideologically committed to settling all of the land.

Speaker 2 And a quick note, the Likud is Benjamin Netanyahu's party, which currently runs the Israeli government.

Speaker 42 Begin adamantly opposes the return of the occupied West Bank to Arab control.

Speaker 2 Minachem Begin was named prime minister, and he appointed Ariel Sharon Minister of Agriculture.

Speaker 2 In that role, Sharon will be responsible for the planning and development of settlements in the occupied territories, which he vocally supported, regardless of international sentiment.

Speaker 52 Are you saying that you think the United States has no business telling you what to do about the settlements here? The United States

Speaker 52 has nothing to say about

Speaker 52 Israeli right to exist or when it comes to our security. That's entirely our problem.

Speaker 10 Coming up, Ariel Sharon takes the settlement movement to new heights.

Speaker 28 Hi, this is Joshua Rooney. I'm calling from Essex Junction, Vermont, and you're listening to True Line from NPR.

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Speaker 21 Part 2.

Speaker 21 The Godfather

Speaker 53 There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future.

Speaker 2 In 1923, years before the foundation of the State of Israel, a man named Zeb Jabotinsky published an article called On the Iron Wall, We and the Arabs.

Speaker 2 Jabotinsky is considered by many to be the spiritual father of the Israeli right, and historian Avi Schleim's book, The Iron Wall, is a reference to his article.

Speaker 53 My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries. Jabotinsky says

Speaker 28 no

Speaker 28 nation in history has ever willingly made room for another people to come and create a state on its land.

Speaker 53 There is no such precedent.

Speaker 28 So Palestinian resistance to the Zionist project of an independent Jewish state in Palestine is inevitable and inescapable. The only way to realize

Speaker 28 the Zionist project is

Speaker 28 behind an iron wall of Jewish military strength, which the native population cannot breach.

Speaker 2 In the early 1920s, Zeb Japotinsky helped found a paramilitary group called the Haganah, which defended the community of Jewish immigrants who had recently settled in what was then still called Palestine.

Speaker 55 At the age of 14, I was initiated.

Speaker 20 In the mid-1940s, a new recruit named Ariel Sharon was initiated into the Haganah.

Speaker 4 He describes the experience in his autobiography, Warrior.

Speaker 55 In an orange grove outside Moshev, a group of us lined up, then went one at a time into a small shed where we stood in front of a Bible and a pistol and took an oath of allegiance.

Speaker 31 Not long after, in 1948, Sharon and his counterparts in the Haganah took up arms in what Israelis call a war for independence, what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.

Speaker 10 The fighting forced around 700,000 Palestinians to flee their homes, some seeking refuge in neighboring countries like Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, others in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Speaker 2 In the Battle of Latrun near Jerusalem, Sharon was shot in the abdomen. Days earlier, he'd heard that Israel had officially become a nation over the radio.

Speaker 2 The new prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, addressed the new nation.

Speaker 2 This is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state.

Speaker 4 And one of the first things Ben-Gurion did after taking office was transform the Haganah into the national military of the new state of Israel, rebranding it the israel defense forces or idf

Speaker 2 for the next few decades sharon would serve in the idf including as the commander of unit 101 where he cultivated his military chops unit 101 carried out reprisal raids on palestinian villages in retaliation for attacks from palestinian and arab guerrilla fighters in israel Many of these reprisal raids were done in secret outside official military protocol.

Speaker 28 On On one of these raids, Ariel Sharon went with his commander unit at night

Speaker 28 and he massacred 69 civilians. This was his first

Speaker 28 war crime,

Speaker 28 but it wasn't his last.

Speaker 56 The West Bank is part of Israel.

Speaker 56 And we must keep this part as part of Israel because of the vital importance of this part of the security of Israel.

Speaker 37 Sharon eventually turned his attention from the battlefield to settlements.

Speaker 4 In his autobiography, he says the presence of Gush Amonim, the group of religious zealots who settled in Gidiat Arba, was the spark needed to set the wheels in motion.

Speaker 24 He called them young pioneers.

Speaker 28 He was

Speaker 28 the main representative in the government on the side of the settlers. He gave them every possible support.

Speaker 19 Sharon began greenlighting more settlements, mainly in the West Bank, but also in Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula, all the territories Israel came to occupy after 1967.

Speaker 51 But then.

Speaker 57 The word came first this morning from the Egyptian Middle East News Agency.

