Noam: Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and you’re listening to Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history.
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Okay, yalla, let’s do this.
Last week you heard me speak with Haviv Rettig Gur about the history of the settler movement in Israel and the phenomenon often called settler violence. We spoke about the history of the West Bank, slash Judea and Samaria, before and after 1967 and about what’s happening today.
It’s a hard conversation to have in some ways because what’s happening there is contentious. It’s polarizing. It’s explosive. And people have very strong opinions, often before seeing evidence. And this cuts both and always. If you haven’t heard the episode, I definitely recommend checking it out.
This week is in some ways a part two of that episode. I’m speaking with my friend, colleague, and someone I deeply admire, Yirmiyahu Danzig, also known on social media as @that_semite, where you got to check him out. Yirmiyahu is a content creator and digital educator specializing in Jewish diversity, history, and identity. His roots in the old Yishuv and the Caribbean inform his social media activism where he uses English, Hebrew, sometimes Yiddish, and Arabic to reach diverse audiences.
On a personal note, I fell in love with Yirmiyahu right when I met him and not in some weird way, but in a “this guy gets it” sort of way. So even though he works with me at Unpacked, hosts most of our Unpacked YouTube videos, I still get pumped every time he joins me. And I actually think this is, Yirmiyahu, this is your first appearance on Unpacking Israeli History. Yirmiyahu, welcome, welcome.
Yirmiyahu: That’s right, thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure.
Noam: It’s great to have you. And I wanted to speak with you today because you are not an academic per se and you aren’t a historian, though you’re allowed to be, it’s all good, everyone’s a historian. At heart, though, I think that you just connect with people. You really connect with people. You understand people. You empathize with people.
And when speaking about the West Bank, for example, and I know this about you, you did your homework. You studied the history, you read the books, you watched the videos, but then you didn’t just stop there and say that you understand it. Here’s a story. You’re welcome. You actually go there. You speak to everyone you can, experts, people who are described as settlers, Palestinians who are impacted on a daily basis. And you have also been an Israeli soldier for years, sometimes in the settlements. So I want you to share those stories with me. who are these settlers, especially the Noar hageva’ot, the Hilltop Youth, as they’re called. What is their perspective? What about people who live in settlements who are not part of the Hilltop Youth? Who are the Palestinians being affected? What are the Palestinians doing here or not? What is the general relationship between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank? What does the media get right? What does the media get wrong? So I want to get into all of that with you.
Yirmiyahu: Good, let’s do this.
Noam: You ready to lose friends, win friends, whatever it is?
Yirmiyahu: Well, if I’m speaking and I haven’t upset somebody, then I know I’m probably not saying anything worth listening to.
Noam: All right, that’s a very fair take on it all. So tell me in your own words, the story of settler violence. And by the way, I’m interrupting myself here. What I just said is it’s kind of like, when did you stop cheating on your taxes or when did you stop lying to your friends? So I apologize for the framing a little bit, but I’m being provocative for a reason. When you are walking down the street in Tel Aviv and someone stops you and says, I love your content, love what you’re trying to do and something I simply do not understand. What’s happening with settler violence? What do you say to them?
Yirmiyahu: I’ve always been fascinated with what’s going on in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, because in many ways it’s a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s where the intensity of the Jewish story comes head to head with the intensity of the Palestinian experience. And because of that, I’ve always prioritized getting to know people on the ground in the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria, in Israeli communities and in Palestinian villages to really understand these people better, you know, trying to see the world through their eyes.
And one of the things that’s so clear to me about the many years that I’ve been speaking with the Israeli Jews that most in the international community describe as settlers and that all Palestinians certainly describe as settlers is that there’s so much diversity in that community. There really is a spectrum that spans religious ideology, political ideology, there are ultra-orthodox Jews that live in the West Bank, there are religious Zionists, there are secular Jews, there are people that there for ideological reasons, and there are people that are there because they’re looking for cheaper housing or a better educational system for their kids.
