A History of Settlements
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And along some parts of it are walls with painted murals on them.

Concrete and brick walls, 20 feet high barriers, and fencing with razor wire on top that separate the highway from the occupied Palestinian territory surrounding it. It probably has some security justification. The highway makes the trip between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem faster for Israeli citizens, including settlers who live in enclaves in the occupied West Bank.

So there is a...

kind of out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality that we can superimpose this Israeli reality on this territory with minimal contact or even thinking about Palestinians. For Palestinians, it's the exact opposite. In order to have that kind of seamless contiguity, you have to disrupt Palestinian society.

The International Court of Justice says Israel's presence in Palestinian-occupied territories is illegal and should end. I think now the international consensus among international human rights groups is that this is a reality of apartheid.

This is Khaled El-Gindi. He's a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., where he directs the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs. Even though we're talking about 700,000 or so settlers compared to 3.1 million Palestinians,

They are the marginal community in the West Bank because everything has been set up to serve the settler minority. Since the Hamas-led attack on October 7th, 2023, and Israel's invasion of Gaza, there's also been escalating violence in the occupied West Bank, the bigger of the two Palestinian territories Israel occupies. It's sandwiched between Israel and Jordan and includes East Jerusalem.

A Palestinian man was shot dead after a group of armed settlers stormed the village of Jeet, setting homes aflame. At the center of the violence is the issue of settlements. You might be picturing a few tents on a dusty plain, and there are some like that. But many of the settlements resemble an American suburb, with paved roads, nice houses, good schools and playgrounds.

If you look at a map of the occupied West Bank today, Israeli settlement infrastructure runs throughout the territory, and Palestinian lands look kind of like Swiss cheese, small islands disconnected from one another. Today, Israeli settlers are primarily economic settlers. They're essentially suburbanites that I believe, if they had been offered the citizenship,

the same standard of living at prices that they could afford in other parts of territorial Israel would have no real reason to be living in the West Bank. This is Sarah Yael Hirshhorn. She teaches at the University of Haifa and wrote the book City on a Hilltop, American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement. So this leaves maybe

30% of the Israeli settler enterprise today that identify as religious Zionists. Some of whom believe all the land in the West Bank was given to the Jewish people by God and should be part of Israel at any cost. I'm saying this very clearly. We will never uproot settlements in the land of Israel. The current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a vocal supporter of the settlements.

And some of the most prominent positions in his administration are held by extremist settlers, including the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gavir. As Israeli police battled Arab stone throwers, right-wing extremist politician Itamar Ben-Gavir showed up and drew his pistol. He tweeted that Jewish blood matters and that police should not be constrained by the government from shooting Arab terrorists.

In this episode, we're going to explore how the settlement movement grew from a small religious mission to one of the central tenets of the current Israeli government. It's a story that intersects with other topics we've covered in our series relating to this conflict: the history of Hamas, the rise of the Israeli right wing, Hezbollah, and Zionism. Coming up: the birth of a city on a hill.

This is Dr. Robin Neinfeld from Alaska, and you are listening to ThruLine with NPR. Part 1: On the Seventh Day Imagine if you were observing a group of people several hundred years ago who boarded a ship called Mayflower crossing the ocean and landing on the eastern shores of North America.

What did it look like when you first got there?

This is Gideon Aran. He was an anthropology and sociology professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for many years. And back in the mid-1970s, he spent several years doing research, closely observing one of the first settlements built in the occupied West Bank.

Giriat Arba. When they have political meetings, when they prayed, when they played with their kids at home, when they were guarding their settlement, I was there all the time, 24 hours, 7 days a week. Giriat Arba is located just a mile outside the city of Hebron, or Khalil in Arabic.

Hebron is considered a holy site by Muslims, Christians, and Jews, where Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, is buried. Gideon learned that this new movement was hoping to settle further and further into what they call the land of Judea and Samaria, which they believed was the birthright of the Jewish people, land that was already inhabited by Palestinians. The idea of pushing the frontier, it is inherently violent.

They called their movement Gush Amonim, the Block of the Faithful. Their spiritual leader, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, tied settlements to a religious mission. We were walking in the canyons leading from Jerusalem to Jericho late night, all dark.