Speaker 31 It reported that Egypt and Israel had agreed on a final draft for a peace in 1978, just a year into the Menachem Begin Likud administration, Israel began peace talks with Egypt.

Speaker 8 The talks were facilitated by the U.S.

Speaker 24 and held at Camp David outside Washington, D.C.

Speaker 4 Egypt would recognize Israel as a state.

Speaker 19 Israel would gain access to the Suez Canal and give back the Sinai Peninsula, where some settlements had already been set up.

Speaker 28 to the peace treaty, but Begin overruled him.

Speaker 19 While negotiations with Egypt were underway, Sharon doubled down on settlement building in the West Bank, as he recounted in his autobiography.

Speaker 55 I received permission to establish three settlements a month.

Speaker 55 Then I really started to push.

Speaker 20 Sharon also believed that if Israelis could only see the settlements for themselves, they'd be less inclined to give them up.

Speaker 55 That was how Sharon Tours was born.

Speaker 36 Sharon Tours.

Speaker 55 Buses with trained guides drove voters up into the mountains where they could actually look down on their homes and envision for themselves the strategic consequences of giving up the line of Western settlements I had built.

Speaker 55 By the time the campaign was over, more than 300,000 people had made the trip.

Speaker 38 From the early 70s to the early 80s, the settlements boomed from around 10,000 people to over 100,000.

Speaker 37 All of these settlements were considered illegal under international law. And it's important to note that there was some opposition within Israel to the settlements from the start.

Speaker 2 But for Ariel Sharon and the Likud government, this was a massive success. And he was promoted to Minister of Defense.

Speaker 28 It was then

Speaker 28 that he became the architect of the ill-conceived and ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Speaker 45 The situation in Beirut is edgy. Many here feel that a full-scale Israeli attack on Palestinian positions throughout Lebanon will soon be launched.

Speaker 2 Yes, Iran. To make a very long story short, Lebanon, which had been embroiled in a civil war for years by 1982, had a large Palestinian refugee population.

Speaker 2 And the PLO, which in the 1970s had carried out violent attacks on civilians inside and outside of Israel, the PLO was then headquartered in Beirut.

Speaker 2 Sharon's goal was to clear the PLO from the border area.

Speaker 28 But he had a much bigger plan in his mind. Weaken the PLO to the point that the Palestinians on the West Bank would be disillusioned.

Speaker 28 This would facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel.

Speaker 17 Judaizing the West Bank through settlement and de-Palestinianizing it politically went hand in hand.

Speaker 2 But Sharon's actions in Lebanon were seen by many around the world as a step too far.

Speaker 58 Today in the camps of Sabra and Shatia, a large plot of unmarked graves bears witness to those who died in the massacre.

Speaker 2 At two Palestinian refugee camps called Sabra and Shatila, as many as 3,000 Palestinians were killed in three days by members of a Lebanese Maronite Christian militia who had been let into the camps by the Israeli army.

Speaker 28 A commission of inquiry found that he was indirectly responsible for this massacre.

Speaker 58 The commission's words are that he ignored or dismissed from his mind the danger of acts of revenge and bloodshed.

Speaker 28 And as a result, Arya Sharon was forced to resign as Minister of Defense.

Speaker 2 Throughout the 1980s, the events in Lebanon and then the outbreak of the First Intifada or Uprising, a grassroots Palestinian movement against occupation that involved mass protests and violence in the occupied territories and Israel, contributed to the rise of more extreme groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, backed by Iran.

Speaker 2 We don't have time to get into all the reasons that that happened, but if you want to hear more about the rise of both groups, check out our episode archives.

Speaker 19 Around the same time, the PLO began rebranding itself as more of a diplomatic group.

Speaker 48 They tacitly recognized Israel's right to exist and accepted the Green Line as the border for a future Palestinian state, which remember was drawn in 1949 to separate Israel from what became the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

Speaker 37 This is all important to the story of settlements because now there was a potential framework for a two-state solution.

Speaker 19 But the settlements were on the wrong side of the Green Line and still expanding.

Speaker 49 Further settlement activity is in no way necessary for the security of Israel and only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs that a final outcome can be freely and fairly negotiated.

Speaker 19 American presidents since 1967 have called the settlements everything from illegal

Speaker 24 territory are illegal to an obstacle to peace.

Speaker 49 Nothing should be done that might interfere with this prospect.

