Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Razzismo anti-arabo

Abbiamo purtroppo letto tutti svariati artt. di contenuto decisamente
antisemita sulla stampa araba. Tuttavia, che gli STESSI stereotipi stiano
cominciando (?) a funzionare anche per gli arabi, lo testimonia questo
sciagurato post che traggo da soc.culture.israel. Mi piacerebbe che lo
stesso sdegno che (giustamente) colpisce l'antisemitismo antiebraico
colpisse anche quello antiarabo. Non è morale minimizzare
("la madre degli
imbecilli è sempre incinta" etc.) roba come questa (assai diffusa: vedasi
"il Signore delle
mosche[e]" di mr. Arduino d'Ivrea; o il gratuito "labbruto Arafat" di Bet
Gimel Dalet, o il ben pagato "Arafat sputacchiante" di OriEna Fallaci) e
paventare Auschwitz passando per Asor
Rosa... Shalom.
Namib
Cannibalistic Arabs                (Shulman 9298)
P.A. PSYCHOLOGISTS ON P.A. CHILDREN
A study by P.A. psychologists found that half the Arab children in the P.A.
yearn to become suicide-murderers.  Their generation will be a murderous
one.
"In a society in which the legitimization of child murderers becomes a part
of
its ideology, then normative human morality no longer exists.  Which moral
rules shall these children pass on to their children when they in turn
become
parents?"
A video shows an Arab "child yelling, 'I will eat the flesh of my
conqueror,'
on the backdrop of Arab men yelling and holding up pieces of human organs."
"All of this has been orchestrated quite methodically by the P.A….  What
kind
of government calls upon its citizens to become uncompromising killers,
while
presenting itself to the world as a victim striving only for peace?  This
untenable hypocrisy should not be tolerated by enlightened civilization -
yet
this is the reality happening here and now."  (Saved by a P.A. Arab!)
An Arab psychologist wrote, "Suicide is a sickness, and (terrorist leaders)
are
using it for perverse political ends.  … As a psychologist, I can say
clearly
that the psychological profile of the suicide killers is that of a mentally
ill
person in every sense…  must be treated in order to try to extricate them
from the psychological problems…  But instead of dealing with their
sickness,
there are groups wanting the Palestinian and (other) Arab societies that
encourage them not only to continue along this path, but even to broaden the
ranks and get others to join in their sickness."  (Arutz-7, 2/3 from Israeli
Ministry of Foreign Affairs.)

 ha scritto nel messaggio
news:xrd3a.182784$0v.50...@news1.tin.it...
soltanto tu, avresti potuto mettere sullo stesso piano un razzismo di stato,
con espressioni colorite di singole persone rivolte ad una singola persona.
Ciao
Ad'I

Arduino D'Ivrea wrote:

e' che ti si conosce bene con le tue vermate razziste.
Ti conosce bene da quando ti firmavi veniero fogliata...

 con espressioni colorite di singole persone rivolte ad una singola persona.
Domandina:   L'articolo sotto parla di razzismo di stato o "espressioni
colorite di singole persone"?   Grazie.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/16SETTLEMENTS.html
The Unsettlers By SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO
Moshe Zar lives in a castle-size home atop a hill in the West Bank, near
the Palestinian city of Nablus. Although Zar, 65, is Jewish, his house
isn't in a gated, guarded Israeli settlement, nor is it built in the
suburb-in-the-desert style typical of those settlements. It is an enormous
Arab-style house -- bigger than any building for miles around. Stone
statues of roaring lions flank the doorway, and the driveway ends at a
chain-link fence adorned with barbed wire. A giant antenna towers above
the roof. No one is sure what it is for. (''Communications,'' Zar explains
cryptically.)
