“You are taking advantage of your power to harm me. To harm your brother. You have the law and the power to remove me – so, come on and remove me. I’m telling you – I won’t give in. I’ll stand in front of your bulldozer to the very end.”

These words may sound like they were said by a member of the hilltop youth – the extremist religious Zionist settler youths operating in the West Bank – just before being forcibly ejected by an IDF soldier or police officer from land they illegally occupied. In fact, they were said some two months ago to Yaron Rosenthal, the head of the Gush Etzion Regional Council, by the owner of the El-Hai Farm outpost who had burst into his office. Officially, the reason for the dispute is the warning sent by the regional council, stating that it was about to issue a demolition order for the outpost, since it had been built on open public land. Settlers living in the outpost, however, are convinced that the real reason for the move is that the regional council is planning to authorize the land in question for the establishment of a new neighborhood of the Kfar Eldad settlement.

Kfar Eldad, located east of Gush Etzion, has seen a real estate boom in recent years. In January, for example, a four-room apartment with a 150-square-meter yard sold for 2.7 million shekels (approximately $720,000). However, Kfar Eldad is not recognized as an independent community; it operates as a community settlement and is officially part of the nearby settlement of Nokdim.

A visit to the outpost illustrates the logic behind the argument made by Shem-Tov Luski, the person responsible for the comments quoted at the start of this article. On the other side of the road leading to the outpost, a fence was recently erected, marking the area of a planned residential housing project being promoted by the Harey Zahav construction company, which is owned by Ze’ev Epstein. At this stage, there is still no urban building plan to turn the area into a residential zone, but plans can always be altered, and, in any case, there is plenty of available land in the area.

The El-Hai Farm was established in 2001 by Luski’s late mother, Batya Luski El-Hai, after she immigrated to Israel from the United Kingdom. There are four buildings on the site, olive trees, stables, a workshop, an enclosure for livestock and a nursery. In 2022, Batya Luski passed away. Her sons, Shem-Tov and Lurya, left the farm several months later and the property is currently being managed by Yonatan Applebaum, an activist from Har Hebron Farm and a family friend. Each of the three families living at the site pays monthly rent of between 1,500 shekels and 2,000 shekels. A discussion on the demolition order is scheduled to take place this month at the offices of the regional council.

“All these years, we were not legal. Like all the outposts in Judea and Samaria, it cannot be legal, but suddenly, when they [the regional council] want to build and promote a project, they tell us ‘You’re trespassing,’ ‘You’re not legal’ and ‘Your houses are not up to code’,” Appelbaum says, adding that late last year the outpost opened a mind and body center which hosts therapeutic workshops – some of which are attended by children and people suffering from PTSD. “The absurd thing is that the farm can be integrated, as open public space, in any future construction project. Our workshops are attended by people on an almost daily basis, so I asked: ‘Why are you destroying this wonderful thing for a public project when a public project already exists?’ Rosenthal told me that he is a state official and that he operates in accordance with the law. Other officials have intimated to me that they are willing to relocate us to a different location, about a mile to the north. The farm won’t be legal there, either, but that’s what they want. They want me to be their foot soldier for the next 20 years.”

Igal Komisarov, the chairman of the Kfar Eldad cooperative society, claims that he only started to try and get the farm removed after Batya Luski’s suicide and that this was because it was built on open public land – and had nothing to do with any future construction plans. “Kfar Eldad did agree in the past that Batya Luski could live on the land,” he confirms. “We remember her and honor her memory – she has a lot of credit – but we never said that the land belongs to her. It’s an area that must be open and accessible to the public. The only ones playing the real estate game are the owners of the farm – by renting out structures to families and holding workshops.”

Lurya Luski sees things very differently. He claims that officials from Kfar Eldad, who wanted to get her off the property, began harassing his mother some five or six years ago. “She told us about the problems they were making and how she was forced to deal with it alone. A few months before her death, they turned up at 3 A.M. with a tractor and started to pull down fences. They came to us a little over a month after she died and told us we have to move out.”

