FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
At first it seemed like nothing, a slightly crazy move on the part of a small group of particularly original religious Jews who were so in love with the land of Israel: renting a few rooms at the A-Naher Al-Khaled Hotel in downtown Hebron to celebrate the Jewish Passover of 1968 together with their families.
The Labor government of Levi Eshkol initially turned its nose up, in the days following the landslide victory of June 1967 it was decided that the "occupied territories" to the detriment of Jordan, Egypt and Syria (with the exception of East Jerusalem which was immediately annexed) should be annexed preserved intact, to be able to return them to the Arabs in exchange for peace and full recognition of Israel.
New settlers
But then came "no" from the enemies and the negotiations were prolonged. This government then launched attacks along with slogans reminiscent of those of Hamas today.
And then there was the euphoria of victory and the very romantic suggestion of the idea of "colonizing the earth", after all it was the legacy of the first Zionism, that of the migratory waves at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The religious character of the new settlers was different; they were led by a Rabbi Mosge Levinger, who was born in Jerusalem in 1935, but was far from socialist Zionism.
If this preached the entirely secular need to work the land to create the "new Jew" capable of self-preservation, Levinger instead spoke of the return of the Jews to the regions that had been the kingdoms of Israel before the destruction of the Second Temple.
The first did it with rifle and plow, the second referred in theological terms to a mission by the will of God. But it was a second argument proposed by Levinger that deeply touched the sensibilities of political and military leaders, labor leaders such as Golda Meir, Ytzhak Rabin, Moshe Allon and Moshe Dayan: he wanted to bring his people as in Hebron, where in 1929 the Palestinian population had killed 69 Jews, and in nearby Kfar Etzion, a symbol of the 1948 war, when the Jordanian army and Palestinian Volunteers massacred 127 Haganah fighters and local kibbutz members who were also surrendering.
Two massacres which in their modality, although not in number, recall what happened on October 7 at the hands of Hamas.
However, that first Easter was an irreversible step. Because Levinger and his men refused to leave the next day. A long tug of war began with the government and the army: in the end the compromise was to abandon the center of Hebron (where they would return in a coup ten years later) and settle in a half-abandoned military base on the hill overlooking the city . The settlement of Kiriat Arba was born, which has remained the beating heart of extremist settlers ever since.
"Jewishization of the land"
Here Levinger established the headquarters of "Gush Emunim", the bloc of believers, whose main mission was to "Jewishize" the land by any means, at any price, even threatening, robbing, even killing the Palestinian population.
When you declare that "God loves you," then it becomes very difficult to compromise. As Ehud Sprinzak, one of the most attentive local historians of the Israeli right, told us in the 1980s: "The curse for our people was the victory of 1967, when secular Zionist nationalism, occupying the Jewish holy sites, married right-wing xenophobes . religious".
Government support
Just before the intifada, the great Palestinian uprising that broke out in December 1987, there were about 200,000 settlers. Arab violence did not stop them, far from it. Nor did the beginning of the peace process between Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993. Indeed, supported especially by American Jewish organizations, settlers continued to grow in the lands that were supposed to make up the Palestinian state.
In 2005, Ariel Sharon pulled 15,000 settlers from Gaza, meaning the West Bank was all theirs. The Netanyahu governments supported them by all means: today they seem an irreversible presence.
According to the UN census of March 2023, there are about 700,000 settlers (of which 230,000 in East Jerusalem) and there are 279 settlements in the West Bank: about a quarter of the residents in the region are motivated by ideology, the rest by economic incentives from the government./ Corriere della Sera
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