Zar doesn't hold any official position, although in practice, he functions
as a sort of a Wild West-style vigilante mayor of his stretch of the West
Bank, inspiring awe among many of the Jews there and fear among the
Palestinians. Unlike most settlers, he doesn't have an army posting by his
home; when disturbed, he has been known to lean his head out of a parapet
and threaten to open fire on uninvited guests. He is a religious Zionist
and a longtime friend of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and in the 1980's he
achieved moderate fame for his role in the Jewish Underground, a terrorist
group that planted bombs in the cars of Arab mayors and plotted to destroy
the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Israel captured the West Bank in the
1967 war; since 1979, Zar has been buying land in the territory from
individual Palestinians. It is a controversial practice; some Palestinians
who have sold land to Jews have been killed as collaborators. A number of
Palestinians have taken Zar to court on claims that he falsified
contracts. In 1983, a group of Palestinians attacked and stabbed Zar near
his castle.
The inside of Zar's castle is heavy with velvet curtains, mirrored
tapestries and chandeliers in the style of North African Jewry. There is a
synagogue on the ground floor, and one wall near the library is almost
entirely taken up by a sponge-painted map of an expanded state of Israel
that includes all of the West Bank and portions of Jordan and Lebanon. Zar
commissioned the painting himself. He sees his land deals in the West Bank
as one step in a program to advance Jewish settlement throughout the
Israel illustrated on his wall map.
In the spring of 2001, one of Zar's sons, Gilad, who did patrol duty for
the regional settlers' security force, was shot and killed on a road near
here. While the Zar family was sitting shiva in the castle, some of Zar's
teenage grandchildren and a few of their friends decided to take their
tents and sleeping bags and ''settle'' the empty hill facing Zar's hill in
honor of Gilad.
All over the West Bank in recent years, and particularly since the start
of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000, Israeli teenagers
and young adults, almost all of them passionately religious, have been
doing what Zar's grandchildren did -- claiming a small piece of land for
their own. They are motivated sometimes by personal grief, sometimes by
political anger, sometimes just by the youthful desire to be part of a
daring adventure. Because they usually move onto hilltops, the Israeli
media have taken to calling the most radical and colorful of these young
settlers the ''hilltop youth.'' When these young settlers claim a new
hill, they also claim the land around it, which in some cases Palestinians
have been farming for many years. The new settlers don't seize the land in
any official way; they simply uproot Palestinians' trees or shoot in the
air at any Palestinian who comes close. About 70 of these small
encampments, known in Israel as outposts, have been built in the last two
years; together they represent a movement that intends to transform the
West Bank, and the conflict in the Middle East, from the ground up.
That spring, a dozen kids from surrounding settlements joined Zar's
grandchildren in their encampment, which they would later call Ramat
Gilad, meaning ''Gilad Heights.'' They built huts to live in and a
makeshift outdoor kitchen where they cooked sandy dinners. They
constructed an eight-foot-high Star of David that they covered with light
bulbs so the Jews in nearby settlements and the Palestinians in Gitt, the
village below, could see it. When I visited Ramat Gilad not long ago, the
star was the first thing all of the young people there wanted to show me,
adding that as soon as they got money, they wanted to build a cement wall
to support a larger star, done up in ''fluorescents.''
''It's the only thing Arabs understand,'' explains 18-year-old Tamar Tzur,
an occasional visitor to Ramat Gilad. Seven years ago, Tzur was in a car
with her family outside the West Bank settlement of Beit El when
Palestinians fired on them, killing her mother and brother. The Israeli
government offered her an exemption from army service and a bulletproof
car, she says; she refused both. ''I will not drive around in a cage with
dark windows and show the Arabs I am weak and afraid,'' she says, her fair
skin flushing. ''The only thing that will stop the Arabs is a Jewish star
on every hilltop.''
A few hours after the first tents were pitched at Ramat Gilad, soldiers
from the Israeli Army came and dismantled the camp. But the teenagers
returned the next day with reinforcements, including Moshe Zar himself,
and when the soldiers came again to remove the tents, they were
outnumbered. The next time soldiers arrived at Ramat Gilad, it was not to
dismantle the outpost but to defend it. The ministry of defense had
apparently decided that Ramat Gilad could stay.
