Over the Line

Photograph by Jerome Delay/Associated Press
A settler walks by an Israeli Army patrol in Hebron, 1996.

Adam LeBor, The New York Times, 14.10.07. The West Bank, captured in 1967, is a lawless place, where the Jewish settler, rifle in one hand and prayer book in the other, is undisputed king. The settlers have their own roads, guarded by the Israeli Army, water, electricity, supplies and — occasional if well-publicized crackdowns aside — substantial impunity from the law. Much of the land on which their settlements stand, was, as Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar detail in this important book, simply stolen. The settlements are illegal, in contravention of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to occupied territories. But for those who claim a divine mandate, the Geneva Conventions count for nothing. According to the United Nations, more than a third of the West Bank is now off limits to Palestinians. A web of Israeli Army checkpoints and obstacles further atomizes what is left of Palestinian society.

“Lords of the Land” is the first complete history of the settlement project. It provides a detailed narrative of injustice, and is profoundly depressing for anyone still hoping for a fair resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or even hoping that Jews and Arabs will be seen as equal in the eyes of Israeli law. In a chapter entitled “Everything Is Legal in the Land of Israel” Zertal and Eldar chronicle the paltry punishments given to settlers who kill Arabs, like the settlement leader Pinchas Wallerstein, who in 1988 shot two young Arabs in the back after he saw them burning a tire on the road. One died. Wallerstein was sentenced to four months community service.

If Palestinian lives are cheap, much Palestinian land is even cheaper — that is, free, at least to the settlers and Israeli authorities. The security fence that snakes through the West Bank is, according to Zertal and Eldar, an unparalleled land grab. They write that it was “constructed with no reckoning and no logic other than the purpose of enclosing as many settlements as possible on the western, Israeli, side and dividing up and seizing Palestinian lands.”

This may be an angry, embittered book, but the two authors are well-informed experts. Zertal is a noted Israeli historian, who now teaches at the University of Basel, and Eldar is an influential columnist for the left-wing daily, Ha’aretz. They are especially good on Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, the religious Zionists driving the settlement project and the compromises with them made by a weak secular Israeli establishment.