Lurya Luski claims that officials from Kfar Eldad began harassing his mother some five or six years ago. “A few months before her death, they turned up at 3 A.M. with a tractor and started to pull down fences. They came to us a little over a month after she died and told us we have to move out.”

From pioneers to realtors

The struggle over the fate of the El-Hai Farm is just one example of a widespread phenomenon whereby settlers are being driven out of outposts and farms across the West Bank by the settlement establishment itself. This may appear to be a rather odd, perhaps even bizarre, phenomenon, given that it ostensibly goes against the stated ideology of the settlement movement, but a deeper dive into the details reveals a more complex picture – involving planning schemes, unkept promises, ever-climbing real estate prices and a desire on the part of all those involved to maximize profits.

To fully understand the roots of this phenomenon, we must go back and examine how Israeli settlements in the West Bank expanded. The earliest method involved placing mobile homes about a mile from an existing settlement. If the land was state-owned, the site would be “legalized” as a new neighborhood of the adjacent settlement—even without any geographical connection between the two. This approach has been used to establish most West Bank outposts since the late 1990s.

Another method, which has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, is to establish an agricultural settlement. These farms allow settlers to take control of large areas with a small number of residents. They are mainly located in Area C of the West Bank, which are under full Israeli security and civilian control, and which constitute around 60 percent of the West Bank. Establishing a farm allows settlers to take over areas with various zoning definitions, from state-owned land to privately owned land and land that the legal status of which is under dispute. The moment that the farm is given legal approval, this is the signal for the establishment of a new farm located further away, which will in turn one day become a settlement or a neighborhood of a nearby settlement, if there is one.

Many of the settlers here are attracted to this pioneering adventure by the dream or romantic aspiration to live somewhere with a rural and agricultural character. Some do so based on promises that their future home will come with a large parcel of land attached to it. That is why many of them cannot understand how, in some cases, the process ends with the construction of homes and in other cases it ends with demolition orders. On many occasions, the decision depends on the identity of the people moving into the outpost, their ideology and – most importantly – how close they are to the settlement establishment. A situation was created, therefore, whereby the regional councils in the West Bank – which, for years, were the right-wing opposition to the state’s efforts to clamp down on illegal outposts – now support the removal of these outposts and are actively initiating moves to do so.

“All these years, we were not legal. Like all the outposts in Judea and Samaria, it cannot be legal, but suddenly, when they [the regional council] want to build and promote a project, they tell us ‘You’re trespassing,’ ‘You’re not legal’ and ‘Your houses are not up to code’,” Appelbaum says.

In the past, the settlement movement focused on building single-family homes. In recent years, however, the trend has moved in the direction of apartment blocks. The main reason for this is “natural growth” – the need and demand for apartments, which yield much higher returns for developers. The people who establish farms, who moved onto the land following promises or in the hope of having a single-family home, suddenly find themselves facing a new policy: in certain places, the farms are indeed authorized, but in other places they are demolished in favor of high-density housing. A closer inspection reveals that in some of these cases, the people removed from the land are not seen as coming from within the settlement mainstream – or are perceived as embracing a different lifestyle.

In Kiryat Arba, for example, it seems that much attention is being paid to members of the Givat Gal outpost, where there is a large group from the Nahala movement which is actively working for the renewal of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. Several years ago, residents of the outpost opposed a plan to demolish it and build high-density housing instead and Eliyahu Liebman, the head of the Kiryat Arba council at the time, backed down from the plan. Now the sides are once again engaged in dialogue.

“There is some logic behind the tension between the settlers and the regional councils,” says one member of the Kiryat Arba Regional Council, who asked to remain anonymous. “On the one hand, you do not want to harm people who have moved onto the land. We owe them a debt of gratitude. On the other hand, a council leader wants as many housing units as possible. They question is whether they will authorize the single-family homes of people from Givat Gal. I am of the opinion that they should be allowed to do what they want. But the dialogue isn’t over.”