Rabbi Lovinger and some of his followers had arrived in the city of Hebron with that vision for the future a few years earlier.

Posing as Swiss tourists, they checked into a hotel to spend Passover there. And then... They sent a telegram to the head of the military command saying, you know, we had a lovely Passover holiday and we've decided to stay here. We've decided to stay here indefinitely, in a hotel in the middle of a Palestinian city. If the government did say that you had to leave, would you fight the government? We won't leave.

Under any circumstances. Under any circumstances. For the followers of Gush Amonim, this was the logical next step in God's plan, in the aftermath of what some saw as an act of divine intervention. For the third time since its birth as an independent state, Israel is embroiled in a war with the Arab nations that surround it. On June 5th, 1967, following an increase in tensions in the region and a series of minor skirmishes,

Israel launched a surprise attack against all of Egypt's air force bases. That was the real superpower of the region was air power. War erupted between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. With the shock of the surprise attack and help from Western weapons, Israel swiftly took command of the war. The total humiliation of the Arab militaries

across the board in a sweeping way. The Arab states concede defeat just six days later. I think it's impossible to overstate the elation, euphoria,

that Israelis felt after the war. I mean, many of them looked at it as a miracle to defeat their enemies in six days. It was known as the Six-Day War. And from day seven, the question arose, what is to be done with the territories? Before 1967, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were separated from Israel by something called the Green Line—

Very simply, the Green Line was an actual line drawn in actual green pen on a map in 1949 at the end of a bloody war when borders for the new state of Israel were being solidified. On one side was the new state of Israel, and on the other side, no Palestinian state was created. Instead, Jordan was giving control of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Egypt was giving control of the Gaza Strip.

After Israel's creation, none of the Arab states recognized Israel's existence, particularly since Israel had been created at the expense of the local population. So about 75% of Palestine's Arab population were expelled or forced to flee and were never allowed to return. The 1967 war disrupted all of that. Israel seized control of the territories over that green line.

the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, plus the Gaza Strip. And Israel also captured Egyptian territory, all of the Sinai Peninsula, and Syrian territory in the Golan Heights.

The summer of 1967 was spent in the Knesset debating and dithering over what should be the future of these territories. Should they return them immediately? Could they be exchanged for some kind of peace? You know, the land for peace idea that, you know, Arab pride was tied in part to the future of these pieces of land. So Israel understood that there was

This wasn't just a discussion about land. There were people living on that land.

People who had grown frustrated with Israel and the Arab states controlling their fates. It's after 1967 that the Palestinians kind of politically come into their own. The Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, emerged as an autonomous political and military entity representing Palestinians. At the moment, after we are sure that nobody would do anything for us unless we do something for ourselves...

We choose our own way to liberate our own land. There was one part of the West Bank that Israel decided to immediately annex, incorporating it into the state of Israel.

East Jerusalem. It's not recognized by any country, but it was annexed. The UN Security Council issued a resolution stating that this action was illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. As for the rest of the West Bank, the Minister of Labor at the time, Yigal Alon, drafted a plan for what to do with it, named after himself.

The Alon plan was about creating bands of settlements across Jerusalem into the Jordan Valley and then along the north-south axis of the Jordan Valley.

to ensure that Israel had these, quote, defensible borders. In other words, it would create a buffer between Israel and its Arab neighbors. So initially, the settlement logic was security-based. And he proposed that the settlements should be established in isolated areas to minimize interaction with the local Palestinian population. Because that would create problems. The alone plan was never formally adopted, but it would shape Israeli policy for years to come.

And amid all of this, the government received word that a few dozen Israelis were refusing to leave a hotel in Hebron. Eventually, the Israeli government decided to build them a settlement atop a hill a mile outside Hebron, Kiryat Arba. And slowly, more settlers began to move there. Kiryat Arba would become a model for future Israeli settlements. No doubt, the Arab people of Hebron

view the Jewish settlement as an act of revenge. Palestinians, both local communities and political leaders, recognized instantly the threat that the settlements posed because parents and grandparents remembered the stories of, you know, one day a thriving Palestinian city and then the shell of its former self completely overtaken.