And within that experience, there is a fringe of a fringe that is known by most in Israeli society as the Hilltop Youth. And those Hilltop Youth even within that fringe of a fringe, there’s a lot of diversity even within that movement, right? And and so I think it’s important if you want to understand what settler violence is you have to really understand who the Hilltop Youth are ideologically speaking and then kind of contextualize that in the political context of violence in general in the West Bank in order to really understand what settler violence is and the, the real challenge it presents in Israeli society.
Noam: So let me pause you there. When you talk about settler violence and then you go immediately to Hilltop Youth, just help me understand. Is the settler violence primarily or exclusively with the Hilltop Youth?
Yirmiyahu: So this is one of the challenges when we talk about this subject because often the media, by the media I mean like international media, Palestinian media, Arabic speaking media tend to describe all acts of violence where Israeli citizens in the West Bank are involved as settler violence. And that’s problematic for various reasons because that could include an Israeli teenager going and setting a random Palestinian car on fire, but it could also include an Israeli father defending a random person from a Palestinian terrorist attack at a supermarket in Gush Etzion, one of the central intersections in the southern or in the central West Bank. And so that’s one of the problems is that settler violence, it’s really a blanket statement to describe all acts of violence where Israeli settlers are involved. But what is so problematic about that is that it’s often used to obfuscate the real problem. And the real problem, as far as I think many, if not most Israelis are concerned, vis-a-vis settler violence, is that there are Israeli Jews, Israeli citizens that are involved in acts of violence against Palestinians that are motivated by either revenge or a sense of vigilantism and in the worst case, terrorism.
Noam: Okay, so I want to do something that I don’t often do. I’m going to pull out a book. It’s a book by a great scholar by the name of Abraham Joshua Heschel. He wrote something called A Passion for Truth. And he says:
For most of us, life is a series of evasions, pretensions, substitutes, and rationalizations. We do not see the world as it is, but as a projection of ourselves. And so we are prisoners of delusions that hold us in their spell even after we become aware of their deceptiveness. Gradually, pretensions are converted into certainties. Rationalizations become entangled and madness sets in. So many people become salesmen of their delusions. Salesmen of their delusions. So few people are fully conscious of the non-finality of our here and now world.
Now I love this concept of being a prisoner of your own delusions, a salesman of your own delusions. I live here in in US. You’re in Israel and you are there on the ground. What’s the best way that you can help us not be salesmen of our own delusions when it comes to both Palestinians and settlers? Are there stories that you could share with me, that helps explain what’s going on there in a way that’s not just me confirming what I already believe.
Yirmiyahu: So I think it’s important to first describe what the delusion is, to borrow that term. We, being the Jewish community, both in Israel and in the United States, understand that a big part, if not one of the dominant parts of day-to-day life for Jews that live in the West Bank, Judea, and Samaria is the constant threat of Palestinian terrorism. Right? Anybody who lives in Judea and Samaria has had the experience of fearing for their life, of losing a loved one, narrowly missing a near-death experience. And that really colors the experience of how we look at everything that’s unfolding in the West Bank.
And that creates, I think, a delusion that if there are Jews that are engaged in acts of violence against Palestinians outside of the context of the police and the military, then it must be self-defense at best and at worst, somebody taking the law into their own hands in order to defend their communities.
And I think that that fails to grasp a much more complex reality on the ground. And I learned, I discovered this reality by getting to know and to meet and to speak with the people that the society at large, including the Settler Society, describes as the Hilltop Youth. And these are young men, by and large, and it’s young women, that have grown increasingly disillusioned with the state of Israel, with Zionism.
Noam: What does it mean to be disillusioned with Zionism?
Yirmiyahu: So many point to the beginning of this ideological movement in 2005 with the disengagement from Gaza, where the mainstream of the religious Zionist experience saw the state of Israel, the movement of Zionism, despite its secular appearance, being essentially a tool of redemption, that the state is walking hand-in-hand with the religious Zionist movement to redeem the land, redeem the Jewish people, and eventually the whole world. The disengagement from Gaza essentially shattered that worldview, and many of the young
Noam: And why did it shatter their worldview?
