A History of Settlements

The Israeli government recently approved a new settlement project in the occupied West Bank that would effectively cut it in half. The plan is illegal under international law and has been widely condemned. To get a sense of why settlements continue to be such a big issue for both Palestinians and Israelis, we wanted to bring you this episode about their history that’s part of our series, "The Cycle." This episode originally published in October 2024. Guests: Khaled El-Gindy, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D. C. Sara Yael Hirschhorn, author of City on a Hilltop, American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement Gideon Aran, former anthropology and sociology professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem Avi Shlaim, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World Diana Buttu, former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Israeli government just approved a new settlement project in the occupied West Bank that would effectively cut it in half. The plan is illegal under international law and has been widely condemned. To get a sense of why settlements continue to be such a big issue for Palestinians and Israelis, we wanted to bring you this episode about their history as part of our series, "The Cycle."

• 0:44Speaker 02

  There's a highway that runs from Tel Aviv to the northern suburbs, I guess, of Jerusalem.

• 0:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's called Highway 443. Much of it runs through the West Bank. And along some parts of it...

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Are walls with painted murals on them.

• 1:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  It probably has some security justification.

• 1:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  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. Palestinian residents of the West Bank, who are given different colored license plates, are not able to drive on most of the highway. To access one part of it, they have to cross a military checkpoint and have a special permit. Most do not.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  The International Court of Justice says Israel's presence in Palestinian occupied territories is illegal and should end.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  I think now the international consensus among international human rights groups is that this is a reality of apartheid.

• 2:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Khalid Al Ghindi. He's a former senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, where he directed the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:58Speaker 04

  Since the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 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.

• 3:18Speaker 05

  A Palestinian man was shot dead after a group of armed settlers stormed the village of Jit, setting homes aflame.

• 3:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 3:57Speaker 06

  Today, Israeli settlers are primarily economic settlers. They're essentially suburbanites that I believe, if they had been offered 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.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  This is Sarah Yael Hershorn. She teaches at the University of Haifa and wrote the book, "City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement."

• 4:24Speaker 06

  So this leaves maybe 30% of the Israeli settler enterprise today that identify as religious Zionists.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  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.

• 4:42Speaker 07

  I'm saying this very clearly. We will never uproot settlements in the land of Israel.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:07Speaker 05

  As Israeli police battled Arab stone throwers right when an 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.

• 5:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  Coming up, the birth of a city on a hill.

• 5:56Speaker 00

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• 7:45Speaker 03

  Part One. On the Seventh Day.

• 7:51Speaker 06

  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. At that time, you were not aware of the fact that actually you are watching history.

• 8:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  What did it look like when you first got there?

• 8:25Speaker 06

  Only bare mountain tops. No, no settlements.

• 8:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Gideon Aron. 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, Giriath Arba.

• 8:49Speaker 06

  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, seven days a week.

• 9:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Giryat 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.

• 9:36Speaker 06

  The idea of pushing the frontier, it is inherently violent.

• 9:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  They called their movement

• 9:43Speaker 06

  Gush Amunim.

• 9:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  Gush Amunim.

• 9:46Speaker 06

  The Block of the Faithful.

• 9:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Their spiritual leader, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, tied settlements to a religious mission.

• 9:59Speaker 06

  We were walking in the canyons, leading from Jerusalem to Jericho, late night, all dark. And he looked to me and pointed to a certain hill and said, "Here there will be a yeshiva,

• 10:17Speaker 06

  and here there will be a school, and here there will be some industry."

• 10:23Speaker 06

  I said to myself, "Oh, oh,

• 10:26Speaker 06

  this person is cuckoo. He's dreaming while awake."

• 10:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  Rabbi Levinger and some of his followers had arrived in the city of Hebron with that vision for the future a few years earlier. Posing a Swiss tourist, they checked into a hotel to spend Passover there. And then...

• 10:47Speaker 06

  They sent a telegram to the head of the military command, saying, "We had a lovely Passover holiday, and we've decided to stay here."