In October 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. The surprise attacks came early this morning in the air and on the ground. Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in the hopes of reclaiming the territory they lost in the 1967 Six-Day War.

the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. Israel was taken by complete surprise. This is Avi Schleim. He's an Israeli-British historian and author of the book "The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World." Israel was in a terrible state. The 1973 war was a real chilt to the system. Israel had to get off its kind of pedestal of euphoria and maybe even hubris after the 1967 war.

In the face of almost certain defeat, a general in the Israeli army named Ariel Sharon came up with an idea that would change the course of the war. He crossed the Suez Canal and disrupted one of the supply routes for the Egyptian army. A ceasefire was negotiated soon after. Ariel Sharon emerges as the savior, as the really brave, ingenious leader

who managed to turn the tables on the Egyptians. A picture of Sharon became iconic. He's standing in front of an Israeli tank, head wrapped in white gauze, blood still visible on his face. And that newfound fame gave Sharon a pathway to enter politics and push the country further to the right. The Israeli right were divided into different groups.

And Ariel Sharon was the strategist who united all these right-wing groups together. Sharon struck a deal with Menachem Begin, the leader of a major right-wing group. And together, they created a new party. Called the Likud. In 1977, the Likud party ran in national elections. This is how its platform began.

Last night, the conservative Likud party, headed by Menachem Begin, swept to victory.

You now have a Likud right-wing government ideologically committed to settling all of the land. And a quick note, the Likud is Benjamin Netanyahu's party, which currently runs the Israeli government. Begin adamantly opposes the return of the occupied West Bank to Arab control. Menachem Begin was named prime minister, and he appointed Ariel Sharon minister of agriculture.

In that role, Sharon will be responsible for the planning and development of settlements in the occupied territories, which he vocally supported, regardless of international sentiment. Are you saying that you think the United States has no business telling you what to do about the settlements here? The United States has nothing to say about Israeli right to exist or when it comes to our security. That's entirely our problem. Coming up.

Ariel Sharon takes the settlement movement to new heights. Hi, this is Joshua Rooney. I'm calling from Essex Junction, Vermont, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

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Listening to the news can feel like a journey, but the 1A podcast guides you beyond the headlines and cuts through the noise. Listen to 1A, where we celebrate your freedom to listen by getting to the heart of the story together, only from NPR. Part 2. The Godfather. There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs, not now nor in the prospective future.

In 1923, years before the foundation of the State of Israel, a man named Zev Jabotinsky published an article called "On the Iron Wall: We and the Arabs."

Jabotinsky is considered by many to be the spiritual father of the Israeli right. And historian Avi Schleim's book, The Iron Wall, is a reference to his article. My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries. Jabotinsky says no nation in history has ever willingly made room for another people to come and create a state on its land.

There is no such precedent. So Palestinian resistance to the Zionist project of an independent Jewish state in Palestine is inevitable and inescapable. The only way to realize the Zionist project is behind an iron wall of Jewish military strength.

which the native population cannot breach. In the early 1920s, Zev Jabotinsky helped found a paramilitary group called the Haganah, which defended the community of Jewish immigrants who had recently settled in what was then still called Palestine. At the age of 14, I was initiated. In the mid-1940s, a new recruit named Ariel Sharon was initiated into the Haganah.

He describes the experience in his autobiography, Warrior. In an orange grove outside Moshav, a group of us lined up, then went one at a time into a small shed where we stood in front of a Bible and a pistol and took an oath of allegiance.

Not long after, in 1948, Sharon and his counterparts in the Haganah took up arms in what Israelis call a war for independence, what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. The fighting forced around 700,000 Palestinians to flee their homes, some seeking refuge in neighboring countries like Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, others in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In the Battle of Latrun near Jerusalem, Sharon was shot in the abdomen. Days earlier, he'd heard that Israel had officially become a nation over the radio. The new prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, addressed the new nation.

This is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state. And one of the first things Ben-Gurion did after taking office was transform the Haganah into the national military of the new state of Israel, rebranding it the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF.

For the next few decades, Sharon would serve in the IDF, including as the commander of Unit 101, where he cultivated his military chops. Unit 101 carried out reprisal raids on Palestinian villages in retaliation for attacks from Palestinian and Arab guerrilla fighters in Israel.