Yirmiyahu: Because for the first time since 1982 with the dismantling of the Yamit settlement, the state of Israel uprooted Jews from their homes. They destroyed the Gush Katif settlement, uprooted Jews from their homes, including very traumatic things like literally taking the bones of Jews out of their graves and relocating them. And many of these Jewish families, I believe the statistic is that close to half of the Jews that were uprooted from their homes in Gush Katif in Gaza didn’t find permanent housing until 2016.
Noam: Yeah, yeah 2016. Yeah.
Yirmiyahu: So we’re talking about an incredibly traumatic moment for all of the, for all of Israeli society, but certainly for the religious Zionist community. And so the children that watched their parents lose their homes or their friends, you know, lose their homes and watch the state and the army and the police engage in this. What they experienced was the state of Israel, the secular Zionist movement in the way that they interpret it, betraying their obligation, their responsibility to redeem the land of Israel and to protect the Jewish people.
And so this created a movement of disillusioned young religious Zionists, particularly that lived in Judea and Samaria in the West Bank, that, that gave up on the state of Israel, that gave up on the IDF and started saying, we need to create a movement that will push the Jewish people forward in ways that Zionism and the state of Israel refuse to, and are actually working to prevent.
Noam: So it’s really interesting. I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t understand, maybe including me. These people that you’re describing, they’re not just against Palestinian terrorism, let’s call it, or potential perspective Palestinian terrorism, or Palestinians getting land when they believe it’s their own. They’re also very against the Israeli government and they’re against the IDF because they feel like the IDF and Israeli government is betraying them. And them refers to the Jewish people who are connected to the Jewish land, irrespective of what the state says. Correct? Is that right?
Yirmiyahu: That’s exactly right. And I think that that’s part of the thing that makes them unique, even on the far right side of the spectrum of the the settler movement, that essentially the majority, the mainstream of religious Zionists that live in Judea and Samaria on the West Bank, completely reject any efforts that would resist or attack or undermine the state, the security apparatus in the military. And yet this minority within a minority has essentially explicitly stated that they see the state as being a betrayal of the purpose of the Jewish people in this land and are actively working to undermine the state of Israel where they can. And so to the extent that they build an illegal outpost on some random hill that may or may not be private Palestinian property and the the military goes to demolish it, this was the impetus for what we describe as the price tag attacks, what they start to describe as the price tag attacks.
Noam: Remind me what that is?
Yirmiyahu: For example, the army would demolish an illegal outpost, and in order to exact a cost for that demolition, they would then go and attack a random Palestinian village or or uproot some Palestinian olive trees, essentially making the job of the military to do peacekeeping work in the West Bank much more difficult.
And over time, this would escalate. This would escalate to attacking churches, to attacking mosques, whether it was spray painting or arson. And the culmination of this was the Duma attacks in 2015, where in retaliation to a Palestinian act of terror that killed, I believe, three Israelis. There was a price tag attack which set a random Palestinian home on fire near where that attack happened, which led to the death of three Palestinians, including an infant and a toddler.
Noam: So that’s beyond painful to hear. And I remember that story vividly.
Yirmiyahu: So I remember when I heard about the attack in Duma and how horrified I was. And I think most Israeli Jews, at least in the spaces that I move in, were in complete shock and denial. There’s no way that an Israeli Jew can engage in essentially an act of terrorism.
Noam: Why do you say essentially? Why’d you throw in the word essentially?
Yirmiyahu: I said essentially because people have a problem saying the word terrorism in the context of Jews. We have this association, terrorism equals Palestinians, terrorism equals radicalism. Yeah.
Noam: You’re saying in Israeli society, terrorism can only come from one side, not from the other. It doesn’t come from within.
Yirmiyahu: Right, exactly. Yeah, in Israeli society, there’s an assumption based off of, you know, a hundred years of experience that terrorism can only come from one side of this conflict, from the Palestinian side, from the radical Muslim side, and that Jews don’t engage in terrorism. And we know that historically it’s just not the case that there were Jews that engaged in acts of terrorism in the mandate period.