• 10:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  "We've decided to stay here indefinitely, in a hotel in the middle of a Palestinian city."

• 11:04Speaker 04

  To leave, would you fight the government? Eh, we won't leave.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  Under any circumstances? Under any circumstances.

• 11:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  For the followers of Gushamunim, this was the logical next step in God's plan, in the aftermath of what some saw as an act of divine intervention.

• 11:26Speaker 07

  For the third time since its birth as an independent state, Israel is embroiled in a war with the Arab nations that surround it.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  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.

• 11:47Speaker 06

  That was the real superpower in the region was was air power.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  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.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  The total humiliation of the Arab militaries across the board in a in a sweeping way.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  The Arab states concede defeat just six days later.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  I think it's impossible to overstate the elation, euphoria that Israelis felt after the the war. I mean, many of them looked at it as a miracle to defeat their enemies in six days.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  It was known as the Six-Day War. And from day seven, the question arose, what is to be done with the territories?

• 12:41Speaker 04

  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.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  The 1967 war disrupted all of that. Israel seized control of the territories over that green line.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  The West Bank, including East Jerusalem,

• 13:48Speaker 04

  plus the Gaza Strip. And Israel also captured

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Egyptian territory, all of the Sinai Peninsula, and Syrian territory in the Golan Heights.

• 13:59Speaker 06

  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 ran-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 there was value to this as a diplomatic tool of the Arab world. And some said, by no means, never.

• 14:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  It's after 1967 that the Palestinians kind of politically come into their own.

• 14:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, emerged as an autonomous political and military entity representing Palestinians.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  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.

• 15:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  There was one part of the West Bank that Israel decided to immediately annex, incorporating it into the State of Israel. East Jerusalem.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  It's not recognized by any country, but it was annexed.

• 15:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  The UN Security Council issued a resolution stating that this action was illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  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.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  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."

• 15:56Speaker 04

  In other words, it would create a buffer between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  So initially, the settlement logic was security-based.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  And he proposed that the settlements should be established

• 16:06Speaker 02

  in isolated areas.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  to minimize interaction with the local Palestinian population.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  because that would create problems.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  The Alon 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.

• 16:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 16:49Speaker 07

  No doubt, the Arab people of Hebron view the Jewish settlement as an act of revenge.

• 16:56Speaker 02

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

• 17:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 Shlaim. 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.

• 18:04Speaker 06

  The 1973 war was a real tilt in the system. Israel had to get off this kind of pedestal of euphoria and maybe even hubris after the 1967 war.

• 18:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 soldier 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.

• 18:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  And that newfound fame gave Sharon a pathway to enter politics and push the country further to the right.

• 19:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Israeli right were divided into different parties.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  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.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable, and is linked with the right to security and peace. Therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration. Between the sea and the Jordan, there will only be Israeli sovereignty.

• 20:00Speaker 05

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

• 20:06Speaker 02

  You now have a Likud right-wing government, ideologically committed to settling all of the land.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  And a quick note: The Likud is Benjamin Netanyahu's party, which currently runs the Israeli government.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  Begin adamantly opposes the return of the occupied West Bank to Arab control.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:44Speaker 05

  Are you saying that you think the United States has no business telling you what to do about the settlements here? United States has nothing to say

• 20:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Hi, this is Joshua Rooney. I'm calling from Essex Junction, Vermont. And you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 21:26Speaker 06

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• 22:24Speaker 07

  Part Two. The Godfather.

• 22:30Speaker 05

  There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  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 Shlaim's book, "The Iron Wall," is a reference to his article.

• 23:01Speaker 05

  My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries.

• 23:05Speaker 07

  Jabotinsky says, "No nation in history has ever willingly made room for another people to come and create a state on its land."

• 23:17Speaker 05

  There is no such precedent.

• 23:20Speaker 07

  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...

• 23:38Speaker 05

  Behind an iron wall.