Many of these reprisal raids were done in secret, outside official military protocol. On one of these raids... Ariel Sharon went with his commander unit at night and he massacred 69 civilians. This was his first war crime, but it wasn't his last. The West Bank is part of Israel.

Sharon eventually turned his attention from the battlefield to settlements. In his autobiography, he says the presence of Gush Amonim, the group of religious Zealots who settled in Giri At Arba, was the spark needed to set the wheels in motion.

He called them young pioneers. He was the main representative in the government on the side of the settlers.

Sharon began greenlighting more settlements, mainly in the West Bank, but also in Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula, all the territories Israel came to occupy after 1967.

But then… The word came first this morning from the Egyptian Middle East News Agency. It reported that Egypt and Israel had agreed on a final draft for a peace treaty. In 1978, just a year into the Menachem Begin Likud administration, Israel began peace talks with Egypt. The talks were facilitated by the U.S. and held at Camp David outside Washington, D.C.,

Egypt would recognize Israel as a state. Israel would gain access to the Suez Canal and give back the Sinai Peninsula, where some settlements had already been set up. Sharon was opposed to the peace treaty, but begging overruled him. While negotiations with Egypt were underway, Sharon doubled down on settlement building in the West Bank, as he recounted in his autobiography.

Sharon also believed that if Israelis could only see the settlements for themselves, they'd be less inclined to give them up. Sharon Tors.

Buses with trained guides drove voters up into the mountains, where they could actually look down on their homes and envision for themselves the strategic consequences of giving up the line of Western settlements I had built. By the time the campaign was over, more than 300,000 people had made the trip. From the early 70s to the early 80s, the settlements boomed from around 10,000 people to over 100,000.

All of these settlements were considered illegal under international law. And it's important to note that there was some opposition within Israel to the settlements from the start.

But for Ariel Sharon and the Likud government, this was a massive success, and he was promoted to Minister of Defense. It was then that he became the architect of the ill-conceived and ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

To make a very long story short,

Lebanon, which had been embroiled in a civil war for years by 1982, had a large Palestinian refugee population. And the PLO, which in the 1970s had carried out violent attacks on civilians inside and outside of Israel. The PLO was then headquartered in Beirut. Sharon's goal was to clear the PLO from the border area.

But he had a much bigger plan in his mind. Weaken the PLO to the point that... The Palestinians on the West Bank disillusioned. This would facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into greater Israel. Judaizing the West Bank through settlement and de-Palestinianizing it politically went hand in hand. But Sharon's actions in Lebanon were seen by many around the world as a step too far.

At two Palestinian refugee camps called Sabra and Shatila, as many as 3,000 Palestinians were killed in three days by members of a Lebanese Maronite Christian militia who had been let into the camps by the Israeli army.

A commission of inquiry found that he was indirectly responsible for this massacre. The commission's words are that he ignored or dismissed from his mind the danger of acts of revenge and bloodshed. And as a result, Aryeh Sharon was forced to resign as Minister of Defence.

Throughout the 1980s, the events in Lebanon and then the outbreak of the First Intifada or uprising, a grassroots Palestinian movement against the occupation that involved mass protests and violence in the occupied territories and Israel, contributed to the rise of more extreme groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, backed by Iran.

We don't have time to get into all the reasons that that happened, but if you want to hear more about the rise of both groups, check out our episode archives. Around the same time, the PLO began rebranding itself as more of a diplomatic group.

They tacitly recognized Israel's right to exist and accepted the Green Line as the border for a future Palestinian state, which, remember, was drawn in 1949 to separate Israel from what became the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. This is all important to the story of settlements because now there was a potential framework for a two-state solution. But the settlements were on the wrong side of the Green Line.

and still expanding. Further settlement activity is in no way necessary for the security of Israel and only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs that a final outcome can be freely and fairly negotiated. American presidents since 1967 have called the settlements everything from illegal... The Israeli settlements on occupied territory are illegal. ...to an obstacle to peace. Nothing should be done that might interfere with this prospect.

Welcome to this great occasion of history and hope. But when Bill Clinton took office in the early 1990s, he pushed forward with a peace process between Israelis and Palestinians anyway.

Standing at a podium with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to his right and chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, to his left, Clinton announced the beginning of the Oslo Accords. Today, the leadership of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization will sign a declaration of principles on interim Palestinian self-government.

