And it was dangerous, too. I was shot at by Palestinians when I was a soldier. I was in a civilian car hitchhiking to my base, and two Palestinians ambushed us and shot at our car. I stopped the driver, and I ran after the two gunmen. We ended up capturing them, and they were sent to prison.
When you join with a military force, you divide the world into the good guys and the bad guys. I’ve been there. That’s how you educate soldiers. A soldier needs to know that he’s good and the enemy’s bad. If he thinks that he’s maybe a little bad and the enemy’s maybe a little good, then he’s not a good soldier. That’s the army world. But now I live in the civil world, a much more complicated world.
I’M MARRIED TO MY WIFE AND MY M-16
After the war, I came back to Eli and started teaching at Bnei David. Then I met my wife through a friend in 2007, and I knew right away I wanted to marry her. When my students ask me how you choose your wife, I tell them, “First of all, you need to have chemistry. And then you have to have the same ideas about what you want in life. Then you need to earn her—not win her—you need to change to be better to earn her.”
When we met, my wife worked with handicapped adults. And when I saw how she treated them, I knew she was a good person, that she had a big heart. And I wanted a big-hearted wife. I told her, “You’ll be my wife, now you just need to decide that I’ll be your husband.” And it happened. We were engaged half a year after we met and married in eight months. Our first child was born in 2009 and the second in 2011. Around the time my wife was pregnant with our second child I also started working as head of security in Eli.
I drive my truck a lot on the job. I have a knife, a Motorola, and my M-16. I’m married to my wife and my M-16. It goes everywhere I go.
As head of security of Eli, I haven’t had to shoot my rifle. And I don’t want to. I know when to hide it and when to show it. The people of Eli all own a lot of weapons, mostly pistols. It’s common. It’s for their own security. Here people don’t just feel threatened, they are threatened. But many settlers don’t know how to use their guns, which is dangerous.
There are areas where it’s much more dangerous, and areas where there’s less danger. Now, it’s quiet. From 2001 till 2005, shootings in the roads in this part of the West Bank were common.19 But in the past three years that I’ve had my job, there have been three shootings in the roads here. Still, we’re surrounded by neighboring Palestinian villages, and each one has about 5,000 people. So we’re surrounded by 12,000 or 15,000 Palestinians, and there’s less than 4,000 of us here in Eli.
When I have security situations, I’m very stressed. But I run and I swim. That’s how I calm down. We live a regular life here in Eli, but we always carry something inside—fear. Because every night when I get a telephone call from my subordinates saying the radar system we use sees something weird, I jump. Because I can’t stand the sight of a murdered family. I’m afraid that my wife and kids will get hit by stones. It happens every day. And the Molotov cocktails thrown at cars—that happens once a week, every two weeks.
In the summer of 2010, I got a call that there was a fire just east of Eli. So I got my deputy and a couple of other guys, we called the army for security, and we went to put out the fire. Palestinians from the village just east of here, Karyut, they had burned out one of my security cameras on the edge of Eli’s jurisdiction.20 I knew it was set on purpose, because it was started with a burning tire. Setting fire to tires and putting them by something else is a good way to burn something down, and something I’ve seen villagers do it before. The wind was from west to east, the fire spread to an olive grove, and olive trees were burning. I had the phone number of the head of security of Karyut, and I speak a bit of Arabic. So I called him, and I told him there was a fire burning down Palestinian olive trees.
I decided to extinguish the fire in the olive grove myself. I don’t like olive trees burning. We believe that the trees have a place in the world, that they’re important.
So the head of security in Karyut came, and he brought cameramen. I came with fire-extinguishing equipment, and he brought photographers. While we extinguished the fire in the olive grove, they photographed us. I took pictures of them taking pictures of me. It was crazy. He told me, “I’m taking pictures to show how you’re burning down our trees!” I put out the fire anyway, despite the Palestinians’ accusations against me, because it was the right thing to do.
What I feel isn’t anger. It’s frustration. Yes, we all know there is a conflict. I’m not trying to hide the conflict. But there is a way to solve the conflict—that’s through negotiation. You want to come and negotiate, come. You don’t, pay the price.
TO ME, “SETTLER” IS A GOOD WORD
We stay here despite the threat because of ideology. Zionist slash Jewish slash God—different sides of the same thing. They kicked us out of Europe—thank you very much for kicking us out of Europe. We don’t care who wants us and who doesn’t. We decided, We’re here and you don’t play around with people like us. We’re here, and we’re able to fight to stay here. Last night I had a conflict with a Palestinian. And he told me, “Now you’re strong, so you can kill us. But when we are strong, we’ll kill you.” I said, “Yeah, okay, so when you think you’re strong enough, call me.” That’s an answer for people who only understand power.
I feel powerful now. In the larger world, “settler” is not a good word when talking about the West Bank. But to me, the word “settler” is a very good word. I see a settler as a person who is trying to live with the land, to combine people and the land together in a positive way. We’re trying to build, to grow here in Eli. We want to bring as many people as we can here. Plenty of the wives here work only part-time jobs, because the main goal is building a new generation. Now my wife is a social worker, working with kids, broken families, divorced parents, parents in prison. But it’s only a part-time job. We want to grow our family.
