They aren’t old enough to vote or drink, but they are doing more for the settler movement than most right-wing Israelis. Sometimes they come masked and armed with sticks, rocks, and knives. Sometimes they come with no other weapons but their livestock. These settler youth, often known as Hilltop Youth, are on the front lines of the illegal settler movement in the West Bank. This, of course, is not mere fate, but a highly scripted plan by the Zionist entity. These youth, often under 18 and sometimes as young as 13, spend their days in direct confrontations with their Palestinian neighbours. The goal is simple; conquer all the land and make life unbearable for the Palestinian villages nearby.
The Hilltop Youth
These young people who terrorize Palestinians in the name of Judaism are dangerous but highly exploited pawns in the fascist settler movement. These young men are often from broken homes that live in poverty and/or struggle with mental health and substance issues. Oftentimes leaving home, they are found by rabbis and social workers who send them to State and JNF funded youth homes in the illegally occupied West Bank. Considered therapeutic programs that give these young men a second chance, these outposts and settlements preach radicalism based in Kahanist ideology. Most recently, these programs have proliferated as farming co-operatives and land-based programs.
Here, under the guise of following in the footsteps of the ancient Jewish people, settlers are able to expropriate vast swathes of land through farming and shepherding, even with few people to populate the outposts. Indeed, many of these farms are touted as organic and sold in Israel and around the world. The settlers here claim they are direct descendants of Abraham, and are returning to their ancestral lands and ways. Often these settlements or outposts have a single male leader in charge of a dozen or so teenage boys living in extremely rural conditions.
Youth violence, sanctioned by the state
In Masafer Yatta, I witnessed how these young boys with no family are sent to undertake the bidding of the settlement (or God). It is these young people who are most frequently the aggressors of violence on Palestinian villages, donning balaclavas and showing up in groups, they have thrown rocks at me almost every other week. These are the attacks that send Palestinians to the hospital, destroy property that is already under ‘no build’ orders, and destroy cars and water tanks. When these incidents occur, Palestinians are forced to call the Israeli police. While the army often stands by, usually the police will intervene. Often, this ends with a Palestinian being arrested. Such was the case for Sheikh Saeed Rabaa, who was shot by a settler in the leg and then arrested. The settler is walking free.
These same young men also engage in more benign forms of terrorism. They come to walk through or sit in a village, often filming and trying to provoke a reaction. Other times, they will bring their cows or sheep to graze on Palestinian land seeking to encroach further and farther until they allow their animals to graze in the olive groves and destroy the harvest, or try to mix their animals with a Palestinian flock to steal sheep. While many of the Palestinians who encounter these youth are much older, there is often little they can do to get them off their land or even stop their taunting. Often it requires the border police, or Matak, to enforce a Palestinian landowners rights against an adamant settler. Their arrival can sometimes take hours. Hours that are spent allowing settler animals to eat wheat that was planted by Palestinians on Palestinian land.
Because most of them are minors, these settlers face much smaller penalties, if any, in criminal court. It is a crime to share their names and faces publicly, so they face far less public pressure or intimidation from the wider public for their actions. Their status as minors is the perfect cover for settler growth, and protects all those involved from facing consequences. Similar to the way minors are used in the drug trade in North America to avoid criminal penalties, or the child soldiers in places like Congo, Sudan, and Somalia, these young people are brainwashed and forced into violent confrontations with Palestinians. They are taught that above all else, taking Judea and Samaria for the Jewish people is the holiest action on earth.
Terrorizing Palestinians
They often wear Jewish paraphernalia as they enact these international crimes, wearing tzitzit, or Jewish ritual fringes, tefillin, black boxes and straps worn on the head and arms. They use Jewish holidays as an excuse to invade the villages with Jewish prayers used for intimidation purposes. Palestinians living nearby often expect violence on the Jewish sabbath and other holidays. They often shout to the Palestinian villagers that this land is Jewish, or much worse. Oftentimes, they have learned enough Arabic to shout expletives that every Palestinian can understand.
Though these youth homes are considered illegal under international law, they receive support from both Israel and abroad. Soldiers are stationed nearby to support them and even settlements deemed illegal by Israel are often provided water and electricity. It is in these rural communities that groups of traumatized youth are brought to undertake this seemingly holy mission. Given a home and a purpose, they quickly find themselves on the front lines of this fascist settler movement and uphold their mission. Whether through direct violence or through shepherding and verbal threats, these Hilltop Youth are directly responsible for the migration of Palestinians from places like Masafer Yatta and the Jordan Valley to nearby cities, where a livelihood is hard to find.
Some Palestinians feel empathy for these settler youth; they understand their exploitation. One Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, who wishes to remain anonymous, explains to me that he has children the same age as these young boys. But some believe these youth are too far gone. When asked, a senior Israeli solidarity activist mused that he doesn’t see a difference between these teenagers who yell in his face and the adults who do the same. It is all part of the same regime of ethnic cleansing. These teenagers are simply another casualty in the fight for Israeli occupation.
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