The goal of the teenagers who built the outpost is to one day create a
permanent Israeli town, and step by step, their dream is moving forward.
The Yesha Council, the political organization that represents settlers,
placed six trailers on the site. A nearby settlement provided water tanks
and gas-burning generators for electricity. Much of the day-to-day
maintenance of the site is performed by a constantly rotating band of
teenagers from the area who hang out on the outpost after school, on
Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, and on vacations. Two families have moved
into the trailers -- Moshe Zar's daughter and her 11 children, and a young
couple from an area yeshiva -- and now live there full time. There is a
plan for a prominent rabbi from a local settlement to move in; he would
probably bring followers to fill the remaining empty trailers.
There are no phone lines at Ramat Gilad. There's no garbage pickup,
either, but that's not because the Israeli government hasn't tried to send
trucks up to the outpost. One teenage girl, a regular visitor to Ramat
Gilad, xplained that at first the outpost was added to the regular
garbage-pickup route. But, she said, the trucks were driven by Israeli
Arabs, ''so some people threw stones at them until they didn't come
back.''
The diplomatic ''quartet'' that has been trying to negotiate a new Middle
East peace process -- the United States, the European Union, Russia and
the United Nations -- has labeled the new outposts an obstacle to peace.
One step in the first phase of the ''road map'' that the quartet endorsed
last fall was the dismantling of the outposts; that phase was scheduled to
begin last October. But to date only a few outposts have been removed, and
new ones continue to appear.
Raanan Gissin, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Sharon, claims that
nearly all of the 70 new outposts are legal expansions of existing
settlements, not new settlements. They are a necessary means of defense
for the settlers, he maintains, serving as strategic lookouts and
providing a first line of defense against Palestinian attacks on more
established settlements. In the last two years, more than 170 settlers
have been killed in the territories. The outposts, Gissin says, are a
justifiable response. ''You wouldn't see these outposts if the
Palestinians hadn't rejected the chance to negotiate in 2000,'' Gissin
says. ''Until there is an agreement, Jews have as much a right to settle
in their ancestral homeland and live unrestricted as Palestinians do.''
On the surface, tiny outposts like Ramat Gilad appear to be ad hoc and
unauthorized. Their population is small -- estimates of the total number
of outpost residents range from 500 to 1,000. It's clear that they have
some contact with the government -- who else sends the soldiers and the
garbage trucks? -- but it is a relationship that for the most part is
invisible.
According to Ezra Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Yesha Council, the low
profile is by design. ''There is a time for everything,'' he told me and
then sketched out a potential series of events for the next few months.
''Let's say there's a war in Iraq. Well, then the government can build
10,000 new housing units in Judea and Samaria'' -- the biblical names for
the area that settlers prefer to use -- ''and it won't be on the front
pages or all over the talk shows. So in the meantime, we can do this with
the outposts. The government's hands are clean; they have no involvement.
It's small potatoes, so it doesn't get covered outside of Israel.''
Palestinians who live near the outposts understand Rosenfeld's vision of
the future, and it scares them. Mustafa Bargouthi, a leader of Civil
Society, a Palestinian group that promotes democracy, grew up in Ramallah
and watched the settlements of Psagot and Beit El begin as a few trailers
on hilltops. ''Now Ramallah is surrounded by settlements on both sides,''
Bargouthi says, ''cities that have taken away agricultural lands and
prevented us from using our streets and roads.''
To Barghouti, outposts like Ramat Gilad are Israeli cities-in-waiting.