• 23:39Speaker 07

  Behind an iron wall of Jewish military.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Which the native population cannot breach.

• 23:52Speaker 04

  In the early 1920s, Zev Japetinsky 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.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  At the age of 14, I was initiated.

• 24:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the mid 1940s, a new recruit named Ariel Sharon was initiated into the Haganah. He describes the experience in his autobiography Warrior.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  In an orange grove outside Mosheav, 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.

• 24:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 benakba, 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.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  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.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  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.

• 25:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 25:51Speaker 04

  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...

• 26:19Speaker 07

  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.

• 26:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  The West Bank is part of Israel, and we must keep this part as part of Israel because of the vital importance of this part of the security of Israel. Sharon eventually turned his attention from the battlefield to settlements. In his autobiography, he says the presence of Gush Amunim, the group of religious zealots who settled in Giriyat Arba, was the spark needed to set the wheels in motion. He called them "young pioneers."

• 27:09Speaker 07

  He was the main representative in the government on the side of the settlers. He gave them every possible support.

• 27:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 27:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  But then...

• 27:36Speaker 07

  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.

• 27:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1978, just a year into the Menachem Begin Likud administration, Israel began peace talks with Egypt. The talks were facilitated by the US and held at Camp David outside Washington DC. 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.

• 28:09Speaker 07

  Sharon was opposed to the peace treaty, but Begin ruled him...

• 28:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  While negotiations with Egypt were underway, Sharon doubled down on settlement building in the West Bank, as he recounted in his autobiography.

• 28:25Speaker 07

  I received permission to establish three settlements a month. Then I really started to push.

• 28:31Rund Abdelfatah?

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

• 28:39Speaker 07

  That was how Sharon Tours was born.

• 28:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sharon Tours.

• 28:44Speaker 07

  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.

• 29:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 29:23Speaker 04

  But for Ariel Sharon and the Likud government, this was a massive success. And he was promoted to Minister of Defense.

• 29:32Speaker 07

  It was then that he became the architect of the ill-conceived and ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

• 29:44Speaker 07

  The situation in Beirut is itchy. Many here feel that a full-scale Israeli attack on Palestinian positions throughout Lebanon will soon be launched.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  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...

• 30:11Speaker 02

  The PLO was then headquartered in Beirut.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  Sharon's goal was to clear the PLO from the border area.

• 30:18Speaker 07

  But he had a much bigger plan in his mind.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  Weaken the PLO to the point that...

• 30:24Speaker 07

  The Palestinians on the West Bank would be disillusioned. This would facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Judaizing the West Bank through settlement and de-Palestinianizing it politically went hand in hand.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  But Sharon's actions in Lebanon were seen by many around the world as a step too far.

• 30:50Speaker 07

  Today, in the camps of Sabra and Shatila, a large plot of unmarked graves bears witness to those who died in the massacre.

• 30:57Speaker 04

  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.

• 31:14Speaker 07

  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, Ariel Sharon was forced to resign as Minister of Defense.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  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.

• 32:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  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

• 32:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  that a final outcome can be freely and fairly negotiated. American presidents since 1967 have called the settlements everything from illegal...

• 33:04Speaker 05

  The Israeli settlements on occupied territory are illegal.

• 33:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  ...to an obstacle to peace. Nothing should be done. It 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 principle. On interim Palestinian self-government. It charts a course toward reconciliation.

• 33:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  Khalid El-Gindi says many Palestinians were wary of proceeding without a settlement freeze.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  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?

• 34:36Speaker 06

  During the period of the Oslo Peace Accords, the settlement population soars. The West Bank in particular is really taking off, and suburban settlements there are growing in this kind of, what I have called, the securitized suburbanization of the Israeli settler movement.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Securitized suburbanization. Housing developments with easy commutes to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, with paved roads, groomed lawns, shopping centers, better schools, playgrounds.

• 35:06Speaker 06

  Quality of life that Israelis were attracted to and the government was subsidizing.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Tax breaks, cheaper housing, and the person in the government creating those subsidized opportunities.

