Ariel, with nearly 20,000 inhabitants, is one of the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It is near Huwara, in the heart of the Palestinian territory, on top of a hill, and can only be reached by car or bus on a road closed on both sides and after the approval of the police checkpoint that inspects each vehicle which approaches the entrance.
In Ariel, the mistrust is maximum. It stops the “terrorist” violence of the Palestinians, according to the representative of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Shlomo Neeman. However, outside of Ariel and the settlements, he also encourages the violence of some of the settlers.
The Israeli Observatory Yesh Din records it and the data says it all: since October 7, settlers have increased attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank and in 2023 there were up to 242 cases of assaults, fire to homes, cars and more. It has been the “most violent” year since 2006, it concludes, and the dilemma of a possible reappearance of Jewish terrorism is back in the foreground.
“I hope he doesn’t come back. I hope it doesn’t happen”, exclaims Mario Sznajder, professor emeritus of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the subject, but who at the same time adds that “there are reports that among the most extremist settlers, a fanatical minority who follow the Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was racist against Arabs and was killed in 1990, attacks the Palestinians. They call them the youth of the hill.
No one knows how many there are. “Dozens, maybe hundreds, but enough to exploit the violence”, details Sznajder. And many are concentrated in small settlements in the Huwara area.
One of the young men on the hill is Aviad Frija, the reservist who on November 30 shot and killed Yuval Doron Castleman, a 38-year-old lawyer who intervened with a rifle to stop the three Hamas terrorists who attacked Jerusalem that day . Frija mistook him for a terrorist. And he shot him, even though he was apparently kneeling with his shirt open trying to identify himself. He merely said on television that it was his duty to kill the terrorists and that he was one of the young men on the hill.
“The colonists are mostly not terrorists; they may be nationalists, and even supremacists, but not terrorists. The youth of the hill are not afraid to take out a weapon if a stone is thrown at them. According to the majority of Israeli public opinion, they are terrorists, fanatics, racists and xenophobes”, insists Sznajder.
However, the young people on the hill protest because they are aligned with the approaches of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the current Minister of Security in the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the same one who has relaxed the criteria for Israeli civilians to carry weapons. And their affection is evident from the number of rifles that can be seen on their shoulders in the streets.
Adva Oved runs a sweets, ice cream and coffee shop in Ariel and says that in the settlement they have a good relationship with the Arab neighbors, but in turn admits that there is violence, “which comes from before Gaza”, he explains, “and especially there are in the mountains, more towards the interior”. “Ariel has now stopped, but it’s always a ‘today they attack one and then the other'”, he sums up. Leonid, another resident of this settlement full of parks and low houses almost all the same, adds: “On the road sometimes there are problems with stones or shots, although it is worse in the settlements that are more towards the “inner”.
The situation is a tug-of-war between violent people on both sides, everyone repeats, “in which it is the civilians who end up being the victims. Most of the acts of the young people on the hill are symbolic and spread hatred,” continues Professor Sznajder.
However, there is a fear of a return to the drama that ran parallel to the peace talks in the 1990s, when Baruch Goldstein, an Orthodox Jewish doctor and fundamentalist Zionist from a Hebron settlement, murdered 29 Muslims praying in the Ibrahim mosque, also sacred to Jews because it is the tomb of the patriarchs.
In Degania, in Israel’s first kibbutz, a small agricultural community near Jordan and Syria, Aner Wacobe, a former soldier in the West Bank, told this newspaper: “The problem is that there are 15% on each side who bad for everyone”. In Jerusalem, Aram Khatchadourian, a tourist guide now out of work, said: “There are fanatics everywhere”. And Yossi Beilin, architect of the Oslo peace accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians in the nineties, summed it up in La Vanguardia in Tel-Aviv: “The biggest challenge is knowing what to do with the half a million settlers on the Palestinian side”. It seems so.