There was the Jewish underground in the 80s. There was Baruch Goldstein, right? This is not something that’s new. But yet, because it is so on the fringe of Israeli society, it becomes very difficult for many Israelis, for many of Israel’s supporters to accept the fact that there are Jews that engage in acts of terrorism. And so I went out to have conversations with Hilltop Youth to try and understand, you know, if there is, if they accept that this happened, do they deny that this happened, do they justify it?
And one of the first things that really stood out to me in those conversations was that they were living in a very different movie than I was. In their lived experience in the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria, they really see themselves as a local tribe engaged in tribal warfare against Palestinians. And so if a nearby village kills a member of our village, then we’re going to go kill a member of their village, even if they’re not connected.
And when I would press them both on the Jewish ethics of engaging in something like that and on the political reality that we’re not just tribes fighting against each other. We have a state and we have a military and we have a police force that it’s their job to defend its citizens and to stop terrorism where they can, then I was exposed to this really complex ideology and narrative that really, if it didn’t justify the terrorism, it explained it in a way that was very, very sympathetic. And the pillars of that are just real quickly that the state essentially is an enemy of the Jewish people there at worst, and at the very least is inept and is incapable of protecting the citizens of Israel from Palestinian terror. And the second part, which is the most alarming, is that there was a theology that justified taking Palestinian civilians’ lives.
And some of the most outspoken members of the Hilltop Youth Movement of organizations which we’re not really sure if they exist right now called, for example, the organization The Revolt, that they were very explicit in using halachic arguments to say that they can go out and kill Palestinian civilians if it meant furthering this goal of redeeming the land and redeeming the Jewish people.
Yirmiyahu: Mind you, not every person who is part of the Hilltop Youth or that is described as being part of the Hilltop Youth is somebody that engages in violence.
For many of them, the most important part of what they’re engaged in is building outposts, it’s building new Jewish communities illegal or legal, right? Sometimes it’s built on land, which is state land or as part of a, you know, recognized community and they’re just extending it themselves. Sometimes it’s illegal. Sometimes it’s on state land and sometimes it’s on Palestinian private land.
But for many of them, the living on the land, the building of the outposts, the engaging in agriculture, in animal husbandry, in living a lifestyle which is as close as possible that I have seen to how our ancestors lived on this land, right? That really is the most important part of their day-to-day lives. There is a contingent within that community that takes the ideology, the ideological and theological justifications for violence against Palestinians and actually goes and acts on it. It makes that a main part of what they do.
Noam: Do they have rabbinic leaders that they look up to and that guide them, or is it more from the ground up?
Yirmiyahu: Those figures look to Rabbi Meir Kahane, one of the most outspoken of radical members of the Hilltop Youth is Meir Kahane’s grandson, Meir Ettinger. And he was arrested and I believe initially charged for the Duma attacks, but later released because of lack of evidence.
Many of the Hilltop Youth have studied at the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in Yitzhar under Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg. Although Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburg, despite the fact that he teaches a very radical interpretation of Torah and of halacha, he has on many occasions condemned price tag attacks and violence against Palestinian civilians. And so many have said that, okay, these are people that have learned essentially this radical Torah from him, but they’ve taken a step further. They’ve taken Rabbi Ginsburg’s Torah and combined it with Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Torah. And the combination of these two ideological pillars with the very painful lived experience of having dealt with violence from Palestinian terrorists throughout their whole childhood has essentially created an ideological worldview that valorizes vengeance against Palestinians and justifies attacks on random Palestinian targets, but especially those in villages that have been collectively, in their eyes, responsible for acts of violence against Jews.
Noam: Yirmiyahu, I’m going to challenge us for a second. The cynic in the room might say, hey, listen, why are we talking about a fringe of a fringe group? If there are 450 to 500,000 people who identify as part of the settler communities in Judea, in Samaria, in the West Bank, and they live in Maaleh Adumim, they live in Efrat, and if I’m an Israeli civilian that is living amongst these settlements, in these settlements, and I hear us talking about a fringe of a fringe, I can imagine people being like, come on, why are you even talking about this? This is so small. And you’re making it sound like it’s the same thing as the Palestinian terrorism when the Hamasniks want to destroy it, the Jewish state. Like, what would you say to that? Are we being mean here by picking on them and talking about them?