• 35:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 35:46Speaker 06

  For settlers, where are the imbalance for sure? Is that... Being that they want to see Palestinian state in come into existence, I think that's a that's a separate question.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Sarah Herschorn says while some settlers said they were willing to leave if a Palestinian state was formed, there was a vocal extremist group.

• 36:06Speaker 06

  Who actually want to see the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and, you know, full Israeli sovereignty until the end of time.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  And some of those extreme voices didn't come from within Israel.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  The US is almost ground zero for outside support for for settlements in the occupied territories.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  At the same time that American officials were negotiating a potential two-state solution.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  There is also a strong constituency of non-Jews who are supporting the settlements, namely evangelical Christians.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  And so it's very hard in this political environment for US administrations to take actions against settlements.

• 37:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  Some American settlers were drawn to Kiryat Arba, the place where Rabbi Levenger and the followers of Gush Ammonim first settled.

• 37:17Speaker 06

  Kiryat Arba begins to be a settlement that has a growing reputation for radicalism. A few small fringe, but very important terrorist groups within the Gush Ammonim community, and more largely renowned as the Mach terrorist or the Jewish underground, carried out some very severe and significant attacks.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  God willing, we shall establish the state of Judea here, and we will. know how to take care of them ourselves.

• 37:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 Ibrahimim 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.

• 38:18Speaker 05

  gunning down 29 Palestinians as they were praying.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  In the aftermath, it's Hakrab Bin, 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 Ibrahimim Mosque against Palestinians.

• 38:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Deanna Buttu. She's a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer who now lives between Haifa in Israel and Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

• 38:58Speaker 05

  He chose the latter.

• 39:00Speaker 06

  Israel sent extra troops into the occupied territories, placed a curfew on Hebron, and closed off the Gaza Strip.

• 39:07Speaker 05

  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.

• 39:22Speaker 06

  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.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  The bombing occurred at an outdoor marketplace, injuring at least 21 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.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  There was this fear that Oslo was moving inevitably and irreversibly toward giving up the West Bank and Gaza and possibly even East Jerusalem.

• 40:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  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."

• 40:56Speaker 04

  Coming up, Ariel Sharon makes an unlikely comeback.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Hi, this is Grace from Green Bay, Wisconsin, and you're listening to True Line from MPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 41:14Speaker 03

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• 42:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part Three: A New Reality. 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.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  "The Likud party is here today with a message of peace," he said.

• 42:46Speaker 07

  He said he was carrying a peace message, but he was surrounded with a thousand security people, so he was being deliberately provocative.

• 42:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Behind the scenes, negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials had stalled.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:20Speaker 07

  So the situation was like a barrel of gunpowder, and Sharon threw a match to the gunpowder.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Clashes break out.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  Just after he left the platform, a crowd of some 200 Palestinians began hurling stones at police.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Protesters are shot dead.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Today's violence in Jerusalem quickly spread to Ramallah on the West Bank.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Before you know it...

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Palestinian students chanted, "We're ready for a revolution."

• 43:51Speaker 07

  The second Etfah was unleashed.

• 43:58Speaker 05

  I arrived on the first day of the second uprising.

• 44:04Speaker 05

  I had no idea.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  Diana Buttu 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.

• 44:18Speaker 05

  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.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  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 a return to the peace talks, Israel says this is impossible to do both at the same time.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  With elections around the corner and the second intifada continuing, the sitting prime minister, Ehud Barak, faced an unlikely challenger, Aryeh Sharon.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:02Speaker 04

  In February 2001, Aryeh Sharon was elected prime minister and doubled down on settlements.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  The government of Israel will act to restore the security and stability we need.

• 45:16Speaker 05

  For me, it was terrifying. This was a man who, in the aftermath of the massacre of Sabran Shatila, was declared to not be fit to be Minister of Defense. But it's OK 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.

• 45:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 46:24Speaker 07

  But I would argue the real purpose, or one of the purposes of the security barrier was land grabbing.

