Interview With a Settler


Volume [9]	No. [2]	December 2012
Newsletter Home Page		NORCAL ISM Homepage

Interview With a Settler

By Kelly Joiner, October 1, 2012

“What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.”

Moshe Dayan, Israeli general, 1956

During my visit to Palestine this summer, I met with an Israeli settler in an effort to learn more about the views of settlers living in the West Bank. My ultimate goal was to speak very little, listen a lot, and try to understand the thinking behind the settler point of view. My purpose was to try to understand his point of view in an effort to be able to explain it to others and argue effectively against it, so I spoke very little and allowed him to talk, which he was more than happy to do.

I spoke to a settler living in the Efrat settlement which is part of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc. It is located south of Jerusalem between Bethlehem and Hebron over 4 miles from the green line separating Israel and the West Bank and is on the Palestinian side of the apartheid wall. There are about 22,000 illegal settlers in Gush Etzion and 7000 of those live in Efrat.

Settlers like the one I interviewed were enticed to move there because the Israeli government heavily subsidized the housing in settlements in an effort to change the demographics within the West Bank and enlarge Israeli territory

All settlements within the West Bank have been deemed illegal under international law and are a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention’s prohibition against an occupying power’s transfer of civilians into occupied territory. The Israeli government disputes this not by saying that population transfer is not occurring, or even that the boundary is disputed, but because Palestine was under occupation already when Israel conquered the territory, it was not bound by the Geneva Convention because it was a liberating army. The International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion issued in 2004, has rejected this assertion and reaffirmed the position that all Israeli settlements within the West Bank are illegal under international law.

The man that I spoke with one afternoon in August of 2012, was an American who made aliyah, which is the Jewish-only right to return to the holy land, in the early 1980s. He and his wife, also an American, first moved to Tel Aviv because they wanted to live “among their own kind.” He said they “wanted to raise their children with people who were like them.” And he said that while he loved America, he only wanted to live with other Jews. After a few years in Tel Aviv, he moved to Efrat because it was cheaper than living in the city and was closer to Jerusalem. He said he felt no particular attachment to the specific land the settlement was built on, but now that he had purchased his home, he felt entitled to keep living there. Regardless of the original illegality of the purchase apparently.

He asserted that none of the land in the settlement had been illegally confiscated, but had been purchased from the Israeli government. The problem with this is that it was not the Israeli government’s land to sell, and it was precisely this government that stole the land in question. He pointed to small bits of land near the settlement that still held olive trees that were tended by Palestinians as evidence that everything was legal.

But this is one of the legacies of colonialism. Palestinians who had been living on their land for hundreds of years, often did not hold official western legal documents outlining their holdings. So the small patches of Palestinian land that is still held by Arabs are often newer pieces adjacent to more ancient holdings that were purchased more recently during the British occupation. Israeli courts held that these new purchases were the only legally held lands, and the rest were confiscated and used to build settlements.

Settlers like the one I interviewed were enticed to move there because the Israeli government heavily subsidized the housing in settlements in an effort to change the demographics within the West Bank and enlarge Israeli territory. The Israeli government is beholden to Zionist ideology that says that God gave Israel to them and so any action they might take to get that land back is justified.

This does not fit with traditional Jewish teachings about justice however. Abraham purchased the land for Sarah’s grave in Hebron parts of which are now being stolen by settlers on a daily basis. He would be ashamed of what is being done in the name of his God. As would most religious figures. Muhammad would be ashamed at the actions of many of his fringe followers, as would Jesus. As a Catholic, I am often ashamed of people who call themselves Christian and yet deny basic tenets of our faith that is based on love and equality.

He returned to the theme he began with, namely that he doesn’t want to live with anyone but Jews

Here is an analogy I was offered. Israel and the British at the time of Partition offered the Palestinians a state on 45% of their historic homeland in 1947 and offered 55 % to Jews who constituted 30 % of the population and owned only 6 % of the land. Palestinians rejected this offer because they thought they would win in a war supported by other Arab nations. They were wrong. More territory was lost in 1967. “Now faced with almost nothing they have come crawling back like babies” (here he actually began to suck his thumb and talk like a baby) “Waaaah, I’m sowwy.” He adds, “So because they say sorry we are obligated to give them what they want?”

Actually, you are obligated to give them what they want because what they want is to be treated like human beings and be allowed to live in the land they have lived on for thousands of years. But I digress.

He then compared partition to a common business transaction. “Let’s say I offer to sell you this cake for $5. You try to negotiate the price lower and I refuse. You refuse to pay my price and walk away. If you come back tomorrow and I have sold the cake to someone else am I still obligated to sell you the cake for $5?”