Yirmiyahu: So first of all, I would say that a huge part of that critique is really valid because many people use the actions of this fringe of a fringe to demonize all of the Jews, all of the Israelis that live in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. And that’s a gross injustice, you know, regardless of how you feel about the political future of that territory and the way that the Oslo Accords created,the reality we have today, demonizing half a million people, the vast majority of whom are just living their lives and would also like to see some type of solution to this conflict someday is something that none of us should be tolerating.
And beyond that, I think it’s very important to point out that there is a serious difference between the way that the Palestinian Authority relates to Palestinian terrorism to the way that the Israeli government and security apparatus relates to Jewish terrorism. The Palestinian Authority funds and encourages both financially and rhetorically Palestinian terrorism, acts of violence against Jews. Whereas the head of the Shin Bet, Ronen Bar
Noam: What’s the Shin Bet?
Yirmiyahu: the internal security forces of Israel, Shabak–
Noam: Like the FBI in the US would be like the FBI, right? Yeah. Okay.
Yirmiyahu: Exactly, the Israeli version of the FBI. So they’ve been sounding the alarm on this issue for a long time and it’s not just because these Jewish Israeli extremists pose a threat to innocent Palestinians. It’s because when the state doesn’t have a monopoly on violence, it really questions how effective the state is really being. Because one of the fundamental definitions of a state is that it has a monopoly on violence. And if there are even a few hundred people, citizens of that state who are engaging at their own will and own discretion in acts of violence against another people, that is something that the state cannot tolerate. And we’ve seen that to the extent that the military and the internal security forces have not been paying attention to this, have not been addressing this, we’ve seen it grow numerically.
Noam: So what would you say to somebody who says, you’ve been in the IDF, you’ve dealt with these situations. Does the IDF, are they in cahoots with these people or are they antagonistic towards these people? What have you personally seen and what have you personally dealt with?
Yirmiyahu: So on a personal level, can say that the soldiers on the ground are very conflicted with how to deal with this because, like I said, when you see the Hilltop Youth and their lifestyle and the way they speak and the way they live and the way they move, it’s almost like you’re interacting with the bravest members of Israeli society. You’re almost like you’re interacting with your ancestors from thousands of years ago. So there’s almost like a nostalgic, romantic, there’s almost like a nostalgic, romantic thing going on that’s really guiding how we’re looking at these people, how we’re interacting with them, so much so that you can forget that many of them also espouse radically intolerant ideologies and ideas about other people, including fellow Israelis and Jews.
Noam: But there’s like this interesting, you describe it as romantic and nostalgic, I don’t know what the word that I’m looking for, but it’s something like that you could almost like look up to them in a certain way, because they’re just living these original Jewish lives on original Jewish land, like almost out of a fantasy. And you’re like, so why would we be against these people who are living out the Jewish dream in actuality? Is that part of it, also, like you feel that as a soldier, you see them and you’re like, they’re doing the right, they’re doing the thing in the heartland of Judea, which is where the heartland of the Jewish people and all the biblical stories happened here. This is where it is. This is where all the action is, and they’re doing it.
Yirmiyahu: Yeah, and it’s so intense, right? Because all Israelis who grow up on the stories of the pioneers, the people going and draining the swamps out on the frontier, building a Jewish community out of nothing and engaging in agriculture on ancestral Jewish land. And here you’re watching people do that in front of your very eyes.
And they’re doing it in a way which seems to have in some ways integrated a lot of the various parts of the Zionist and the Israeli ethos. The deep Jewish heritage with the need to build something new. The alte doyland, really kind of coming together in a way. It doesn’t get more ancient Jewish than Judea, than Samaria. We’re talking about hilltops next to Bet-El, next to Shchem, next to Hevron.