''Like most Palestinians,'' he says, ''I look at the little outpost and
see a monster opening its mouth very wide to eat us.''
ost outpost residents were born on settlements. They are the first
generation of Israelis to be native to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They
don't have a memory, as their parents do, of moving onto disputed
territory under military occupation. To them, the West Bank is simply
home, a home with very hostile neighbors. Their memories are of being
pelted with stones when their parents drove them into Ramallah to buy
groceries. While the first generation of settlers spoke of ideology all
the time, giving speeches and publishing monographs, the lectures I heard
outpost residents give one another were about singing with enough passion
to stir angels and about ''bringing more sweetness into the world.''
But the messianic passion that drove their parents to the West Bank is
only stronger in this generation, the first to pass through a religious
Zionist school system that teaches that both personal and global
redemption can be hastened by Jewish settlement throughout the biblical
land of Israel. What is most startling about the outposts, to an outsider,
is how the language and imagery of peace exists right next to the language
and imagery of violence. There is, on the one hand, a strong hippie vibe.
Boys wind their side curls into dreadlocks and wear outsize, brightly
colored knitted yarmulkes that look more like the floppy ski hats American
teenagers wear to raves. Most outposts I visited had a guitar or two, many
of which, marked up with hand-lettered slogans about beating swords into
plowshares, would be quite at home in Berkeley.
But other guitars, papered with bumper stickers that read ''Repentance
will lead to transfer of the Arabs'' -- meaning the wholesale removal of
Palestinians from the territories -- wouldn't make the cut.
Outpost construction has its roots in the protest movement that was
sparked by the 1993 Oslo accords. The forebears of the outpost youth
objected not just to the peace deal itself, which included the idea of
ceding control of large sections of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the
Palestinians, but also to the American-style consumerism that took root in
Israel during that relatively peaceful time. The enemies, then and now,
are Coca-Cola and television as much as the Palestinians.
The archetype for the outpost lifestyle is a farm called World Hill. In
the late 1990's, Avri and Sharona Ran, a charismatic, earthy, middle-aged
Orthodox couple, left their farm inside Israel and built an outpost on a
hilltop close to Itamar, an existing settlement beside the Palestinian
city of Nablus. They have moved east every year or two since, leaving a
fully functioning, army-protected outpost at each stop.
World Hill is a stunningly beautiful full-scale farm, about 15 miles
inside the West Bank. Staffed by a crew of about 20 teenagers and young
adults, the farm produces organic goat's milk and cheese for sale across
Israel. It holds a mythic place in the imagination of young people on
outposts all over the West Bank.
The Rans' farm also plays a central role in the lives of the residents of
Khirbat Yanun, a small Palestinian village below the Rans' most recent
outpost, Hill 777. In the last five years, the period in which the Rans
have been settling the area, Khirbat Yanun has come under a steady barrage
of escalating attacks, which on occasion have caused the villagers to flee
Yanun en masse.
Abdellatif Sbeih, the village's mayor, blames the young people from the
hilltops for the attacks. ''They come at the night, the young ones with
the long hair, and they smash the generator so there are no lights or
electricity,'' he says. ''They beat people up with the butts of the
machine guns.''
When the young people attack, Sbeih says, he can see Avri Ran watching
from a hilltop. ''He is the chief of all the people who live in the
caravans,'' Sbeih believes. ''He tells them what to do, and they follow
his orders. These young settlers are much more radical than the older ones
are, but who is guilty? It is the older ones who taught them to be this
way.''
During the week, Shlomi Abutbul, 17, and Hayim Baum, 16, sometimes come
and sleep in the trailer at Ramat Gilad that functions as a synagogue.
They dropped out of a yeshiva at an established settlement nearby several
months ago in order to travel around the outposts, and they came to Ramat
Gilad to earn money picking olives for Moshe Zar. They often get into
fistfights with the Palestinians who are trying to harvest the same
olives; when Shlomi offers me a freckled, dimpled grin, he reveals some
freshly broken teeth. Hayim says it's O.K. with their school and with
their parents that they've dropped out, because they weren't good at
learning Torah. And now, he says, they're doing something important.