Yes, that’s exactly the same thing. Your homeland and a piece of cake. Perfect analogy. But it illuminates a lot. If you think of the invasion and occupation of Palestine as a business transaction, then Palestinians are simply trying to declare the contract null and void. There is no need to demonize them or paint them as scary, they are simply unsatisfied customers. It also means that you should not be so zealously attached to your product. Every businessman knows you don’t get emotional. It’s just business. Typically, the settler is applying different standards to others than for himself. Palestinians are hopelessly violent, emotional and scary. Israelis are just rational businessmen. I often see businessmen in America throwing rocks at children on their way to school. Sure. Totally rational.

The settler also compared the situation to that of Native Americans in the US. As if I, as a beneficiary of American colonialism, would sympathize and collude with him. Some differences. First, the majority of atrocities committed in the US happened several hundred years ago. I was not a settler who pushed Native Americans off of their land, my ancestors were still in Europe when this was happening. Not that I didn’t benefit indirectly, I did and still do, but I do not bear personal responsibility for the actions. This settler is living on someone else’s land. He took it. He did.

The lesson of the Holocaust is Never Again, not Never again to us. I do not accept that this settler and others like him should be allowed to continue to live on stolen land.

Second, while I would not argue that similar atrocities were committed against Native Americans, I would argue that many of them are not still ongoing. Native Americans suffer from the same effects of institutionalized racism that African-Americans and other communities of color in America face. This racism is real, powerful, and harmful. But the fact remains that today Native Americans can leave their reservations whenever they like—they have freedom of movement. Though incarceration rates are far too high relative to their proportion of the population, we do have legal procedures and mechanisms for prohibiting torture by guards and policemen. We do not imprison children with adults, nor do children end up in military jails. We do not send our air force to bomb reservations, or poison their water and fields anymore. Our military does not target civilians on American soil. And while I do not often defend the US government, police, and military, I have to say that within the bounds of our own country, we are not as bad as Israel. Not that we are good. But we at least have the sense to know that discrimination is wrong. It is illegal. And people who do bad things are supposed to be punished. Does this always happen, no. Far too often, power is abused. But we do not legalize torture because it happens. We do not legalize stealing because some people will steal. At least not yet. But even if we did, I would not support that.

Once I was apparently unable to mask my disgust or shock when he was telling me that all Palestinians teach their children to hate Jews. At that point he backtracked and spent a lot of time trying to convince me he was right and eventually said, “But I don’t mean Christian Palestinians, I mean the Muslims.”

He tried to play on my Christianity several times by saying that Palestinian Christians were not bad guys; it was the Muslims that were a problem. He intimated that I would be OK with this type of intolerance because it was so common at home I guess. Those people are clearly not to be trusted, but Christians are fine. Of course this is despite the fact that the Israeli occupation makes no such distinction and Palestinian Christians are targeted just as harshly by the regime as Muslims.

But even if this were not so, the nakedness of his prejudice was startling. I am from San Francisco, and I am not that old yet, so I am used to people having the sense to be ashamed of their racism. Not that it doesn’t come out, but when confronted, most people that I know feel bad afterwards, not unabashed. He really did remind me of a Klan member at that moment. Explaining why those people aren’t really people and don’t deserve the same respect as you and me.

Eventually he returned to the theme he began with, namely that he doesn’t want to live with anyone but Jews. So the fact that other people have historic and meaningful ties to this land as well appears immaterial. He is an Israeli. They won a war. And God gave them the land. So might makes right. The fact that this Zionist philosophy of exclusivism is racist and antithetical to ideas of democracy seemed not to bother him.

Then he returned to the idea that he and I were the same and it was the Arabs that were the problem. “9/11, that was Muslims” he told me. That’s when I knew it was time to leave. I think once you bring 9/11 into a discussion, it is a sign that you are out of rational arguments. It was such a bald-faced attempt at fear-mongering and racism I realized that I had nothing more to learn.

Apparently the lessons of Exodus and the Holocaust were lost on him. The Old Testament says, “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:21) And the lesson of the Holocaust is Never Again, not Never again to us. I do not accept that this settler and others like him should be allowed to continue to live on stolen land. I do not accept that there is something fundamentally different about the Palestinian people that means they are not entitled to basic human rights and the protection of international law. I do not accept that there is nothing we as Americans can do about this situation.

We must refuse to allow our government to continue to support this inhumanity in our name and with our money. We must educate other Americans about what is going on. And we must do this not because it is in our own interest, even though it is, but because it is the right thing to do. Doing the right thing is rarely easy. It means awkward conversations at work and at Thanksgiving dinner. It is our responsibility as Americans to act in solidarity with Palestinians by changing things here in the United States. This is the work. Yalla.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1963

“The resistance of Israeli Jewish people to the occupation and the enormous risk taken by those refusing to serve in the Israeli military offers an example, especially for those of us living in the United States, of how to behave when you discover that atrocities are being committed in your name.”

Rachel Corrie, 2003

Kelly Joiner is an activist from Northern California working on issues affecting communities of color. In 2012 she spent the summer in the West Bank working with IMEMC news. She is currently working on research regarding Palestinian children in the Occupied Territories.