Noam: Like, Bet-El, where Jacob’s ladder, where that happened, like that story? Right. Yeah.
Yirmiyahu: Exactly. Yeah, Jacob’s Ladder, right? Where our forefathers and foremothers are buried, right? Where Shchem, where the children of Israel, when they came out of the exodus from Egypt, the first place where they go, right? The place of the mountain of the blessing. You’re seeing Jewish history unfold in front of your eyes in a way.
And you combine with that the security mandate that every Israeli soldier in the West Bank is given the main job of protecting Israelis, of defending Israelis from terrorism. And so that when you see some of those Israelis engaging in acts of violence themselves, engaging in acts of terrorism themselves, it becomes very confusing on like an internal level. What are you supposed to do in those moments?
And so we’ve seen videos come out and I’ve seen it with my own eyes, where soldiers have either stood by and watched while some of these radical Hilltop Youth were engaging in acts of violence against Palestinians. And sometimes, unfortunately and tragically, soldiers even join in on the violence. But that’s at the level of what we call the chapashi, the chayal hapashut, the simple soldier, right? What Americans often refer to as the grunts.
On the level of the of the commanders, it’s more complicated because we’ve seen some of the most senior commanders of the IDF condemn this phenomenon, act to try and stop this phenomenon, but it seems like something is happening or not happening in that interaction between the political class and the military, which is essentially stopping efforts to meaningfully end, to meaningfully put an end to this violence.
Noam: Okay, so next question. Let’s switch gears. What about the Palestinians? What could you tell me that could help me as an American and, that paints the picture in as realistic a way as possible that helps humanize it for me. Tell me like what, what you’re seeing, what you know about.
Yirmiyahu: So the listeners may be aware of the fact that the West Bank, the Judea and Samaria area is divided into areas A, B, and C. And the vast majority of Palestinians live in area A, but there was a significant population, we’re talking about thousands and thousands of Palestinians that live in area C, which is under Israeli jurisdiction, as opposed to area A, which is under the Palestinian authorities jurisdiction, area B, which is shared, Israeli security, Palestinian authority of administration.
Area C is under Israeli jurisdiction and there are thousands and thousands of Palestinians that live there. Much of the friction between Israelis and Palestinians, understandably, that live in the West Bank happens in Area C. And I’ve gone to many of these Palestinian villages to meet with them, to speak with them, to try and understand what they’re dealing with.
And one of the recurring things that really connects all of the Palestinian experiences in Area C is the combination of challenges that they face from the IDF and challenges they face from Israeli settlers, particularly the Hilltop Youth. Much of Area C is defined by a constant struggle over land rights, you know, what is state land? What is Palestinian private land? Where can settlements work in Jewish communities expand? Where can’t they expand?
And in the context of that legal bureaucratic dispute, the Hilltop Youth have been very active in going into these spaces and essentially trying to establish facts on the ground. And so I’ve spoken to Palestinians that have the claim that this is their private land, that have documents that according to them, attest to that fact and they say here look every single day we’re going to to pick olives from the trees on our on our grandfather’s land and there’s Israelis showing up and burning down the trees planting their own trees getting into violent confrontations with us about who’s allowed to be there. And as far as those Palestinians are concerned, you know, I have a specific Palestinian in mind, a Palestinian woman in her mid-20s that is going on a regular basis and trying to stake her claim for what she believes is her ancestor’s land, and how she, every single day, is being confronted first by Hilltop Youth that are very aggressive in the way that they deal with her, and then by the Israeli soldiers that essentially show up on the scene and tell her that she has to leave.
And it’s very seldom that she sees the soldiers actually grabbing the Hilltop Youth and pushing them back or arresting them for attacking her. And I think in many ways this is demonstrative of something that’s happening, broadly speaking, in Area C of the West Bank.
Noam: Is there any part of this where, that the Palestinians are provoking? Because one of the things that I’ve heard is that, you know, and you described it earlier as there’s a tribal thing going on here, that’s not really happening at the governmental level, but happening on the ground. And I’ve just, I’ve heard that sometimes it’s Palestinians who are the ones that are being provocative towards the Jewish settlers and it’s really a back and forth there. What would you say to that?