Clinton didn't mention settlements in the speech. The Oslo Accords focused on two things, establishing mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, i.e. both sides recognize the other's right to exist, and establishing Palestinian governance over certain parts of the West Bank and Gaza.

Thornier issues like the status of Jerusalem, refugees, and settlements were set aside for future negotiations. Khaled El-Gindi says many Palestinians were wary of proceeding without a settlement freeze. Because settlements disrupt the whole land for peace formula, right? How are we going to negotiate over the fate of this land while you keep gobbling it up? During the period of the Oslo Peace Accords, the settlement population soars.

West Bank in particular is really taking off and suburban settlements there are growing in this kind of what I've called the securitized suburbanization of the Israeli settler movement. Securitized suburbanization. Housing developments with easy commutes to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, with paved roads, groomed lawns, shopping centers, better schools, playgrounds. A quality of life that Israelis were attracted to and the government was subsidizing.

Tax breaks, cheaper housing, and the person in the government creating those subsidized opportunities? Ariel Sharon. After resigning from his post as Minister of Defense, he spent several years working as Minister of Industry and Trade, then Housing and Construction, and then National Infrastructure.

Often, the resources that were needed to shore up these suburbanized settlements—water, electricity, roads, agricultural land—directly impacted the availability of those same resources for Palestinians in neighboring communities. Settlers wear the imbalance for sure. Does that...

Being that they want to see the Palestinian state come into existence, I think that's a separate question. Sarah Hirshhorn says while some settlers said they were willing to leave if a Palestinian state was formed, there was a vocal extremist group. We actually want to see the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and, you know, full Israeli sovereignty until the end of time. And some of those extreme voices didn't come from within Israel. The U.S. is...

almost ground zero for outside support for settlements in the occupied territories. At the same time that American officials were negotiating a potential two-state solution. The settler movement has an elaborate infrastructure of nonprofits and charitable organizations, tax-exempt groups in the United States that raise money for and funnel resources into the settlements.

There is also a strong constituency of non-Jews who are supporting the settlements, namely evangelical Christians. And so it's very hard in this political environment for U.S. administrations to take actions against settlements.

Some American settlers were drawn to Kiryat Arba, the place where Rabbi Levinger and the followers of Gush Amonim first settled. Kiryat Arba begins to be a settlement that has a growing reputation for radicalism, a few separatists.

Members of the Jewish underground were eventually arrested,

But attacks continued. One of the most severe happened in 1994, less than a year after the first Oslo Accord was signed. An American-born physician named Baruch Goldstein, who had settled in Kiryat Arba, went to the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, also holy to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs, during morning prayer. It was the 15th day of Ramadan.

Then he opened fire. Gunning down 29 Palestinians as they were praying. In the aftermath, it's Hak Rabin, remember the person who signed Oslo, this was the Labour government, so-called left wing. He faced two choices. Choice number one, which was to take the settlers out of Hebron. Or number two, double down.

keep the settlers there, and militarize the Ibrahimi Mosque against Palestinians. This is Deanna Butu. She's a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer who now lives between Haifa in Israel and Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. He chose the latter. Israel sent extra troops into the occupied territories, placed a curfew on Hebron, and closed off the Gaza Strip. Palestinians were no longer the people who

were the owners of the land, we were now turned into effectively the thieves and the interlopers, the people who shouldn't belong. And we were treated as such. The very young chant the word Palestine, an act of faith. So far, they have escaped the despair. But for most Palestinians, faith in a future democracy has declined.

By the late 1990s, the lack of progress in the Oslo peace process and escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians was leading to more disillusionment and extremism.

The bombing occurred at an outdoor marketplace, injuring at least 21 others. The Islamic militant group Hamas has claimed responsibility for the bombing. Palestinians grew frustrated with the PLO, which was increasingly seen as corrupt and willing to compromise on the fundamentals of Palestinian statehood.

And in Israel, the man who had launched the Oslo era alongside Clinton and Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a Jewish religious extremist. There was this fear that Oslo was moving inevitably and irreversibly toward giving up the West Bank and Gaza and possibly even East Jerusalem.