I don’t hate Arabs. I don’t want to kill them, I don’t want them dead. I’m not against them. The Jewish nation’s place is here. I don’t want a conflict with you. You can live here. You’re invited. Meanwhile, there is a Palestinian state—in Jordan. We need to put everything in place. I don’t want Egypt, I don’t want Syria, I don’t want to conquer Europe. We want our place. Mine. This small border, this is mine. Give me my place. I don’t want your place.
I’M VERY OPTIMISTIC ABOUT LIFE
I hope that my kids will be much better than I am. I don’t believe that I’m so good, but I pray that my kids will be much better. Because the world is going forward. It’s not going backwards. It’s getting better and better every day. And I’m very optimistic about the future.
Today, I know how to control myself and my anger. I’ve worked on it the last few years by studying the Torah. Now I think of how to choose every minute of my life. I have responsibility for my feelings. I choose my feelings, I know how to control them. Because everything you feel, everything you do, you choose.
There is a national conflict, and I believe that is a moral conflict. I need to ask myself in what ways we are we acting immorally towards the Palestinians and try to fix that. And I know what apartheid is in South Africa—I lived there. The basics are very different. The English, French, and Dutch came to South Africa as conquerors, as imperialists, and conquered Africa—that’s very different from what’s happening here. To say that we are treating Palestinians like the South Africans—it’s wrong, it’s not happening here.
I don’t believe that, as a whole, Arabs in Israel want to push all Jews into the sea. It’s much more complicated than that. Whoever holds Islamic ideology definitely wants to kill all the Jews. They say it, loudly. You just have to listen. Read their books, their newspapers. Whoever embraces the Palestinian national identity, they want to kill us in a war. They say it. When they draw the map, they don’t draw the ’67 borders, they claim all of Israel.21 They want everything.
I do not think that everything Israel does is moral. We are not as good as we want to be. My explanation for our problems is that we don’t know yet who we are and what our goals are. We have problems with human rights with the Palestinians. And the extreme left wing wants to keep these problems, actually, so they can show we are not moral people, and the Jews are not what they claim to be. So I try to fight that perception.
To build our identity as Jews in Israel, who we are, we have to start by asking questions. And we have to have problems to force us to ask questions. So, thank God we have the Palestinians. Thank God we have that problem, so we can ask ourselves who we are. It’s more than useful. It’s an integral part of who we are.
What is immoral about settlement buildings? The world expects the Jews to be more moral than others. When I educate, I explain that criticism comes out of a belief. When you criticize something or someone, you believe they can change. If you don’t care about someone, you don’t criticize them. The world is looking up to the Jewish nation and the Jewish community and the Jewish country because they believe there is something different here.
1 Today, Eli is a cooperatively-run settlement of nearly 3,500 people about thirty miles north of Jerusalem.
2 Kfar Etzion is a settlement of under 1,000 people located four miles south of Jerusalem. A kibbutz (Israeli collective farming community) was built on the current location in 1927.
3 The kibbutz at Kfar Etzion was completely destroyed after a two-day battle during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. The destruction of the village by Arab forces (in retaliation for the destruction of an Arab village), is memorialized throughout Israel. After the 1967 Six-Day War, a newly established Kfar Etzion was one of the first planned Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The new community was led by Hanan Porat (1943–2011), a prominent settlement activist who, as a child, was one of four survivors of the original Kfar Etzion’s destruction.
4 Mazkeret Batya is a city of 10,000 located sixteen miles south of Tel Aviv. Be’er Sheva is a city of over 200,000 people located sixty miles southwest of Jerusalem.
5 Zionism is the movement to create a Jewish homeland that led to the formation of Israel in 1948. For more information, see Appendix I, page 295.
6 During the late eighties, opposition to South Africa’s apartheid policies intensified and resulted in widespread violence and a national state of emergency.
7 Efrat is a settlement with 10,000 residents that was established in 1983. It is located three miles east of Kfar Etzion.
8 Shilo is a settlement a few miles east of Eli. Shilo was established in 1978 and has a population of nearly 2,500. It was one of the first settlements constructed by the Gush Eminum movement, which sought to claim all of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) for Israel. For more on Gush Eminum, see the Glossary, page 304.
9 The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank quadrupled between 1980 and 1983, from 8,000 to approximately 32,000. Expanded construction of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza was promoted by the government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin following the Camp David Accords and the peace agreements with Egypt, Israel’s most powerful neighbor.
10 The first Oslo Accord was signed in 1993 and slowed the growth of settlements in the West Bank for a couple of years after implementation in 1995 (though settlement construction expanded in 1997). For more on the Oslo Accords, see Appendix I, page 295.
11 A yeshiva is a Jewish religious school dedicated to the study of the Talmud and Torah.
12 The Israeli government officially recognizes 125 settlements in the West Bank, and over 100 more have been established without formal recognition (and contravening Israeli law), but with support for infrastructure and security.
13 For more on administrative Areas A, B, and C, see the Glossary, page 304.
14 Parts of the land Eli Settlement is built on are categorized as Palestinian private property according to a 2013 survey conducted by the Israeli Civil Administration.
15 Israeli citizens (with some notable exceptions) are required to serve in the military, usually starting at age eighteen. For more information on the Israeli Defense Force, see the Glossary, page 304.