“It is certainly a phenomenon that exists,” says one former official from the Civil Administration. “Within the settlement establishment, these people are known as realtors, as opposed to the ideologues. The phenomenon is especially prevalent in places where the land is more expensive. In the end, the local authorities approach the Civil Administration and ask them to remove the settlers.”

“How can they claim that we are the ones who took control of the land illicitly? Yitzhak Shamir sent people here. We were here before them,” says Rafi Peretz, a resident of Hadar-Beitar who, unlike the other residents, has invested a large sum of money – between 1 and 1.5 million shekels, he says

Ma’ale Rehavam

Another outpost located in the vicinity of Nokdim provides a prime example of the phenomenon. Ma’ale Rehavam is an eclectic collection of structures and mobile homes scattered across the hillsides and connected by rough dirt roads. There are between 20 and 25 families living on the outpost, but there is a high turnover of residents. According to figures published by Haaretz, in 2023 the Civil Administration demolished 34 out of the 385 illegal structures identified on settlements – most of them at Ma’ale Rehavam.

According to one long-time resident of the outpost, who also asked not to be identified, settlers at Ma’ale Rehavam used to enjoy the support of the Gush Etzion Regional Council, the Settlement Division, the Amana movement and even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Over the past 10 years, however, a bitter dispute has been raging between the authorities and Kfar Eldad on the one hand and settlers at the outpost on the other. At the heart of the dispute there is a plan that the council is promoting to build 400 housing units in high-density structures. The settlers, for their part, are demanding the legalization of the very first buildings erected on the site, all of which have plenty of land and enjoy a pastoral atmosphere.

As part of the dispute, Ma’ale Rehavam has, among other things, had its water and electricity cut off. As far as residents of Kfar Eldad are concerned, their neighbors simply owed them money. Left with no choice, residents of the outpost relied for the past decade on solar panels and water brought in tankers from nearby Palestinian villages – until they were reconnected to the water supply several months ago. “The change in the approach to us began in 2008,” says one of the residents. “A newly paved road cut the travel time to Jerusalem from 50 minutes to 20 minutes and bumped up the prices of apartments by hundreds of percent. We came here to protect the land. There is no reason that, after all these years, for them not to authorize our homes like they did in other outposts – but they are treating us like ‘realtors.’ I hope that we can reach a compromise, nonetheless. The houses that already exist here can be integrated into a future neighborhood.”

Zayit Raanan

The Talmonim bloc of settlements, which is in the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, has also become a highly sought-after area and home prices there have steadily risen over the years. In July, for example, a four-room apartment in an apartment block on the Talmon settlement was sold for 2.1 million shekels. Israeli settlers first moved into the nearby Zayit Raanan outpost in the early 2000s, with the support of the Amana movement and the regional council. According to an Amana brochure from 2002, for example, anyone moving to the outpost was guaranteed agricultural land as part of their property. Today, most of the homes there are earmarked for demolition, as part of plans to build a new neighborhood for the Talmon settlement.

In an administrative appeal that is currently being heard by the Jerusalem District Court, residents of Zayit Raanan argue that they are being discriminated against compared to the other neighborhoods of Talmon – Nerya, Haresha, Kerem Reim and Horesh Yaron. “The plan that was drawn up for Haresha relies entirely on illegal construction, including permanent structures, mobile homes and a road system. It is unclear why the same criteria were not adopted for Zayit Raanan,” the petition states. Other arguments relate to their treatment compared to residents of Nerya. Unlike settlers in Zayit Raanan, who moved there from various places across Israel, Nerya is populated by around 400 families all of whom belong to the mainstream of Religious Zionism, including many former students from the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva. Herein, they claim, lies the problem.