Seizing on this fear, a now elderly Ariel Sharon took over as leader of the increasingly hardline Likud party. On Israeli state radio, he'd recently said, quote, Everybody has to move, run, and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements. Because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don't grab will go to them. Coming up.

Ariel Sharon makes an unlikely comeback. Hi, this is Grace from Green Bay, Wisconsin, and you're listening to True Line from NPR.

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In the early morning hours of September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon arrived in the old city of Jerusalem, atop what Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call Haram al-Sharif. Both consider it one of the holiest places on the planet.

Thousands of Palestinians were there that day. The Likud party is here today with a message of peace, he said. He said he was carrying a peace message, but he was surrounded with a thousand security people. So he was being deliberately provocative.

Behind the scenes, negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials had stalled. Jerusalem had become so central because now the parties were talking about Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem and dividing Jerusalem. And that was just totally unacceptable for Sharon and others in his ideological family. So the situation was like a barrel of gunpowder

And Sharon threw a match to the gunpowder. Clashes break out. Just after he left the platform, a crowd of some 200 Palestinians began hurling stones at police. Protesters are shot dead. Today's violence in Jerusalem quickly spread to Ramallah on the West Bank. Before you know it, Palestinian students chanted, we're ready for a revolution. The second intifada was unleashed. We're ready.

I arrived on the first day of the second uprising. I had no idea. Diana Butu had come to the West Bank to be part of the Palestinian negotiations team that was working towards a two-state solution. She would also serve as a spokesperson for the PLO during this time.

The Palestinian uprising is now in its second month with no sign of abating. More than 135 people have been killed so far, all but eight Palestinians. Palestinian leaders basically say their aim is to play both cards. They want to use the violence to fight the Israeli occupation. With their overall goal of return to the peace talks, Israel says this is impossible to do both at the same time.

With elections around the corner and the second Intifada continuing, the sitting Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, faced an unlikely challenger: Ariel Sharon. Even though Sharon isn't that popular among Israelis, to many Israelis, the right wing looks very prescient now for saying for so long the Palestinians didn't want peace. In February 2001, Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister and doubled down on settlements.

For me, it was terrifying. This was a man who, in the aftermath of the massacre of Sabran Shetila, was declared to not be fit to be Minister of Defense. But it's okay for him to be Prime Minister? I knew that his rise to power was not only going to lead to a rise in settlements,

He laid the groundwork for some of the most horrendous things to be done against Palestinians. Not long into his term, Sharon announced plans to erect a security barrier. Some call it a separation wall, all along the border between the West Bank and Israel.

but not along the old Green Line border. Almost 90% of the barrier is built on the Palestinian side, snaking deep into the West Bank to surround the main Jewish settlement blocks built on occupied territory.

He said it was in response to a wave of suicide bombings and attacks in Israel, carried out by Palestinians during the Second Intifada. But I would argue the real purpose, or one of the purposes of the security barrier, was land grabbing. Avi Shlame says the West Bank security barrier was Sharon's way of preserving a version of the dream of greater Israel amid the negotiations. The wall, the wall,

marked what he hoped would be the final borders of the state of Israel. Throughout his time in office, Sharon implemented more physical barriers between settler and Palestinian communities. Concrete walls, chain-link fences, patrolled roads, military checkpoints. And that means that every time I exit Ramallah or enter Ramallah, I need to go through an Israeli military checkpoint.

It means that I'm always confronting an Israeli soldier. It means that my car is always being searched. My papers are being searched. There is almost daily violence at these checkpoints because their whole point is to ensure free movement of the Israeli settlers, but not free movement of Palestinians. I can remember being shocked by this.

how little consideration there was for how things like settlement infrastructure affected people on the ground. While Sharon was in office, Khalid al-Gindi was hired as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership on negotiations with Israel. I was based in Ramallah and I was in charge of the settlements file and I spent five and a half years

kind of up close and personal with that issue. He visited Palestinian communities all across the West Bank. We went to visit people whose homes, one portion of their home was now off limits because the wall came right through it. We as Palestinians, we're invisible to them.

A group known as the Hilltop Youth emerged around this time, galvanized by Sharon's message to grab as many hilltops as they could. Every hill is territory of the land of Israel. Every hill must be conquered. They established new unofficial outposts, sometimes in defiance of state authorities.