Friday morning finds Shlomi pushing a broom around Ramat Gilad's filthy
kitchen, listening to Aretha Franklin and packing his and Hayim's
belongings -- Backstreet Boys CD's, prayer books, a battered high school
library book titled ''Stories About the Land of Israel'' -- into a giant
suitcase. Hayim has embarked on the mile-and-a-half hike to the
supermarket at the nearest settlement to get food for the evening Shabbat
meal. He can't carry enough supplies in his backpack for the dozens of
young people who will be coming to pray at the outpost synagogue or just
to hang out over Shabbat, so all day long people from neighboring
settlements stop by with loaves of challah bread and tubs of hummus to
augment the meat stew the boys are cooking.
Once night falls and Shabbat begins, youths from area settlements hike up
and down the pitch-black hills surrounding the outpost. None of them wear
flak jackets, and only a few of them carry guns. Watching them, it's easy
to forget how many settlers have died in the West Bank during the second
intifada, shot by snipers or killed in an armed assault by Palestinian
militants.
The traffic of kids almost makes the outpost feel like it is part of a
normal neighborhood, but Uri Maizelis, 40, one of the four reserve
soldiers stationed at Ramat Gilad, calls the situation there a ''textbook
ambush scenario.'' When residents and visitors approach and leave the
outpost, they can be easily seen -- and thus be easily shot at -- by
Palestinians in Gitt, at the bottom of the hill.
On many Shabbat evenings, at around the same time, Moshe Zar returns to
his hill after attending synagogue at Ramat Gilad. ''You think the
Palestinians don't see the pattern?'' Maizelis asks.
That night, when a group of boys head down the hill to give me a tour of
the area, the soldiers call out to us anxiously from behind their concrete
bulletproof blocks.
''You aren't taking a gun?'' one shouts. ''You really think this is a good
time to take a walk?''
When we don't answer, he yells, ''We are not coming after you if something
happens!''
When we return, they are still furious. ''The people here are so crazy,''
another soldier, Yigal Shimoni, says when I stop to talk. ''The family in
that caravan,'' he says, pointing to the trailers where Moshe Zar's
daughter and her family live, a few yards away, ''the mother goes out
driving at 8 o'clock at night with her babies for groceries! I would never
drive here in anything but a tank and never ever would I take my babies. I
am wearing night-vision glasses and a bulletproof vest and a helmet, and I
am not going for a walk down there.''
Maizelis gestures to the Arab village a few hundred yards below, whose a
thousand tiny white lights wind all around Ramat Gilad and beyond that to
Nablus. ''Do you see this?'' he asks. ''This is Palestine. The air is
clean. We have many holy places here. But this is not a place to be right
now.''
At the last outpost that Maizelis was assigned to guard, a bunch of kids
decided to walk into the local Arab village one afternoon. ''The whole
village came charging out screaming, 'Allah akbar!''' he recalls. ''We had
to run in and save them. That's not what I am in the army to do. I am here
to protect my country, not die so five crazy people can live on a hill and
bother Arabs.'' While we are talking, news comes over Shimoni's beeper
that a soldier has died in an explosion near a Jewish settlement in Gaza.
Maizelis's distaste for the occupation is shared by a majority of
Israelis, as expressed in opinion poll after opinion poll. A recent one
found that 78 percent of Israelis would be willing to give up the vast
majority of settlements in order to strike a peace agreement with the
Palestinians.
But despite those polls, and despite international laws prohibiting
settlement in occupied territories, Jewish settlement in the West Bank has
expanded continually since the land was captured in the 1967 war. At
first, settlement was rare, undertaken only by religious extremists. In
that era, the government tried to prevent the building of settlements in
Palestinian population centers, a policy that led to repeated evacuations
of religious settlers by soldiers.