Yirmiyahu: I would say that sometimes it’s the Palestinians that they identify some Israeli settlers and they start pelting them with stones. And sometimes those stones can be deadly. Sometimes, there are terrorists or Hamas terrorists that are nearby and they open fire on the Israeli settlers that they see.
And sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes it’s the Israelis. Sometimes it’s the Hilltop Youth that see Palestinians and start throwing rocks at them. Sometimes it’s them that are setting fire, right? So it is really this kind of back and forth thing. You know, it’s not the case that every single act of violence that Hilltop Youth are involved in is one that they initiated, right? It is the case that sometimes it is in response to Palestinian rock throwing, to a Palestinian Molotov cocktail or shooting.
But it’s not always the case, and there are many examples where it has been initiated by Hilltop Youth, or we’re talking about situations even where Israeli extremists have gone into Palestinian homes on land that the military, as far as the military is concerned, state land, and that settlers or Israeli extremists have gone in there to intimidate families, inside their homes.
I think the big difference, which is important to understand, is that in many cases, the Palestinians, particularly in Area C, are unarmed and they are being confronted with or confronting Israeli settlers that have the military to back them up and so even if it’s just in the case of like who’s responsible for defending them that creates a reality in which at least the Palestinians are experiencing it as here are the settlers here are the Hilltop Youth and They are working hand-in-hand with the military now. We know that that’s not the full picture, but it’s important for us to understand that the way that Palestinians are experiencing this is the Hilltop Youth working with the military and the Israeli civil administration of the West Bank to essentially intimidate Palestinians off of their land. That is how Palestinians are experiencing this.
Noam: Why is the media obsessed with this topic? We’ve done a hundred plus episodes on Unpacking Israeli History and rarely talk about this, but you know what? We decided to do a two part series on this. And one of the reasons was because it comes up in the media all the time. And many, many, many listeners said, Hey, could you just just unpack everything that’s going on here? The history did an episode on that, but you’re talking about the actual experience.
What does the media get wrong about this and why does the media obsess over it? Or do you think the media obsesses over it? Did I just lead you?
Yirmiyahu: I do think the media obsesses about it and I think that some of that obsession, least vis-a-vis what goes on internally in Israel, makes sense. Like I understand why Israeli left-wing newspaper Haaretz, I understand why they overreport or put extra focus on Jewish extremism in the West Bank because this is a serious problem for Israeli society to contend with, an internal problem as opposed to just an external problem. Hey, we’re Israelis, right? We live here. We have to deal with our internal problems. Otherwise they become bigger internal problems. And then they affect our external problems, which I think is also happening here.
But as far as the international media, I think that one of the main reasons why they decide to focus on this so much is that it feeds into this narrative that Israeli society writ large and especially Israeli settlers, the Israelis that live in the West Bank are invested in Palestinian displacement, in Palestinian intimidation, and in Palestinian suffering. And this story perfectly feeds into that narrative.
And as we’ve discussed, there are some ways in which that is true. And there are so many ways in which that misses the big picture of Israeli society and even the big picture of what’s going on day to day in the West Bank.
Noam: So Yirmiyahu, what does the future look like? What are the people there, the Palestinians, the regular settlers, or is there, like, some people like say, don’t even call us settlers, call us West Bank Jews or call us Judean Samaria Jews, call us mountain Jews, call us different names, whatever they are. Please stop calling us settlers, it’s offensive. But using the nomenclature that’s used, so with my apologies to those who are offended.
But Palestinians, Hilltop Youth, regular settlers, what’s the future of the region? What does it look like? And maybe this is an odd question, but what do you think would happen if put aside like the state bureaucrats? What if the Palestinians got together with the Hilltop Youth and they sat together in a room and they were like, hey, put aside the governments. Like, let’s figure this out together.
Is that possible? Or am I living in my South Florida dream over here?
Yirmiyahu: Well, I would love to see that. And it’s interesting. The first person to point this out to me was Yehuda Cohen, who I got to interview extensively on this subject.