“From a political perspective, and due to electoral considerations, it is in the interests of the head of the council that there is a large community and not a small one,” says one resident of the outpost. “A few years ago, the council decided, under pressure from Nerya, that they needed to drive us off the site and, in our place, to promote an approved plan for dense, urban housing. And then, for the first time, the council sought demolition orders for the structures. Usually, residents of outposts have to find all kinds of ways to hide from the Civil Administration; in this case, we have to hide from the regional council. People who came to Zayit Raanan knew that there was a ‘young settlement’ in Judea and Samaria and that the goal was always to authorize outposts rather than demolishing them. Here, they want to demolish. The same people who encouraged us to move here, as pioneers, started treating us differently the moment they saw the real estate potential.”

In addition to all this, there is also a fierce personal dispute, which has included libel suits, allegations of the theft of Torah scrolls, boycotts by children in local schools and complaints about the perceived preferential treatment that some Zayit Raanan residents receive from residents of Nerya. At a hearing held in February 2021 at the Civil Administration’s Central Planning Unit, Matanya Aharonovich, a settler from Zayit Raanan, asked the following: “How does it make sense that that there are so many homes here earmarked for demolition and just by chance five were removed from the list? We can tell you that everyone living in those five homes is affiliated with the National Religious Movement that is loyal to Nerya. The character of Zayit Raanan is more accepting. Secular, religious, immigrants, natives, ultra-Orthodox. Nerya found a solution and is destroying all that: People who live here will be looked after; people who live there can go to hell.”

Tapuah Ma’arav

In a significant proportion of this kind of dispute between residents of outposts and the settlement establishment, the finger of blame is pointed at the Amana movement, which was responsible for many of the pioneering settlers moving to the West Bank at the start of the process. Amana is defined as a cooperative society and, as such it is not obligated to transparency. It is controlled in practice by the Yesha Council and the larger regional councils in the West Bank. In the past, it was given large areas of land by the state at no cost, through the World Zionist Federation. But, as Shomrim revealed last year, it is also heavily involved in land sales in sought-after settlements at inflated prices and uses its profits to fund its operations elsewhere.

Alongside providing assistance at the start of the journey, Amana also provides political support for the outposts in the corridors of power. Having said that, this comes at a price. When the time comes, Amana has the power to demand that they leave the outpost. In the case of the outpost farms that have been established in recent years, would-be residents signed a document clearly stating that they are aware of this possibility. However, in the 20 years previously, the relationship between the sides was a lot less clear.

One of the outposts where residents express the most anger toward Amana is Tapuah Ma’arav, established in the early 2000s. In 2015, Yesh Din filed a petition with the High Court of Justice on behalf of residents from the nearby Palestinian village of Yasouf, opposing construction at the site. Paradoxically, however, the legal proceedings resulted in the land being retroactively authorized, allowing the project to proceed. As part of the development, a road was built to Tapuah Ma’arav, paving the way for a new residential neighborhood—at the expense of the outpost. Eight families opposed the plan, and by the end of 2020, they filed an administrative petition. They argued, among other things, that when they first settled on the land, they were promised that future development would preserve its rural and agricultural character.

“Amana and Binyanei Bar Amana [the Amana subsidiary which actually carries out the projects], which are currently promoting their plans at the expense of the residents and while tearing down homes, have invested themselves significant funds during the years in this settlement,” the petition states. “Amana's position that the residents must be evacuated in order to build structures at the site and to make a profit shows that the residents were in fact exploited by Amana to safeguard the land – and are now being thrown out.” A year later, at the end of 2021, the petition was withdrawn after an agreement was reached whereby arguments would be presented to the planning authorities.

Amana’s promise, which is at the heart of residents’ arguments, was also raised during hearings on the administrative petition against the demolition of the Tapuah Ma’arav outpost that was submitted to the planning authorities. In their petition, residents argue that they also received a promise from the head of the Samaria Regional Council, Yossi Dagan, who told them that the future neighborhood in Tapuah Ma’arav would have a rural atmosphere and that every family living there would be given a parcel of land measuring between 500 and 750 square meters. The subcommittee on objections in Judea and Samaria rejected that argument, saying that Dagan did not have the authority to make any such promise. It also rejected claims that promises had been made by the state and by the Settlement Division, stating that the complainants did not submit any evidence to support them.

