The Settlers

What is said about them and what we know

In the media, whether worldwide or in Israel, we only hear about them when there are riots and violence against Palestinians or Israeli soldiers. If this comes from settlers, they are extremists who make up a tiny part of the total population of so-called Israeli settlers. Otherwise, among the almost 800,000 Israelis who live today in the Golan Heights, in Judea and Samaria, and in East Jerusalem, we find all kinds of people whom we otherwise encounter in Israeli society.

Many residents of Israel’s capital, Jerusalem, have no idea that they are “settlers” and “illegal occupiers” in the eyes of the European Union and many international institutions. They live in neighborhoods and areas that were occupied by Jordan after Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 and conquered by Israel in 1967. In July 1980, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, declared the entire city of Jerusalem to be the eternal and indivisible capital of the State of Israel in the so-called “Jerusalem Law.”

Jerusalem is Israel’s largest city, developing rapidly and with a steadily growing Arab and Jewish population. From the Israeli perspective, Jerusalem is not legally a “settlement.” However, as the European Union sticks to its position and people, as is often the case, move from one part of the city to another, some become settlers, while others cease to be settlers when they move. This also applies to other parts of the country. People move to so-called settlements, which today have tens of thousands of inhabitants, such as Maale Adumim or Modiin Ilit, and then back to recognized Israel in Beer Sheva or Tel Aviv. The number of Israelis who would not live in a “settlement” for ideological reasons is decreasing for various reasons.

The term “settlement” can be confusing. It covers a whole spectrum of cities, villages and towns, including small farms in the Judean Desert or the hill country of Samaria.

In addition to the settlers from Jerusalem, there are also residents of the Golan Heights, which were occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War and declared Israeli territory by law in 1981. Shortly after the end of the war, experienced kibbutzniks founded the first kibbutz, “Marom Golan.” Soon more were added. Today, when you visit Susita, one of the archaeological national parks, you can not only walk along a Roman road but also watch a film that tells how, during the War of Independence, kibbutzniks from Ein Gev even captured a Syrian military base from which they were constantly shelled.

The settlement of the Golan Heights after the Six-Day War was primarily for security reasons. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the residents were forced to flee. But they returned after the war and rebuilt the destroyed places. Today, the Golan Heights are a place of fertile plantations, vineyards and pastureland. At an altitude of over 1000 meters above sea level, raspberries and blueberries, which do not otherwise grow in Israel, also thrive.

The Druze at the foot of Mount Hermon grow delicious apples and make salads from wild herbs. Archaeological excavations testify to an interesting history and nature reserves attract countless visitors. A unique feature in Gamla is the conservation station for endangered vultures.

From the shores of the Sea of Galilee, one can see a hilltop in front of the Golan Heights where, after the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, representatives of Great Britain and France stood to divide the area between themselves. At that time, the Golan Heights were then assigned to France. With the end of the French mandate, Syria became independent in 1946. The British had the mandate to enable the Jews to establish a national homeland on their territory both west and east of the Jordan. But by the early 1920s, about 75% of the British Mandate of Palestine had been separated and declared the Emirate of Abdullah Ibn Hussein. Abdullah actually came from the Arabian Peninsula. His father had been the Sherif of Mecca. The League of Nations approved this first partition of Palestine on September 16, 1922. As a result, the East Bank of the British Mandate of Palestine became the Emirate of Transjordan.

After the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the government of Yitzhak Rabin considered returning the Golan Heights to Syria. At that time, banners, posters, and stickers reading “The People with the Golan” appeared everywhere. Today, no one in Israel regrets that a “peace agreement” with Syria under these conditions was not reached. From the perspective of the EU and a large part of the UN, the Israeli inhabitants of the Golan Heights are still occupiers of Syrian territory. Under President Donald Trump, the United States recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019.

