Extremist entitlement: Jewish settler activists hastily erecting outposts inside the Israeli military’s buffer zone for the Gaza Strip at the Erez crossing. — Photos: LAT/TNS
CARRYING planks of plywood, a group of Israeli settlers pushed past soldiers guarding the barrier surrounding the Gaza Strip and quickly got to work. Within minutes, the young men had erected two small buildings – outposts, they said, of a future Jewish settlement in the war-torn Palestinian enclave.
Their movement had hungered for this moment for years, but now, after Oct 7 when the current war began, they felt it was just a matter of time before Jews would be living in Gaza again. “It is ours,” said David Remer, 18. “[God] said it is ours.”
Religious Zionists, who believe the Jewish people have divine authority to rule from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, make up only around 14% of Israel’s population. But in recent years they have greatly expanded their influence in the military, the government and society at large, and their often-extremist ideology is helping shape Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
Although they are not politically homogeneous, most religious Zionists embrace far-right views. They loudly oppose a ceasefire deal to bring home Israeli hostages, and have repeatedly blocked humanitarian assistance from entering Gaza by standing in front of aid trucks.
They see the deadly Oct 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel as proof of their longtime assertion that peace cannot be made with the Palestinians, and view Gaza as a territory that they have a religious obligation to conquer. Increasingly, they have called for the expulsion of the 2.3 million Palestinians living there.
First, they dream of reestablishing Gush Katif, a bloc of Jewish settlements that existed in Gaza until Israel withdrew from the enclave in 2005.
ALSO READ: Operation Occupation: Israel has been illegally expanding its borders for decades
It’s a goal embraced by some of the top leaders in Israel’s far-right government, many of whom appeared at a recent Jerusalem rally pushing for Gaza’s resettlement. While videos played showing Israel’s brutal military assault on the enclave and organisers shared brochures promising new houses with views of the Mediterranean Sea, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir sang religious songs alongside participants and told them: “Now is the time to return home.”
‘A holy war’
On the battlefield, some religious soldiers have filmed themselves dancing with Torah scrolls and waving the orange flags of Gush Katif. Other combatants travel with mezuzahs, small boxes containing biblical scriptures meant to be hung outside Jewish residences, to affix to Palestinian homes.
Reuven Gal, former chief psychologist for the military and a researcher at the Israel Institute of Technology, says that for many soldiers, the Gaza conflict that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians is “not just a military operation”.
“For them,” he said, “it’s a holy war.”
Yair Margolis, an army reservist who was called up from his yeshiva (religious) studies last year to fight in Gaza, said during a recent break from battle that the war had a clear spiritual dimension.
“Going back to that land is returning home,” he said. “This is where we are from, and this is what we are fighting for.”
It’s a vision starkly at odds with Israel’s mainstream, even as the country’s political centre has shifted discernibly to the right in recent years. A January poll by Israel’s Channel 12 broadcaster found that 51% of Israelis oppose building Jewish settlements in Gaza, compared with 38% who support doing so.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a right-wing populist, has called settling Gaza “unrealistic”. But in 2022, as his ongoing corruption trials left him isolated, Netanyahu made a deal with several religious Zionist parties to form a coalition government, and his political future is now closely tied to theirs.
Beyond a pledge to maintain indefinite military control over Gaza and eventually turn over administrative duties to Pales-tinians, Netanyahu’s postwar strategy remains murky, leaving a vacuum, political analysts say, that the religious right is eager to fill.
In a recent video from Gaza circulated on social media, an Israeli soldier dressed in camouflage stands smiling with a machine gun in front of a bombed-out building. He directly addresses Netanyahu, who is widely known by his nickname “Bibi”.
“We are occupying, deporting and settling,” the soldier says. “Do you hear that, Bibi?”
Occupation ambitions
Those hoping to establish Jewish settlements in Gaza say they will model their strategy on the West Bank, where today 500,000 settlers live among three million Palestinians.
Since Oct 7, tensions in Gaza have been simmering as the line between settlers and soldiers has become increasingly blurred.
After the Hamas attack in southern Israel killed around 1,200 people, hundreds of thousands of Israeli reservists were called up for duty. Many reservists in the West Bank were instructed to don uniforms and guard their own communities.
Among them were Yosef Shalom Sheinman, 30, who is from Har Bracha, a mountain settlement overlooking the Palestinian city of Nablus.
Sheinman’s parents helped found Har Bracha in 1987 amid protests from Jewish leftists and the Palestinians who once grazed sheep here. His younger brother, 27-year-old Yishai, belongs to a famously violent extremist group known as the Hilltop Youth, which is devoted to expanding Israeli control of the region. “These are kids who would eat Arabs for breakfast,” their father says proudly.