• 46:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Avi Shlaim says the West Bank's security barrier was Sharon's way of preserving a version of the dream of Greater Israel amid the negotiations.

• 46:43Speaker 07

  The wall marked what he hoped would be the final borders of the State of Israel.

• 46:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Throughout his time in office, Sharon implemented more physical barriers between settler and Palestinian communities: concrete walls, chain-link fences, patrolled roads, military checkpoints.

• 47:04Speaker 05

  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.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  I can remember being shocked by how little consideration there was for how things like settlement infrastructure affected

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Affected people on the ground.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  While Sharon was in office, Khalid El-Gindi was hired as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership on negotiations with Israel.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  He visited Palestinian communities all across the West Bank.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  We went to visit people whose homes, one portion of their home was now off limits because the wall came right through it.

• 48:22Speaker 05

  We, as Palestinians, were invisible to them.

• 48:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  A group known as the Hilltop Youth emerged around this time, galvanized by Sharon's message to grab as many hilltops as they could.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Every hill is territory of the land of Israel. Every hill must be conquered.

• 48:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  They established new unofficial outposts, sometimes in defiance of state authorities. And Yana Buttu says some of them

• 48:52Speaker 05

  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.

• 49:05Speaker 05

  It's a daily form of being afraid that they're going to attack you.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  And then, in 2005, Sharon came up with an idea that seemed to contradict his decades-long commitment to the settlement project.

• 49:24Speaker 06

  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 or economic development.

• 49:39Speaker 04

  All 8,000 settlers in Gaza had to leave. Some refused and were forcibly removed.

• 49:45Speaker 06

  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? That it was necessarily almost sacrifice Gaza to ensure that the West Bank settlements could, you know, continue to thrive forever?

• 50:09Speaker 07

  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.

• 50:36Speaker 04

  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.

• 50:52Speaker 06

  You know, for many Israelis, there's a direct line between that and October 7.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  In a dramatic twist of fate.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  Shortly after this all took place, Ariel Sharon suffers this catastrophic stroke.

• 51:05Speaker 04

  Which leaves them in a coma for eight years.

• 51:08Speaker 06

  And never regains consciousness. President Obama is among the world leaders remembering Sharon as a leader who dedicated his life to Israel. President Jimon Perez.

• 51:19Speaker 05

  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.

• 51:48Speaker 07

  As I met Rabbi Levin at the very beginning, he told me that his success would be defined in terms of people inhabit the West Bank who have nothing to do with the original ideas of Gush Yom Naim. People of the middle class want to better their life.

• 52:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 52:39Speaker 05

  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.

• 53:00Speaker 07

  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.

• 53:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 54:01Speaker 06

  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 paradigm, in a 1948 existential conflict about why did a state of Israel come to existence and a state of Palestine did not? And how is that going to be historically redressed?

• 54:25Speaker 05

  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.

• 54:40Speaker 05

  And I think that's the part that Israel has to understand. They can't live their lives just somehow assuming that all of the violence that they put out is not going to have a boomerang effect.

• 54:53Speaker 06

  Many Israelis fear that, you know, what happened in Gaza would happen in the West Bank.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  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.

• 55:23Speaker 05

  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 rule of power. It's the law of power.

• 56:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 56:05Speaker 04

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 56:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  And me, and...

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devin Kadyama.

• 56:21Speaker 05

  Sarah Wyman. Lina Mohammed. Irene Noguchi.

• 56:25Speaker 04

  Thanks to Tony Cavan, James Hyder, Daniel Estrin, Greta Pittinger, Johannes Dergi, Punit Matiwalah, Nina Puchalsky, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

• 56:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Voiceover work in this episode was done by Devin Schwartz, Casey Morrell, and Nick Neves.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  Back checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. This episode was mixed by Gilli Moon.

• 56:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Anya. Miza.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.

• 57:01Speaker 04

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, write us at [email protected].

• 57:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 57:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.