Israeli settlements and the growing divide between settlers and Palestinians

West Virginia native Rachel Braslavi says she moved to her new home so her family would have more space and a greater sense of community. But she faces bigger questions than with a regular home purchase. Their community is the Israeli settlement of Karnei Shomron, located in the occupied West Bank.

When asked if she sees her settler family as an obstacle to peace, Braslavi replied: “No. I don’t do that. No way. I think we have a right to be here. And I think the Palestinians have the right to be here. to be here.”

“On this land?” I asked.

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

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

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

Today, more than 700,000 Israelis live in these communities, which the United Nations calls illegal. They are spread across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. About 15% of the settlers are Americans.

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

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

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

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

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

“Just strengthen the existing Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria,” Braslavi responded.

‘On the West Bank?

“Yes.”

The settler population has grown by more than 200 percent since 2000. The Israeli government encourages these measures, paying for the army to police them and funding public services such as buses and schools.

Judith Segaloff moved to Karnei Shomron from Detroit seven years ago and says she could afford a bigger house here than on the other side of the Green Line. She took us on a tour. “Our shopping center is right across the street,” she said. ‘We have an ice cream shop. This is where our sushi shop is.”

I asked, “Do you have friends or family who disagree with you living in a settlement?”

“Sure,” Segaloff said. “Some of them won’t come to visit.”

Segaloff says she’s excited about plans to expand a settlement down the street. She believes that the Israeli presence provides security.

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

“According to some,” Segaloff said.

“By the international community.”

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

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

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

He and his wife Tamador, a high school science teacher, invited us to tea. They say they are most concerned about increasing violence from Israeli settlers, encouraged by The increasingly right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Since October 7 last year, there have been more than 1,400 attacks by extremist settlers on Palestinians or their property, according to the UN.

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

I asked, ‘Is there any room for introspection here? Do you ever think, ‘Maybe we are not the best partners to find a path to peace’?

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

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

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

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

Regarding the settlers who claim they didn’t take anyone’s land and that no one lived there before them, Sharon said, “Well, of course that wasn’t done individually. Occupying a land doesn’t mean you have a house.” It could be pasture. It can also be an area set aside for the self-determination of a people.’

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

“The safety argument is complete nonsense,” Sharon replied. ‘The settlements are not a certainty; they are a certainty burdenbecause defending and protecting dozens of civilians, deep in densely populated Palestinian territory, is an enormous burden for the army.”

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

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

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

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

The negotiations changed under Donald Trump, Makovsky said: “Until Trump, all American peace approaches were similar. Under Trump, who works with Prime Minister Netanyahu, he does not want to choose which settlements will survive and which will not. So the Prime Minister convinced the President that every single settlement is called Israel. Now an impossible Swiss cheese situation arises. Every Palestinian entity will now be littered with settlements.

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

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

According to Makovsky, 2005 is their Waterloo for the colonists, their defeat. Then Israel removed all 8,000 settlers from Gaza.

At the time, I portrayed a 17-year-old who was forced to leave Gush Katif, her settlement in Gaza. Nineteen years later, the settlements are still front page news. “Yes, that’s how it is in Israel,” said Rachel Yechieli Gross. Today she is a mother of three children and no longer lives in a settlement.

I asked: ‘The fact that you left your home and your settlement as a teenager shows that settlements can be closed. Could that be a step towards peace?’

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

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

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

“I wouldn’t leave voluntarily because this is where I raised my family and, you know, built my dream house,” she said. “Why should the peace agreement come at my expense if I have to give up my house?”

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Story produced by Sari Aviv. Editor: Ed Givnish.