For decades, Israeli soldiers have been deployed throughout the West Bank to protect existing settlements, which most of the world considers illegal under international law. But the soldiers are also often instructed to stop the building of illegal settlement outposts. In the past, they sometimes clashed with Yishai, tearing down new outposts he and his friends had erected.
Now many of the soldiers in the region are Yishai’s friends – or, in the case of Yosef Shalom, his family.
The reservists are not curtailing settlement expansion, Yosef Shalom said. Instead, they’re focused on patrolling nearby Palestinian villages – and making sure they aren’t growing. His unit recently cut a new road through a stretch of hillside between a Palestinian hamlet and Har Bracha, effectively claiming the area for the settlement.
“This is our land,” he said. “And God is with us.”
A crowd celebrating at a Jerusalem convention organised by far-right activists seeking expansion onto more Palestinian land.
On a recent afternoon, Yosef Shalom stood with his father, Avraham Sheinman, taking in views sweeping from the peaks of Jordan to the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv. Avraham clutched a well-worn Torah, which he consulted frequently to highlight passages he says show that Jews have a religious obligation to be here. “We have a commandment to conquer it,” he said.
He spoke of a war with Palestinians, but also of “an inner war” within Israel.
“Who are we? What direction are we going?” he asked. “Are we going in the direction of our destiny as a chosen people in the Land of Israel – as a Jewish state according to Jewish law? Or are we a secular leftist copy of Europe or America?”
Many on the other side of the political divide view that question with the same urgency.
In an interview with Sky News this month, writer and historian Yuval Noah Harari said the biggest threat to Israel is not Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran, but Jewish extremism: “There is really a battle for the soul of the Israeli nation between patriotism on the one side and ideals of Jewish supremacy on the other.”
It is too early to say exactly how the Hamas attack and the Gaza war will shape that debate. But early indications suggest they have awakened new support for the right.
Zooming Zionists
Protests near the Egyptian border to halt aid delivery into Gaza were first organised by religious Zionists, but now draw secular participants. And while much of the international community holds out hope that the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza will one day be recognised as a Palestinian country, faith among Israelis in a two-state solution has dimmed.
A Tel Aviv University poll found that support for peace negotiations among Israeli Jews had fallen from 48% just before the Hamas attacks to 25% a few weeks after.
Leaders of the religious right, meanwhile, are using the war as an opportunity to push through extreme policies.
Ben-Gvir, the national security chief, leads the Jewish Power party and has helped arm thousands of Israeli civilians by relaxing restrictions on gun ownership. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionist Party, recently announced plans to expand settlements in the West Bank by more than 3,000 homes. Both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who has been convicted of inciting racism and supporting terrorism, live in the West Bank.
Life for Palestinians there has gotten markedly worse since Oct 7, with more than 600 settler attacks against Palestinians recorded since the war broke out, according to the United Nations, and more than 1,200 Palestinians displaced from their homes.
An Israeli soldier ordering Palestinian children in the West Bank city of Hebron to go back inside.
Palestinian activist Issa Amro lives in the historic centre of Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank, in the midst of a heavily guarded Jewish settlement.
On the day of the Hamas attack, he was returning from work when several neighbours surprised him in an olive grove and began assaulting him. Some, he said, wore army uniforms likely leftover from their military service.
Amro was then taken to a military base, where he says he was detained for 10 hours and beaten.
Amro said he lives in fear. Every day he passes former Palestinian businesses shuttered by settlers, as well as a sign that says: “We’re occupying Gaza now.”
“Every metre I walk, I think I may be shot,” he said.
Amro said he doesn’t blame the settlers themselves so much as the political leaders who have allowed the settlements to flourish. He pointed to Netanyahu, who allied with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, and to former US president Donald Trump, who as president abandoned Washington’s long-held position that West Bank settlements violate international law. “Netanyahu made them mainstream,” Amro said. “The Trump administration made them mainstream.”
Current US President Joe Biden has since reversed the United States’ stance on West Bank settlements – and recently imposed sanctions on four Israeli settlers for carrying out violence against Palestinians. And US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken says Washington opposes the reoccupation of the Gaza Strip by Israel and any reduction of the Palestinian territory’s size.
Joel Carmel, a former Israeli soldier who is now a peace activist, said the future of Jewish settlements in Gaza may depend on who wins the US election in November.
“Probably the only thing holding back the resettlement of Gaza is the Biden administration,” he said. “And who knows how long that’s going to last.”
Israeli troops try to to stop one of many far-right activists from entering the Erez Crossing military buffer zone into Gaza. — Los Angeles Times/TNS
Many Palestinians in the West Bank think its only matter of time before Israeli settlers move permanently into Gaza.
Areej Al Jaabari, a mother in Hebron, has watched as settlements have crept nearer and nearer to her family home. Ben-Gvir lives in a sprawling suburban community she can see from her living room window.
“They’re gradually accomplishing their goals,” she said of the settlers. “Eventually they will control everything in Gaza too.” – Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service