When the Likud Party came to power in 1977, though, the government began
constructing Jewish villages and cities all over the territories. Ariel
Sharon, then the minister of agriculture, engineered a settlement plan
with financial incentives that made the territories an attractive home
even for Israelis who didn't feel strongly about the political ideology
that drove the settlement project. The settlements grew quickly, and there
are now 400,000 Israelis living outside the country's 1967 borders --
200,000 in East Jerusalem, and another 200,000 deeper into the West Bank
and Gaza.
In some ways, today's outposts are reminiscent of the pre-1977 settlement
wave, when a tiny band of ideologically charged religious radicals
frustrated the government by establishing outlaw settlements. But the
relationship between the government and the new outposts is much more
complicated. Although the national government does not finance the
outposts directly, the municipal settlement councils that do finance them
receive money from the government.
Gissin, Sharon's senior adviser, explains that most of the outposts are
positioned within the municipal boundaries that the Israeli government has
designated as under settlers' control -- an area that is many times the
size of the land that settlements are currently built on. Within the
boundaries of this ''master plan,'' as Gissin calls it, the government
considers outpost creation legal.
Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, a peace
group that protests Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, says
that the government's true intentions -- to expand Jewish settlement in
the West Bank -- are clear from the shape and size of the ''master plan.''
The areas it encompasses, Halper says, are designated for settlement
expansion, and the outposts that sit on that land are the first step in
that expansion.
''The secret about these outposts is most aren't really a wildcat thing,''
Halper says, ''just an initiative within frameworks that have already been
approved.''
If Halper is right that the young outpost residents are useful instruments
of the established settlers and the national government, able to advance a
plan the government cannot articulate formally, it is also true that the
outpost settlers can be politically extreme, unpredictable and difficult
to control. Young settlers sometimes claim lands outside the areas the
government has slated for Israeli control; this means that the army has to
send soldiers to remote and isolated locations, creating what a senior
official in the ministry of defense calls a ''military burden.'' And at
the most radical outposts, people talk seriously about replacing the
democratically elected Israeli government with a Jewish kingdom or a
theocracy. After Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer tried to dismantle
30 unauthorized outposts last fall, the Shin Bet, the Israeli security
service, issued a secret report warning of threats to his life from young
settlers. One does not have to look too far to find evidence of this.
Yehudit Shish, 18, who is from Jerusalem but boards at a girls' school in
Kiryat Arba, a settlement next to Hebron, cheerily offered from the
trailer where her dorm is, ''I would love to see Ben-Eliezer dead.'' Her
only concern about such an assassination is that ''if he got shot, someone
just like him would rise up in his place and the secular people would
support him even more.'' (Ben-Eliezer stepped down as defense minister and
was voted out as leader of the Labor Party in October.)
Last October, young settlers attacked Israeli soldiers and police officers
when they came to dismantle another of Moshe Zar's outposts, called Gilad
Farm. (Like Ramat Gilad, the outpost was named after Moshe Zar's murdered
son.) Gilad Farm is built on land Zar claims to privately own, but is
outside of the government's ''master plan.'' When the army came to remove
the two shipping containers that were the only solid structures on that
outpost, they were met by more than 1,000 young settlers who had traveled
from different settlements and outposts across the West Bank to defend the
encampment. (They had heard about the evacuation on Arutz 7, a right-wing
pirate radio station that is for many outpost residents the only source of
news.) The youths slashed tires, called police ''Nazis'' and threw punches
at everyone from soldiers to journalists.
In the fighting at Gilad Farm, the government and army appeared to be at
odds with a new generation of extremists -- more radical than the first --
in a losing battle for control of the West Bank. But Rosenfeld, the Yesha
Council spokesman, claims that the rift was less deep than it seemed. ''We
reviewed every single outpost together with Ben-Eliezer,'' he told me,
adding that settlers erected some outposts ''just so Ben-Eliezer could
take down something tangible'' and look as if he was taking a stand
against the settlers. Rosenfeld said that what happened at Gilad Farm was
the result of a miscommunication between Ben-Eliezer and the settlers;
normally, he said, it is an amicable collaboration. Tami Shiekman,
Ben-Eliezer's current spokeswoman, vehemently denies Rosenfeld's claim of
collusion, calling it ''ridiculous.'' Officials in the defense ministry,
speaking on condition of anonymity, say they do negotiate with settler
leaders over evacuations to prevent messy, violent confrontations, but
deny that they approve some outposts just so they can appear to dismantle
them.
