The settlers, Israel's other 'army' in the war against Hamas

“We have an enemy.

They have to help us fight against the devil, fight against Hamas, fight against terrorists.

“We are not the terrorists.”

Ilana Shimon, 49, makes that call from the kitchen of her prefabricated house in an illegal settlement on a hill in the West Bank, Israeli-occupied Palestine while several of her ten children hover around her.

Under a kind of divine mandate that supposedly grants these lands to the Jews, Ilana and her husband, the lawyer Yehuda Shimon, rely on messianic and biblical arguments to defend their lives along with 400 other people in the settlement of Havat Gilad (Gilad Farm). ), just outside the city of Nablus.

Since October 7, the day the war began with the Hamas attack in which some 1,200 people were murdered in Israel, the violence of the settlers, as well as the impunity and support they receive from the State apparatus, has increased. has multiplied, according to the United Nations and Israeli humanitarian organizations such as B'Tselem or Peace Now.

In these four and a half months, Israeli troops have killed almost 30,000 Palestinians.

The call-up of more than 300,000 Israeli reservists has led many settlers to now wear uniforms, like the 40 of Havat Gilat, which represents almost half of the hundred adult men in the settlement.

Since 2007, the Shimon family has been part of the half a million Jews living illegally in the West Bank (there are about 100,000 more in East Jerusalem).

Contrary to reports from human rights organizations, they deny the attacks and insist, as justification, that the acts of violence that occur by Israelis are only in response to those carried out by Palestinians.

“There are about 500,000 Jews residing in Judea and Samaria (the official Israeli name for the West Bank) and there may be twenty, even up to a hundred, who participate in these events,” says David Haivri, a resident of the settlement, referring to the settler attacks. Tapuah for three decades before recently settling in Jerusalem.

“That is not representative, although it is very colorful in the eyes of the media,” he comments during a trip to the area.

“I don't think anyone can say that the attacks by Jews against Palestinians can be considered a significant event compared to the situation that may exist in Spain, England or any other part of the world,” he says.

General view of the Havat Gilad settlement (West Bank) where about 400 Jewish settlers live on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Nablus.Luis de Vega

Israel believes that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) must be ended after accusing 12 of its 33,000 employees of having participated in the October 7 attack.

Asked about whether these 12 are representative, Haivri affirms that the settler movement “is not an official entity” unlike UNRWA, “a humanitarian organization that receives international funds.”

Settlers frequently enter the fields and uproot Palestinians' olive trees or prevent them from picking olives.

“It may be true, so what?

They cut ours,” Yehuda Shimon responds, framing it in the problems that can arise between neighbors while he insists that coexistence is something that the sacred books provide for regardless of the religion that each one professes.

But immediately he adds: “Palestinians are always crying.

Look at my house (he comments, pointing to his manufactured home) and look at theirs.

We give them everything.

Roads, electricity, water... and they don't pay.

"I pay taxes to the Government so that they have all that without paying."

“Do you see cut or burned olive trees around us?” asks David Haivri as he points to a field next to the road.

He alludes to the West Bank as the promised land, but also adds that Israel won its right to it by winning the “defensive war” against the Arabs in 1967.

Haivri is conclusive: A two-state solution?

That's not an option.

“There cannot be two states here, especially if one is a Palestinian entity with an army.”

They can integrate and adapt to the laws of Israel without ceasing to be Muslims or Christians, he adds.

Western sanctions

In an unprecedented measure, in early February the United States imposed sanctions against four settlers, whom it considers extremely violent.

Days later, the United Kingdom did the same with four others.

France announced that it will punish 28, but has not offered their identities.

Now, Spain plans to take similar measures.

The sanctions “seem like a joke to me,” says Yehuda Shimon.

“In history, in the Bible, we know that every time someone does something in the name of the devil, he ends up paying for it,” he adds.

Havat Gilad was founded by Moshe Zar, a member of a cell of the Jewish Underground group that attacked the mayor of the Palestinian city of Nablus in 1980.

It is an organization considered terrorist by Israel.

The colony was born in revenge for the murder of his son Gilad Zar in 2001 at the hands of Palestinians on a West Bank highway.

“We can't be stupid.

If they come to kill us, we have the right to kill them first,” defends Ilana Shimon, while continuing to defend that we must build “bridges of coexistence.”