Speaker 60 Welcome to this great occasion of history and hope.

Speaker 8 But when Bill Clinton took office in the early 1990s, he pushed forward with a peace process between Israelis and Palestinians anyway.

Speaker 4 Standing at a podium with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to his right and chairman of the PLO Yassed Adafat to his left, Clinton announced the beginning of the ASL Accords.

Speaker 60 Today, the leadership of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization will sign a Declaration of Principles on Interim Palestinian Self-Government. It charts a course toward reconciliation.

Speaker 30 Clinton didn't mention settlements in the speech.

Speaker 4 The Azo Accords focused on two things: establishing mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, i.e., both sides recognize the other's right to exist, and establishing Palestinian governance over certain parts of the West Bank and Gaza.

Speaker 4 Thornier issues like the status of Jerusalem, refugees, and settlements were set aside for future negotiations.

Speaker 2 Khaled El-Gindi says many Palestinians were wary of proceeding without a settlement freeze because settlements disrupt the whole land for peace formula, right?

Speaker 17 How are we going to negotiate over the fate of this land while you keep gobbling it up?

Speaker 33 During the period of the Oslo peace of wars, the settlement population soars.

Speaker 33 West Bank in particular is really taking off and suburban settlements there are growing in this kind of what I've called the securitized suburbanization of the Israeli settler movement.

Speaker 2 Securitized suburbanization, housing developments with easy commutes to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, with paved roads, groomed lawns, shopping centers, better schools, playgrounds.

Speaker 33 A quality of life that Israelis were attracted to and the government was subsidizing.

Speaker 2 Tax breaks, cheaper housing. And the person in the government creating those subsidized opportunities?

Speaker 3 Ariel Sharon.

Speaker 16 After resigning from his post as Minister of Defense, he spent several years working as Minister of Industry and Trade, then Housing and Construction, and then National Infrastructure.

Speaker 19 Often, the resources that were needed to shore up these suburbanized settlements, water, electricity, roads, agricultural land, directly impacted the availability of those same resources for Palestinians in neighboring communities.

Speaker 33 For settlers, wear the imbalance for sure.

Speaker 33 Does that mean that they want to see Palestinian state and come into existence? I think that's a that's a separate question.

Speaker 2 Sarah Hirshorn says while some settlers said they were willing to leave if a Palestinian state was formed, there was a vocal extremist group.

Speaker 33 So actually you want to see the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and you know full Israeli sovereignty until the end of time.

Speaker 2 And some of those extreme voices didn't come from within Israel.

Speaker 17 The U.S. is almost ground zero for outside support for settlements in the occupied territories.

Speaker 2 At the same time that American officials were negotiating a potential two-state solution.

Speaker 17 The settler movement has an elaborate infrastructure of non-profits and charitable organizations, tax-exempt groups in the United States that raise money for and funnel resources into the settlements.

Speaker 17 There is also a strong constituency of non-Jews who are supporting the settlements, namely evangelical Christians.

Speaker 17 And so it's very hard in this political environment for U.S. administrations to take actions against settlements.

Speaker 4 Some American settlers were drawn to Kiriyat Arba, the place where Rabbi Levenger and the followers of Gush Amonim first settled.

Speaker 33 Kira Arba begins to be a settlement that has a growing reputation for radicalism.

Speaker 33 A few small, fringe, but very important terrorist groups within the Gush Amunim community, and more largely were known as the Machterid or the Jewish Underground, carried out some very severe and significant attacks.

Speaker 54 God willing, we shall establish the state of Judea here, and we will know how to take care of them ourselves.

Speaker 37 Members of the Jewish underground were eventually arrested, but attacks continued. One of the most severe happened in 1994, less than a year after the first Azlo Accord was signed.

Speaker 4 An American-born physician named Baruch Goldstein, who had settled in Kiriat Arba, went to the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, also holy to Jews as the cave of the patriarchs, during morning prayer.

Speaker 4 It was the 15th day of Ramadan.

Speaker 24 Then he opened fire.

Speaker 39 Gunning down 29 Palestinians as they were praying.

Speaker 39 In the aftermath, It's Hakrabin, remember the person who signed Oslo, this was the labor government, so-called left-wing. He faced two choices.

Speaker 39 Choice number one, which was to take the settlers out of Hebron, or number two,

Speaker 39 double down, keep the settlers there, and militarize the Ibrahimi mosque against Palestinians.