Noam: Yehuda Cohen, I spent like five, six hours with him, fascinating human being. We drove all through the different areas in the settlements. And he was also interviewed in your video that you’re doing with the unpacked, on the unpacked video on this topic, right?
Yirmiyahu: That’s right. Yes.
Noam: So what did Yehuda say?
Yirmiyahu: Yehuda, who proudly identifies as a West Banker, as a West Bank Jew,
Noam: A mountain Jew, a mountain Jew.
Yirmiyahu: He highlighted to me, somebody that really in many ways shares an identity with the Hilltop Youth, that there’s so many things that these specific Jews have in common with Palestinians that the majority of Israeli Jews do not. Right? Experiencing a sense of antagonism towards the state of Israel, towards the military, towards the police, of having their homes demolished, right? This is something that happens on a regular basis throughout Area C of the West Bank. Palestinians’ homes are demolished and settler outposts are demolished at less frequency. And so this is something also that they share.
In addition to that, they see themselves as very not Western. They’re living by a set of rules and culture that is very much rooted in the ways of the Levant and of the Middle East.
And so it’s possible to foresee some type of, we like to call it in the Middle East, sulha, some type of reconciliation, know, reconciliation between Hilltop Youth and Palestinians. But I think a lot of work has to be done. I don’t see that happening realistically now. And I think that maybe it starts by the settler movement in general, the moderates within the settler society, within Jewish society in the West Bank, you know, actually building more meaningful relationships with Palestinians, with their Palestinian neighbors. And then that way they can create some type of mutual responsibility to make sure that the disillusioned youth of the Jewish society aren’t engaging in acts of extremism and that the local Palestinian leadership can also take responsibility that their youth are not going out and throwing rocks at Jews or worse.
Noam: That’s a really interesting insight that the settlers in the West Bank and the Palestinians might have more in common in some ways than those who live in North Tel Aviv or other, know, bougie areas in Israel proper within the Green Line. And they are, they’re part of the land. They’re part of the cultivation of it all and they view themselves as biblical in many ways. And this is an ancient biblical issue that’s still alive today. The term I think that I’ve heard often is the decolonization of the Jew, right? It’s saying, let’s settle the land here without thinking about being protected by the state, by anyone. Be natural, be native, be of this land, which is where you are from. And Palestinian Arabs have been living there for hundreds upon hundreds of years as well. And let’s see what could happen if the two of us spend time together in the same room, thinking about things radically differently from one another. But you know what? We both deeply have a shared passion in this land. So maybe, maybe there’s something there. Who knows?
Yirmiyahu: Yeah, I would just add that,there is a, you know, a cultural and a spiritual and perhaps even linguistic. Many of the Jews, I would say certainly a higher percentage of Jews who live in the West Bank speak Arabic than those that live, you know, in the center of Israel. They are uniquely positioned to engage with the Palestinian narrative and experience in a way that could be meaningful for the future.
That being said, in order for us to even get to a place where some type of new ideology of reconciliation with Palestinians can emerge, first, they have to feel, by they I mean the Hilltop Youth and specifically the most radical members of the Hilltop Youth movement have to understand that their efforts to undermine the state, to in their mind, push Jewish history forward by building new settlements or intimidating Palestinians off of their land or far worse, that that is not working. In order for them to feel that that is not working, that they’re not able to do that, then the state, the military, the politicians need to take the threat that they pose to Israeli society as well as Palestinians seriously.
Noam: Well, Yirmiyahu, thank you so much for joining me on Unpacking Israeli History. It was so, so fun to have this conversation, so enlightening to have this conversation with you. So thank you so much for joining.
Yirmiyahu: Thanks for having me. It was great.
Noam: Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts if you enjoyed this episode. It was a difficult one. There’s a difficult one, but an important one. Don’t be afraid to share it with a friend who you think will appreciate it and make sure to leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify. And one last thing, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media to share your thoughts.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Hona Dodge, Adi Elbaz, and Rob Para. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for listening. See you next week.