She says that a few days before this interview she went to demonstrate with her children and other settlers in the neighboring Palestinian town of Hawara, a constant focus of tension and the scene of the latest attacks by Jews on Palestinians.

Asked about the cars that the Jewish settlers burn in Hawara, she answers that she does not know, that it could be themselves, the Palestinians, who burn them.

Ilana Shimon in a vehicle repair shop in the Havat Gilad neighborhood, on February 21. Luis de Vega

Ahava Shimon, 19, with one of her nine siblings.

Luis de Vega

Ilana Shimon, 49, in front of the house where she lives with her husband and ten children.

Luis de Vega

In 2018, the community's rabbi, Raziel Sevach, was also murdered in an attack similar to that of Gilad Zar.

That opened the door for the Israeli Government to legalize the Havat Gilad settlement, something that, six years later, has not happened.

"We still do not receive from the authorities electricity, water, gas, security, daycare, health center, gardens, road...", explains without reproachful tone Ilana Shimon, responsible for raising funds to "survive", because, she assures, they receive sufficient private contributions from “people who believe in the Bible, who believe that God gave us this land.”

For this reason, when in 2005 the then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed to remove the more than 8,000 settlers who occupied Gaza, Yehuda Shimon decided to settle there with his family.

For three months they lived in a tent on the beach until they had to agree to leave.

“We wanted to fight against the evacuation,” he explains.

Today, around a hundred families reside in Havat Gilad, a hill overlooking the Mediterranean coast, from where you can see the cities of Tel Aviv and Netanya, about twenty kilometers away in a straight line.

Surrounded by small Palestinian villages, the settlement is dominated by prefabricated houses, like the one that houses the Shimons, and there are still those who live in one of the old buses that, at the beginning of the century, welcomed the first neighbors.

Murder of a Palestinian farmer

A shot to the chest ended the life of Bilal Saleh, a 40-year-old Palestinian farmer, on the morning of October 28.

This special envoy interviewed several witnesses, including his two children, that same day after the burial in the town of Sawiya (West Bank).

All of them agreed to point to a settlement from which several armed men descended towards the Saleh family's olive grove without the military, witnesses in the distance, doing anything to stop them.

Yossi Dagan, one of those responsible for the settlements in the area where the attack in which Bilal Saleh died took place, stated that the perpetrator of the murder acted in self-defense because they were being attacked "by dozens of Hamas members."

“I fully support the fighter who shot,” he added, according to

The Jerusalem Post

.

“It is ridiculous that settlers kill,” says lawyer Yehuda Shimon, denying these facts again and again.

An off-duty soldier was arrested two days later accused of killing Bilal Saleh.

His defense lawyer, Adi Keidar, belongs to Honenu, the same association that Shimon works with and which, according to Peace Now, “offers legal defense to settlers or other people who carry out violence.”

During the current conflict, the NGO B'Tselem has documented the forced displacement of 151 Palestinian families from the West Bank out of their place of residence, a total of 1,009 people, of which 371 are minors, due to attacks and pressure from settlers, who act accompanied and protected by the military.

The sanctions against individuals from countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom do not reflect the responsibility of the Government of Israel for the use of that violence, understands Dror Sadot, spokesperson for this Israeli human rights organization.

“We are basically facing violence from the State because impunity is granted to these settlers,” he defends.

He understands that it is important to send that message, but he considers the effectiveness of these sanctions against a handful of settlers “limited.”

According to Sadot, since October 7, there have been more attacks, more violence, more shooting incidents, more settlers have been armed and some of them are now part of the army.

The State wants to stay away from these acts of violence, but B'Tselem understands that it is a policy marked from above.

“A good year for the settlements, a bad year for Israel,” is how the Israeli organization Peace Now summarizes the activity carried out around Jewish settlers last year.

The figures they handle show that “unprecedented conditions” have been created for the rise of this movement in Palestine in the shadow of the Government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since December 2022.

In the twelve months of 2023, according to data made public last week, 26 new colonies were created while a total of 21 Palestinian towns were displaced from their land;

the creation of 12,349 new homes in the West Bank was announced and authorized;

administrative advances for the annexation of more land;

and a budget of three million shekels (about 750,000 euros) for new roads in settlements, which represents approximately 20% of this type of investment.

Following the attack by three Palestinians last Thursday at the gates of one of those settlements in which an Israeli was murdered, the authorities have announced a plan to build 3,000 new homes in the West Bank.

The illegal real estate spiral does not stop.

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