Speaker 15 This is Deanna Butu.

Speaker 22 She's a Palestinian Canadian lawyer who now lives between Haifa in Israel and Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Speaker 39 He chose the latter.

Speaker 61 Israel sent extra troops into the occupied territories, placed a curfew on Hebron, and closed off the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 39 Palestinians were no longer the people who

Speaker 39 were the owners of the land. We were now turned into effectively the thieves and the interlopers, the people people who shouldn't belong.

Speaker 8 And we were treated as such.

Speaker 42 The very young chant the word Palestine, an act of faith. So far, they have escaped the despair.
But for most Palestinians, faith in a future democracy has declined.

Speaker 2 By the late 1990s, the lack of progress in the Oslo peace process and escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians was leading to more disillusionment and extremism.

Speaker 57 The bombing occurred at an outdoor marketplace, injuring at least 21 others. The Islamic militant group Hamas has claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Speaker 2 Palestinians grew frustrated with the PLO, which was increasingly seen as corrupt and willing to compromise on the fundamentals of Palestinian statehood.

Speaker 2 And in Israel, the man who had launched the Oslo era alongside Clinton and Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a Jewish religious extremist.

Speaker 17 There was this fear that Oslo was moving inevitably and irreversibly toward giving up the West Bank in Gaza and possibly even East Jerusalem.

Speaker 18 Seizing on this fear, a now elderly Ariel Sharon took over as leader of the increasingly hardline Likud Party.

Speaker 4 On Israeli state radio, he'd recently said, quote, Everybody has to move, run, and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements.

Speaker 6 Because everything we take now will stay ours.

Speaker 22 Everything we don't grab will go to them.

Speaker 2 Coming up, Ariel Charon makes an unlikely comeback.

Speaker 54 Hi, this is Grace from Green Bay, Wisconsin, and you're listening to TrueLine from MTR.

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Speaker 14 Part 3.

Speaker 21 A New Reality

Speaker 4 In the early morning hours of September 28th, 2000, Ariel Sharon arrived in the old city of Jerusalem, atop what Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call Haram El Sharif.

Speaker 31 Both consider it one of the holiest places on the planet.

Speaker 4 Thousands of Palestinians were there that day.

Speaker 62 The Likud party is here today with a message of peace, he said.

Speaker 28 He said

Speaker 28 he was carrying a peace message,

Speaker 28 but he was surrounded with a thousand security people, so he was being deliberately provocative.

Speaker 4 Behind the scenes, negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials had stalled.

Speaker 17 Jerusalem had become so central because now the parties were talking about Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem and dividing Jerusalem.

Speaker 17 And that was just totally unacceptable for Sharon and others in his ideological family.

Speaker 28 So the situation was like a barrel of gunpowder. Then Sharon threw a match to the gunpowder.

Speaker 17 Clashes break out.

Speaker 62 Just after he left the platform, a crowd of some 200 Palestinians began hurling stones at police.

Speaker 17 Protesters are shocked.

Speaker 62 Today's violence in Jerusalem quickly spread to Ramallah on the West Bank. Before you know it, Palestinian students chanted, We're ready for a revolution.

Speaker 28 The second Iltifada

Speaker 45 was unleashed. We're ready for a revolution.

Speaker 39 I arrived on the first day of the second uprising.

Speaker 39 I had no idea.

Speaker 2 Diana Butu had come to the West Bank to be part of the Palestinian negotiations team that was working towards a two-state solution. She would also serve as a spokesperson for the PLO during this time.

Speaker 63 The Palestinian uprising is now in its second month, with no sign of abating. More than 135 people have been killed so far, all but eight Palestinians.

Speaker 62 Palestinian leaders basically say their aim is to play both cards. They want to use the violence to fight the Israeli occupation.

Speaker 62 With their overall goal, a return to the peace talks, Israel says this is impossible to do both at the same time.

Speaker 2 With elections around the corner and the second intifada continuing, the sitting prime minister, Ehud Barak, faced an unlikely challenger, Ariel Sharon.

Speaker 62 Even though Sharon isn't that popular among Israelis, to many Israelis, the right wing looks very prescient now for saying for so long the Palestinians didn't want peace.

Speaker 2 In February 2001, Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister and doubled down on settlements.

Speaker 45 The government of Israel will act to restore the security and stability we need.

Speaker 39 And it was terrifying.

