10 hours agoShareSaveJeremy BowenInternational editor, reporting from the occupied West BankShareSaveOren Rosenfeld/BBCMeir Simcha agreed to talk, but he wanted to do it somewhere special, because for him, this is a special time. In a place where nation, religion and war are linked inextricably with politics and the possession of land, Simcha chose a patch of shade under a fig tree next to a spring of fresh water. From his dusty car, a small Toyota fitted with off road tyres, he produced a bottle of juice made from fruit and vegetables.”Don’t worry, there’s no extra sugar,” he said as he poured it into plastic cups.Simcha is the leader of a group of Jewish settlers steadily transforming a big stretch of the rolling terrain south of Hebron in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since it was captured in the 1967 Middle East war. He moved two large flat stones into the shade as seats, and we sat down in a patch of lush grass, kept alive in the harsh summer heat by water dripping from a pipe coming out of the spring. It was a small oasis at the foot of a steep, arid, rocky slope and the location, if not our conversation, felt peaceful in a way that the West Bank rarely does these days.The conflict between Arabs and Jews for control of the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea started well over a century ago when Zionists from Europe began to buy land to set up communities in Palestine. It has been shaped by significant turning points. The latest has come from the deadly 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Israel’s devastating response.The consequences of the last 22 months of war, and however more months are left before a ceasefire, threaten to spread across years and generations, just like the Middle East war in 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan.The scale of destruction and killing in the Gaza war obscures what is happening in the West Bank, which smoulders with tension and violence. Since October 2023, Israel’s pressure on West Bank Palestinians has increased sharply, justified as legitimate security measures.Evidence based on statements by ministers, influential local leaders like Simcha and accounts by witnesses on the ground reveal that the pressure is part of a wider agenda, to accelerate the spread of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and to extinguish any lingering hopes of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.Palestinians and human rights groups also accuse the Israeli security forces of failing in their legal duty as occupiers to protect Palestinians as well as their own citizens – not just turning a blind eye to settler attacks, but even joining in. Violence by ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers in the West Bank has risen sharply since 7 October 2023. Ocha, the UN’s humanitarian office, estimates an average of four settler attacks every day.The International Court of Justice has issued an advisory opinion that the entire occupation of Palestinian territory captured in 1967 is illegal. Israel’s rejects the ICJ’s view and claims that the Geneva Conventions forbidding settlement in occupied territories do not apply – a view disputed by many of its own allies as well as international lawyers.In the shade of the fig tree, Simcha denied all suggestions he had attacked Palestinians, as he celebrated the fact that most of the Arab farmers who used to graze their animals on the hills he has seized and tend their olives in the valleys had gone.He looks back to the Hamas October attacks, and Israel’s response ever since, as a turning point.”I think that a lot has changed, that the enemy in our land lost hope. He’s beginning to understand that he’s on his way out; that’s what has changed in the last year or year and a half.”Today you can walk around here in the land in the desert, and nobody will jump on you and try to kill you. There are still attempts to oppose our presence here in this land, but the enemy is starting to understand this slowly. They have no future here. “The reality has changed. I ask you and the people of the world, why are you so interested in those Palestinians so much? Why do you care about them? It’s just another small nation.”The Palestinians don’t interest me. I care about my people.”Simcha says the Palestinians who left villages and farms near the hilltops he has claimed simply realised that God intended the land for Jews, not for them. On 24 July this year, a panel of UN experts came to a different conclusion. A statement issued by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said: “We are deeply troubled by alleged widespread intimidation, violence, land dispossession, destruction of livelihoods and the resulting forcible displacement of communities, and we fear this is severing Palestinians from their land and undermining their food security.”The alleged acts of …