There were settlers “who were residents of the Jewish villages in the Gaza Strip.” Exactly 20 years ago, the Israeli government under Ariel Sharon implemented a decision to unilaterally separate from the Palestinians. All residents of the Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip were forcibly relocated, “uprooted,” as they themselves called it. This was done with the approval of the whole world, even though according to the Fourth Geneva Convention it is no longer legal to “deport or transfer” civilians for political reasons.

When in the year 2023, in connection with the controversies and massive demonstrations surrounding the judicial reform, there was talk of “the greatest crisis since the founding of the State of Israel,” the thought of the unfortunate separation from the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip through the expulsion of its own population was unavoidable. In my view, the heartbreaking scenes of Israeli soldiers forcibly dragging their own civilians from their homes was the greatest crisis in Israeli society, with terrible consequences.

The Palestinians could have built a Singapore on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. But they built Hamastan – and the world continued to talk about occupation, even though not a single Jew, not a single Israeli soldier, remained in the Gaza Strip. The flourishing agriculture with its huge greenhouses on sand, synagogues, schools and kindergartens, all residential buildings were destroyed by the Palestinians – “the world of yesterday,” as Stefan Zweig would say, ceased to exist.

Twenty years after that tragic attempt to secede from the Palestinians in Gaza and grant them self-rule; after three decades of rocket fire and terrorist attacks on Israeli territory, culminating on October 7, 2023, in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, retired Major General Gershon HaCohen, who led the expulsion of Jews from the Gaza Strip, admits that without the evacuation of the settlements, the massacre would not have happened. The smuggling of weapons from Iran and the establishment of a terrorist stronghold in the Gaza Strip would not have been possible in this way. We will likely hear from these settlers and their descendants again — albeit initially in connection with the ill-fated 20th anniversary.

So far, we have been dealing with settlers who, from the Israeli perspective, are not settlers. Then there are settlers who are no longer settlers because the government evacuated them from the villages in the Gaza Strip against their will. Then there are the settlers, about whom there is a lot of talk at the moment, who live in places that are historically very important for the Jewish people.

I write “at the moment” because on July 23, 2025, the Knesset, by a majority of 71 votes, issued an official recommendation to the Israeli government to declare sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley. This resolution describes these territories as an inseparable part of the historical, cultural and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people.

For example, there are settlers from Hebron. It was there that the patriarch Abraham bought a field to bury his wife, Sarah. The patriarchs Isaac and Jacob are also buried there together with their wives Rebekah and Leah. King David ruled in this city before making Jerusalem Israels capital. For 3,000 years, there was a continuous Jewish community in Hebron until Arabs committed a horrific massacre in the summer of 1929. The British Mandate evacuated the surviving Jews, so that the old Hebron community was wiped out.

When assessing a situation from a historical perspective, the question always arises as to how far back in history one should go. To biblical times? To the Byzantine period? To the Middle Ages? Into the early modern period? Regarding the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria, there is archaeological and written evidence of a Jewish presence, often of a Jewish majority population. The beautiful mosaic from an ancient synagogue in the Gaza Strip can now be admired, for example, in the Museum of the Good Samaritan on the way to the Dead Sea.

In Europe, Gentiles always wanted to determine where Jews could live and where they could not. That is why Jewish life in Europe is characterized by expulsions, restrictions, ghettos and worse. Even today, when the Jewish people have returned to their original homeland, we Europeans obviously want to continue to determine where Jews may and may not live, even in their own country.

The Palestinians and their supporters have made their voices heard around the world, not only in Arabic but also in a universally understandable chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free!” They openly demand that the entire historical territory of Israel from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea should be “judenrein.”

When the slogan “From the river to the sea” became so popular, I was personally immediately struck by an irony of fate, or perhaps the irony of God. This sentence comes from the Bible. There God promises his people (Deuteronomy 11:24): “Every place that your foot sets on will be yours: from the desert to Lebanon, from the Euphrates River to the Mediterranean Sea, all of it will be your territory.” However, there is also a condition attached to this in the relationship between the God of Israel and his people.