Speaker 39 This was a man who, in the aftermath of the massacre of Sabran Shatila, was declared to not be fit to be minister of defense. But it's okay for him to be prime minister.

Speaker 39 I knew that his rise to power was not only going to lead to a rise in settlements, he laid the groundwork for some of the most horrendous things to be done against Palestinians.

Speaker 9 Not long into his term, Sharon announced plans to erect a security barrier, some call it a separation wall, all along the border between the West Bank and Israel.

Speaker 5 but not along the old Green Line border.

Speaker 4 Almost 90% of the barrier is built on the Palestinian side, snaking deep into the West Bank to surround the main Jewish settlement blocks built on occupied territory.

Speaker 4 He said it was in response to a wave of suicide bombings and attacks in Israel carried out by Palestinians during the Second Intifada.

Speaker 28 But I would argue the real purpose, or one of the purposes, of the security barrier was land grabbing.

Speaker 31 Avi Schleim says the West Bank security barrier was Sharon's way of preserving a version of the the dream of Greater Israel amid the negotiations.

Speaker 28 The wall marked what he hoped would be the final borders of the state of Israel.

Speaker 16 Throughout his time in office, Sharon implemented more physical barriers between settler and Palestinian communities.

Speaker 13 Concrete walls, chain-link fences, patrolled roads, military checkpoints.

Speaker 39 And that means that every time I exit Ramallah or enter Ramallah, I need to go through an Israeli military checkpoint. It means that I'm always confronting an Israeli soldier.

Speaker 39 It means that my car is always being searched, my papers are being searched, there is almost daily violence at these checkpoints because their whole point is to ensure free movement of the Israeli settlers, but not free movement of Palestinians.

Speaker 17 I can remember being shocked by

Speaker 17 how

Speaker 17 little consideration there was for how things like settlement infrastructure

Speaker 17 affected people on the ground.

Speaker 2 While Sharon was in office, Khaled El-Gindi was hired as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership on negotiations with Israel.

Speaker 17 I was based in Ramallah and I was in charge of the settlements file and I spent five and a half years kind of up close and personal with that issue.

Speaker 2 He visited Palestinian communities all across the West Bank.

Speaker 17 We went to visit people whose homes, one portion of their home, was now off limits because the wall came right through it.

Speaker 39 We, as Palestinians, were invisible to them.

Speaker 19 A group known as the Hilltop Youth emerged around this time, galvanized by Sharon's message to grab as many hilltops as they could.

Speaker 57 Every hill is territory of the land of Israel.

Speaker 57 Every hill must be conquered.

Speaker 4 They established new unofficial outposts, sometimes in defiance of state authorities.

Speaker 39 And Deanna Butu says some of them are known for using their weapons, pointing a weapon

Speaker 39 at your car,

Speaker 39 and forcing you to stop. If you don't stop, they shoot at you.

Speaker 39 It's a daily form of

Speaker 39 being afraid that they're going to attack you.

Speaker 2 And then, in 2005, Sharon came up with an idea that seemed to contradict his decades-long commitment to the settlement project.

Speaker 33 He essentially floats this idea that it was time for a disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 33 And that would involve evacuating all the civilian settlements there, as well as any military infrastructure and economic development.

Speaker 2 All 8,000 settlers in Gaza had to leave. Some refused and were forcibly removed.

Speaker 33 You know, historians ponder: was this the prelude to a large-scale disengagement for the West Bank, or was this

Speaker 33 actually a way to shore up the West Bank settlement project? That it was necessarily almost to sacrifice Gaza to ensure that the West Bank settlements could, you know, continue to thrive forever.

Speaker 28 In the following year, he introduced 12,000 new settlers to the West Bank.

Speaker 28 It was a prelude to consolidating Israel's grip and control over the West Bank. The West Bank was much more important than Gaza.
The West Bank was Judean Sumeria.

Speaker 28 The West Bank was an integral part of the historic homeland. Gaza wasn't.

Speaker 2 Even so, the decision to withdraw from Gaza was deeply controversial within Israel, and it remains controversial to this day.

Speaker 2 A couple of years later, in 2007, Hamas seized power in Gaza after a brief conflict with the Palestinian authority.

Speaker 33 You know, for many Israelis, there's a direct line between that and October 7th.

Speaker 2 In a dramatic twist of fate.

Speaker 33 Shortly after this all took place, Ariel Sharon suffers this catastrophic stroke, which leaves him in a coma for eight years. And never regains consciousness.