Hadar-Betar

In mid-August, residents of the Hadar-Betar outpost received a warning letter from Beitar Illit Municipality ahead of implementation of a demolition order. Hadar-Betar is a place that is hard to define. While it is part of Beitar Illit, it does not have paved roads, the streets have no names and there is no center to the outpost. The randomly scattered structures are mainly mobile homes, some of which were put there 40 years ago by the state. Over the years, residents have come and gone; some found abandoned mobile homes and renovated them according to their own tastes, while others took the place of previous residents, sometimes even paying them for the privilege.

For Beitar Illit, Hadar-Beitar was for many years the unattractive back yard – but all that changed a decade ago. The municipality stopped providing water and electricity for residents of the outpost and, at one point, even cut back on the frequency of the garbage services it provided. There are no guard services operating at the outpost, despite a 40,000-shekel budget that the Defense Ministry sends to the municipality every month. There are some 15 or 20 families living in Hadar-Beitar, coming from different sectors of Israeli society. Each family arrived at a different time and from different places. Some of them buy water tankers and others take water from public gardens in Beitar Illit, which turns a blind eye. Electricity is provided by the nearby Palestinian village of Wadi Fukin.

The resident who has been at Hadar-Beitar the longest is Mordechai Melchin, a father of six who moved there in 1993. “At first, there were armed guards here, reservist soldiers. The site was under the jurisdiction of the Gush Etzion Regional Council. Everything changed during the 1990s when the site moved to the jurisdiction of the Beitar Illit municipality,” he says. In light of the rapid expansion of the city, Beitar Illit expanded closer to Hadar-Beitar, and they are currently almost contiguous.

“How can they claim that we are the ones who took control of the land illicitly? Yitzhak Shamir sent people here. We were here before them,” says Rafi Peretz, a resident of Hadar-Beitar who, unlike the other residents, has invested a large sum of money – between 1 and 1.5 million shekels, he says – building a home on land for which he did not pay. “In Beitar Illit, some people refer to us here as the slum district or their watchdogs,” adds Yehuda Meir, another resident of Hadar-Beitar. “They forget that without us there would be no possibility of building here at all. We were the ones who safeguarded the land.”

The construction plan that is currently being promoted for the area will likely wipe Hadar-Beitar off the map. The plan is part of a tender issued in 2020 by the Custodian of Absentee Property in Judea and Samaria – the West Bank counterpart of the Israel Land Authority – for the construction of 770 apartments and an additional 4,800 square meters for commerce and industry. The tender was won by the publicly traded Netanel Group which, three years later, sold half the land to Shmuel Attias, the owner of an ultra-Orthodox chain of supermarkets, making a tidy profit of 180 million shekels. In a statement submitted to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange last month, Netanel Group said that it had become aware of trespassers on the land – this is how it referred to residents of Hadar-Beitar – and that, after negotiations with the Custodian of Absentee Property it appears that the company will assume responsibility for evicting them.

Residents of Hadar-Beitar, needless to say, see things very differently. They argue that representatives of the Netanel Group know all about the outpost and have even spoken to them. In the meantime, they are preparing for a legal battle against Beitar Illit Municipality and have started to document illegal construction in the ultra-Orthodox city, which they say confirms their claims of selective enforcement. “The building that I live in has been there for 15 years. Beitar Illit Municipality knows that it is not legal. Why did it not demolish it? Why did it wait 15 years,” asks Hila Barda, a resident of the outpost. “After all, they’re the champions when it comes to illegal construction, all over the city. There are whole buildings in Beitar Illit that are illegally built under other buildings [in parking lots, and so on]. Let’s see them demolish all of these illegal buildings.”

Orientation Map | The settlements Mentioned in the Article