Ben-Eliezer resigned in part because of the Sharon-led government's
unwillingness to diminish the allocations for settlers in the national
budget; his spokesman at the time insisted that the government was and is
against any illegal outposts and handed me a list of 22 that they
dismantled.
But Gilad Farm, where the near-riot occurred, is on the list, and two
months after the ''dismantling,'' the young settlers are still there,
along with soldiers in a tank. I find them one night gathered under a tarp
strung with bare light bulbs behind a pen that holds an aged, mangy horse.
They sit in a circle around a jumble of schoolbooks, cans of RC Cola and
guns. They pass a guitar around, calling out chords to ''Esa Einai,'' a
pop-music version of Psalm 121 popular on Arutz 7. When the popcorn rhythm
of gunfire arises from Nablus, they cast a few sidelong glances down the
hill but keep strumming.
David, 17, runs around with a hacksaw slung over his shoulder, chopping
branches off olive trees to stoke the campfire. His friend Rachel, a giddy
16-year-old with neon pink rubber bands on her braces, shows off the
buckets of olives that she and her friends picked from nearby groves --
farmed until recently by local Palestinians -- and the new machine Moshe
Zar gave them to pump olive oil into bottles and cork them.
Rachel and David don't want their full names printed here because they say
they are wanted by the police. It's not that big a deal to be wanted by
the police, Rachel says -- ''when they come, we just run into the olive
trees'' -- but no one wants to be arrested. It happened to one of their
friends, and now he is forbidden to come back to the West Bank. ''He's
only 17, and he has to live his whole life in Tel Aviv or something,''
Rachel says, her eyes wide with the drama of it.
Gilad Farm was not the only outpost on Ben-Eliezer's list that I visited
after it was ''evacuated.'' There was Mizpe Eshtamoa in the hills near
Hebron, which, while empty, is still guarded by the army. The mellow
yeshiva students in their early 20's who lived there have moved to a tidy
row of brand-new trailers less than a mile away, closer to the borders of
an existing settlement. ''Ben-Eliezer gave us these,'' Yoni Hirsch, 24,
said with a sardonic grin. ''He said in a few months we could move back to
the old outpost and keep the new one. Ben-Eliezer built us a new outpost,
so we thank him very much.''
Maon Farm is also on Ben-Eliezer's ''dismantled'' list. But when I
visited, the outpost was being rebuilt in the forest 200 yards from the
hill where the army destroyed the young settlers' cabins and homes. It is
a particularly volatile outpost: last year, a resident of Maon Farm was
among a group arrested and charged with planting a bomb at an Arab school
in Jerusalem.
The founder of Maon Farm, Yehoshefat Tor, says he still thinks the bombing
was a good idea. ''The Torah says we should kill all the Arabs,'' he told
me. ''Not just Arabs who maybe help terrorists. Everybody.''
His neighbor at Maon Farm, David Ben Zvi, a 27-year-old shepherd who lives
with his wife and children in a blue-and-white city bus, tells me that he
would like to see a ''Jewish Taliban'' that would run the country
according to the Torah. ''This is my land, but it is not my nation,'' he
says. ''I am waiting for King Messiah, a serious leader, to take out the
Knesset, to say, 'The army is mine.'''
The mainstream leaders of the settlement movement have publicly denounced
the radical acts and rhetoric of fringe outposts like Maon Farm. There are
some yeshiva rabbis who forbade their students from going to the protests
at Gilad Farm, and others who have instructed their students to dismantle
outposts they have set up.
