The girls, aged 14 to 16, have come for settler training to learn how to occupy Palestinian land — breaking international law. “God promised us this land and told us if you don’t take it, bad people will try and take it and you will have a war,” says Emuna Billa, 19, one of the camp supervisors. “Why do we have a war in Gaza? Because we don’t take Gaza.”
Their guru is Daniella Weiss, a 79-year-old grandmother in a long skirt and patterned headscarf. Founder of the Nachala or Homeland movement, she has been setting up illegal settlements for 49 years and was recently put under international sanctions. “You will be the new emissaries,” she tells the 50 or so girls at the camp. “I call it redeeming, not settling and this is our duty.”
She unfurls a map of Israel and the Palestinian territories dotted with vivid pink house symbols to represent existing and proposed Jewish settlements. Not only are these all across the West Bank, but also in Gaza. Already 674 people have signed up for beachside plots there, she tells me, and “many more want to join”. When someone asks her about settling Lebanon she smiles and says, “Yes, there too”.
I’m not surprised. That’s what Israeli settlers are doing for decades, not just since October.
Tell me how people should not get radicalized, when your home and existence and that of your family is constantly threatened.
I’m not condoning the actions of Hamas, they are brutal and wrong. But Israel created that beast themselves and left Palestinians with no other options.
If you want a more human focused instead of politics I would recommend to read Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation
Jewish author Michael Chabon and Israeli born author Ayelet Waldman asked writers, journalists, authors of both sides and not involved at all, to visit the occupied territories and write an essay about their expierience. It shows a heartbreakingly personal point of view of the situation before the current war.