And Deanna Butu says some of them are known for using their weapons, pointing a weapon at your car and forcing you to stop. If you don't stop, they shoot at you. It's a daily form of being afraid that they're going to attack you. And then in 2005, Sharon came up with an idea that seemed to contradict his decades-long commitment to the settlement project.

He essentially floats this idea that it was time for a disengagement from the Gaza Strip. And that would involve evacuating all the civilian settlements there, as well as any military infrastructure and economic development. All 8,000 settlers in Gaza had to leave. Some refused and were forcibly removed. You know, historians ponder, was this the prelude to a large-scale disengagement for the West Bank? Or was this...

actually a way to shore up the West Bank settlement project. It was necessarily almost a sacrifice to Gaza to ensure that the West Bank settlements could continue to thrive forever. In the following year, he introduced 12,000 new settlers to the West Bank.

It was a prelude to consolidating Israel's grip and control over the West Bank. The West Bank was much more important than Gaza. The West Bank was Judea and Samaria. The West Bank was an integral part of the historic homeland. Gaza wasn't. Even so, the decision to withdraw from Gaza was deeply controversial within Israel, and it remains controversial to this day.

A couple of years later, in 2007, Hamas seized power in Gaza after a brief conflict with the Palestinian Authority. You know, for many Israelis, there's a direct line between that and October 7th. In a dramatic twist of fate. Shortly after this all took place, Ariel Sharon suffers this catastrophic stroke. Which leaves him in a coma for eight years. And never regains consciousness.

President Obama is among the world leaders, remembering Sharon as a leader who dedicated his life to Israel. President Shimon Peres. When he died, the way that people eulogized him totally ignored the harm that he caused. Not just directly, but setting into place this path of just dealing with Palestinians with endless force. No limits. And the world never stopping him.

Today, there are more than 130 settlements that are officially recognized by the Israeli government.

And then there are a number of unofficial outposts, the kind the hilltop youth have established, with estimates ranging between 100 and 191. Only around a third of settlers today settle in the West Bank for religious reasons. The majority say they do it for a better quality of life. But the quality of life is at the expense of whom? For whom is it quality of life?

The decades of violence that these settlements are built on, maintained on, the violence that they continue to cause to Palestinians each and every day, and the fact that they can't see the violence is itself very violent.

In recent years we have seen the escalation of settler violence against the residents of the West Bank with the active support of the government. And today the settlers are a major political force in the country.

Israel's Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gavir, is actually a settler in Kiryat Arba. Today, there's a memorial to Baruch Goldstein there. And some within the settler movement are now calling for a resettlement of Gaza. Now, the settler reality is the dominant reality and the Palestinian presence is the marginal presence. The settlements and the army control 61% of the West Bank.

So the settler reality has completely flipped since Oslo, ironically, since the start of the peace process. Today, I just feel like the Oslo rubric is no longer, you know, no longer in effect. Everybody's in their own one state paradigm. Seems to me like well beyond the question of the Israeli settler movement post-1967. We're back in a 1948 era.

paradigm and a 1948 existential conflict about why did a state of Israel come into existence and a state of Palestine did not, and how is that going to be historically redressed? You asked me, when does it begin for me? It begins with that ideology that there are some people who are deserving of rights and other people who are not. And I think that's the part that Israel has to understand. They can't live

An IDF spokesperson says attacks on Israeli targets in the region have increased significantly since the war started.

The spokesperson said IDF soldiers handle attacks on Israeli citizens, while Israeli police handle violations by Israeli citizens, including violent incidents directed at Palestinians, with support as needed from IDF soldiers. In the West Bank, it's terrifying to be there. The Israeli army has been going into, particularly in the northern part of the West Bank, and destroying the cities and killing people as they choose.

Who do I turn to for that safety and security? There is no rule of law. It's the law of power.

That's it for this week's show. I'm Randabdad Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And...

Thanks to Tony Cavan, James Heider, Daniel Estrin, Greta Pittinger, Johannes Dergi, Puneet Matiwala, Nina Puchalski, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

Voice-over work in this episode was done by Devin Schwartz, Casey Murrell, and Nick Neves. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Gilly Moon. Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, and finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, write us at ThruLine at NPR.org.

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