After settlers set fire to a Palestinian town near Nablus and bloodshed in it, Israelis from the most powerful settlements in the region meet, and others who believe in the establishment of "Judea and Samaria, whatever it may be and whatever the cost of human victims", and their slogan is "We have succeeded now, we are the ones in power." .

With these sentences, the French Mediapart website summarized a joint article by Joseph Confavro and Marines Vlahovic, in which they interviewed settlers in the West Bank against the background of the events that took place in the town of Hawara, south of Nablus, last week.

One of the settlers whose opinions were cited in the article is Benny Katzover, a pioneer of the political and religious movement in the Gush Emunim settlement. He introduced himself saying, "After two thousand years of estrangement, I may be the first Jew to return to Samaria," boasting that he had contributed to the formation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. After he settled in Hebron after the 1967 war.

This settler says, "We expelled the army 7 times, but the eighth time we succeeded, as at that time there was no Jewish presence in Samaria, but now there are more than 300 settlements. I never wanted or thought to see with my own eyes our population increase from 50 to 500,000,” referring to the number of Israelis now settled in the West Bank, which they call “Judea and Samaria,” among its 3 million Palestinian residents.

Benny Katzover, 76, added, "What you see before your eyes is God's will. There were no roads, no water, no electricity. There were Arab terrorists. We had to overcome the hostility of the entire international community, including our government."

The article indicates that Katzover is one of the founders of the "Elon Moreh" settlement, located a few kilometers from the city of Nablus and the town of Hawara, which was recently the victim of a barbaric, punitive attack by settlers, described by General Yehuda Fox, commander of the Israeli forces in the West Bank, as a massacre, which is an inappropriate term. OK for Benny Katzover, though he admits that an attack on this town is "not a good thing".

A call to annihilate Hawara

The article warned that Benny Katzover could be considered an icon for the settlers who are increasingly settling in areas very far from the Green Line, which has been assumed since 1967 to constitute the border between Israel and a Palestinian state that may be born in the future, in order to impede this idea with the encouragement of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The current regime, which relies on fanatical Jews and Zionists, is led by its two ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

The authors pointed out that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, speaking of the attack on Huwwara by settlers, called for the annihilation of the town, while the Israeli government contented itself with administrative detention of a few of the perpetrators of the attack on the Palestinian town.

In the same context in which Benny Katzover spoke, settler Nadia Matar, founder of the increasingly influential "Sovereignty" movement, said, "I understand the motives of the settlers in Yitzhar (an Israeli settlement in the West Bank). The real problem is the Arab terrorists, not the Israeli rioters." The government and the army fail to protect the residents of Yitzhar, who are attacked every day in Hawara."


"The two-state solution is suicide"

The settler, Nadia, protests against naming the settlements, and claims that this land is the inheritance of the Jews, and believes that the roots of the current problems began after the 1967 war, in which Israel won, and adds, "We were able to return to our lands, yet the government refused to do anything that would save us from All the troubles we have today."

Nadia says that the "sovereignty" that the far-right Finance Minister Smotrich seeks to restore today is to annex all of the West Bank to Israel instead of handing over control to the arm of the army responsible for the civil administration of the occupied territories.

She explains that she realized since 1967 that things had changed radically with the presence of 500,000 settlers in the West Bank, more than half of them in East Jerusalem, and she believes that the Israeli right made a mistake by focusing on doubling the settlements outside the Green Line only, and she says, "We felt that we would not save Judea and Samaria by planting 30 trees here and building 3 houses there. For us, the two-state solution that the left wants is suicide, and this is how we started the movement for sovereignty, which calls for the annexation of new territories.

Annexing the West Bank and excluding the Arabs

The article mentioned the opinion of another settler, Shlomo Ne'eman, head of the "Sovereignty" movement to which Nadia Matar belongs, who says that there is a difference between the sovereignty of the State of Israel in the Golan, where there are very few Jews, and its sovereignty in settlements such as "Ma'aleh Adumin" and "Ariel", whose entire population is considered Jewish, and believes that the annexation does not guarantee "sovereignty over the land", as some fear that it will result in granting the Palestinians in the West Bank the same rights enjoyed by the Palestinians in Israel, and enabling them to vote and elect representatives for them in the Knesset.

The authors indicate that Nadia Matar and her movement are aware of the difficulty of the equation of annexing the Palestinian lands, so Matar believes that she has found a solution to the dilemma represented in "that we establish sovereignty over Judea and Samaria without having to grant citizenship to the Arabs immediately, by granting them residency only, as is the case in Jerusalem, and open the way for them to obtain citizenship later.

Factual rule

According to the Mediapart article, the settlers in Hebron assert their de facto sovereignty over it, simply by living in the city, which is one of the largest Palestinian cities in the West Bank and is inhabited by about 700,000 Palestinians, where a few thousand Jewish settlers occupy part of it under the protection of twice their number of Israeli occupation forces.

At the end of the article, the authors present the opinion of a Jewish settlement in the city of Hebron that came to him from France, called Valerie, who said in response to the authors' question whether she believes that the new Netanyahu government, which made the extremist Itamar Ben Gvir minister of national security, removes the danger from the settlers or exacerbates security risks ?

"I am a fan of Netanyahu and I think he will succeed. I know Ben Gvir, and I think he will succeed. We are now in power."