Still, the Likud government, having increased its power in last month's
elections, does not want to provoke a confrontation with the outposts that
would alienate the right-wing religious parties. Moreover, the settlers
are a group that Ariel Sharon himself helped build and that he has
continued to support, both in and out of government.
After the Wye River accords mandated the dismantling of some settlements
in 1998, Sharon, then in the middle of negotiations with the Palestinian
Authority as Israel's foreign minister, delivered a rousing endorsement of
the nascent outpost movement in a speech to the extreme right-wing Tsomet
Party. ''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,'' Sharon said. ''Everything we don't grab will go to them,'' he
said, meaning the Palestinians.
When Israeli doctors or phone repairmen travel to the West Bank, they come
outfitted with flak jackets and armed guards and ride in bulletproof steel
vans whose windows are slivers of darkened double-thick glass. But to the
young Israelis who live on the outposts, that kind of caution is unheard
of. Every kid I drove around with in the West Bank sped through the hills
in a busted car with the windows rolled down, blaring music that they
lowered only to recite the Jewish traveler's prayer.
It's not just that protective gear is prohibitively expensive;
fearlessness is a crucial part of the outpost ideology. Young people on
outposts have been told, by their parents and by their leaders, that they
are protecting Israel. They have been raised with an understanding that
their bodies and homes are ''facts on the ground,'' the only obstacle to
an Arab takeover. This is the point that Gissin, Sharon's adviser,
emphasized when we talked: outposts are the most effective means that the
settlers have to protect established settlements from attack.
I asked Gissin why, if the outposts are just about defense, it is
necessary for families with young children to live on them full time and
for teenage kids to hang around them. He replied that in the minds of
Palestinian terrorists there is no longer a distinction between civilians
and soldiers. ''Palestinians attack civilians,'' he said. ''They don't
attack military army outposts. They go after families with six or seven
children.'' Since a war is being waged against civilians, Gissin seemed to
be saying, it is only appropriate that civilians be the ones to avenge it.
Young settlers on outposts seem to Palestinians to be embodying their
nightmare fear: that the state of Israel is a lawless, boundless, anarchic
occupation, and not the effort of a group of refugees to establish a
homeland in borders delineated by the United Nations.
At the same time, the outpost settlers are re-enacting the Jewish
nightmare of living under siege conditions surrounded by hostile
neighbors. When settlement leaders talk about outposts, they evoke themes
that run deep in Jewish history. Attacks on Israel, which they point out
preceded any attempts at settling in the West Bank, are seen as part of a
long history of attacks on Jews. They portray outposts as a retort to the
horror of living in ghettos, powerless and ashamed. Living without a
fence, unafraid, is seen as a repudiation of the long Jewish history of
victimization, of being driven out by pogroms and conversion campaigns.
An 18-year-old boy named Eliezer boiled the rhetoric down for me one
bright night when, walking unarmed and alone down a West Bank road, we
heard a loud rustling in the bushes. I suggested running away -- we were
in what Uri Maizelis, the soldier, would have called a ''textbook ambush
scenario.'' Eliezer wouldn't hear of it. ''You can't be afraid,'' he said.
''You have to be proud that you're Jewish.''
The redemption these young Israeli settlers are seeking in the hills of
the West Bank also draws on deep Jewish themes -- on the dream that many
years of exile will be supplanted by a return to Israel, to wholeness and
home. For the secular Zionists who built the state, that dream meant
having a place of refuge for Jews from around the world. For the outpost
settlers, it means something quite different: a biblical Israel, a bigger
home. In their temporary villages on hilltops, these settlers have managed
to replicate many of the conditions of the diaspora that the state of
Israel was supposed to eradicate. They seem less like colonizers and more
like Jews in exile, a minority among hostile, foreign neighbors. But this
time they have been exiled not by war or by a foreign power, but by the
intensity of their own fierce dream.
Samantha M. Shapiro is a journalist living in New York City.