Speaker 59 President Obama is among the world leaders, remembering Sharon as a leader who dedicated his life to Israel.

Speaker 52 President Shimon Perez, as Israel has lost his life.

Speaker 39 When he died,

Speaker 39 the way that people eulogized him totally ignored the harm that he caused.

Speaker 39 Not just directly, but setting into place this path of just dealing with Palestinians with endless force, no limits, and the world never stopping him.

Speaker 41 As I met Rabbi Levinger at the very beginning, he told me that his success would be defined in terms of people

Speaker 41 inhabiting the West Bank who have nothing to do with the original ideas of Gushimonim,

Speaker 41 people of the middle class want to better their life.

Speaker 4 Today, there are more than 130 settlements that are officially recognized by the Israeli government.

Speaker 13 And then there are a number of unofficial outposts, the kind the hilltop youth have established, with estimates ranging between 100 and 191.

Speaker 4 Only around a third of settlers today settle in the West Bank for religious reasons.

Speaker 13 The majority say they do it for a better quality of life.

Speaker 39 But the quality of life is at the expense of whom? For whom is it quality of life?

Speaker 39 The decades of violence that these settlements are built on, maintained on, the violence that they continue to cause to Palestinians each and every day, and the fact that they can't see the violence is itself very violent.

Speaker 28 In recent years, we have seen the escalation of settler violence against the residents of the West Bank with the active support of the government.

Speaker 28 And today, the settlers are a major political force in the country.

Speaker 25 Israel's Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gavir, is actually a settler in Gidiat Arba.

Speaker 19 Today, there's a memorial to Baruch Goldstein there.

Speaker 3 And some within the settler movement are now calling for a resettlement of Gaza.

Speaker 17 Now,

Speaker 17 the settler reality is the dominant reality, and the Palestinian presence is the marginal presence. The settlements and the army control 61% of the West Bank.

Speaker 17 So the settler reality has completely flipped since Oslo, ironically, since the start of the peace process.

Speaker 33 Today, I just feel like the Oslo rubric is no longer, you know, no longer in effect. Everybody's in their own one-state paradigm.

Speaker 33 Seems to me like well beyond the question of the Israeli settler movement post-1967.

Speaker 33 We're back in a 1948 paradigm and a 1948 existential conflict about why did a state of Israel come into existence and a state of Palestine did not and how is that going to be historically redressed?

Speaker 39 You asked me when does it begin for me? It begins with that ideology that there are some people who are deserving of rights

Speaker 39 and other people who are not.

Speaker 39 And I think that's the part that Israel has to understand.

Speaker 39 They can't live

Speaker 39 their lives just somehow assuming that all of the violence that they put out is not going to have a boomerang effect.

Speaker 33 Many Israelis fear that, you know, what happened in Gaza could happen in the West Bank.

Speaker 2 An IDF spokesperson says attacks on Israeli targets in the region have increased significantly since the war started.

Speaker 2 The spokesperson said IDF soldiers handle attacks on Israeli citizens while Israeli police handle violations by Israeli citizens, including violent incidents directed at Palestinians, with support as needed from IDF soldiers.

Speaker 39 In the West Bank, it's terrifying to be there. The Israeli army has been going into,

Speaker 39 particularly in the northern part of the West Bank, and destroying the cities and killing people as they choose.

Speaker 39 Who do I turn to

Speaker 39 for that safety and security? There is no rule of law.

Speaker 39 It's rule of power.

Speaker 14 It's the law of power.

Speaker 8 That's it for this week's show.

Speaker 43 I'm Randabdil Fattah.

Speaker 2 I'm Ramteen Arab Louis, and you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 4 This episode was produced by me.

Speaker 1 And me, and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya Steinberg, Casey Miner, Christina Kim, Devin Katayama, Sarah Wyman, Lina Mohammed, Irene Naguchi.

Speaker 2 Thanks to Tony Cavan, James Hyder, Daniel Estrin, Greta Pittinger, Johannes Durgi, Puneet Matiwala, Nina Puchalski, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

Speaker 31 Voiceover work in this episode was done by Devin Schwartz, Casey Morrell, and Nick Neves.

Speaker 2 Back-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. This episode was mixed by Gilly Moon.

Speaker 25 Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Show Fujiwara.

Speaker 2 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, write us at throughline at npr.org.

Speaker 29 Thanks for listening.

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