TANYA HABJOUQA / NOOR FOR THE WORLD
storyEncouraged by the American "peace plan", settlers in the West Bank saw their ideas triumph, at the time of the Israeli legislative elections on March 2. The initial dream of a handful of zealots came to the country.
They won. What was initially only a handful of zealots managed to impose its dream on Israel: Tuesday, January 28, Israeli settlers triumphed at the announcement of the "peace plan" of US President Donald Trump in the East White House Room. This American "vision" offers Israel to annex all the settlements built in the West Bank, on the lands conquered following the war in 1967, and suspend the creation of a Palestinian state on improbable conditions. It proclaims the colonists' victory by knockout, without any possible negotiation.
It does not matter if the Trump administration has procrastinated since then, demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wait until the outcome of the Israeli legislative elections, scheduled for March 2, to take effect. In the field, Mr. Netanyahu is already traveling through settlers "Judea and Samaria" (the West Bank under Israeli control), alongside American Ambassador David Friedman and the Israeli-American committee responsible for establishing the precise route of the annexed areas. In Ariel, in the north, on February 24, the two men listened to the advice of settlers in suit and tie, respected administrators of cities that today represent nearly 600,000 inhabitants, in the occupied West Bank and around Jerusalem.
What a path traveled, in half a century, by a movement launched by about fifty fanatics, bearded and haired, who dreamed of giving shape to a Jewish state at the borders defined by the Bible, between the Jordan and the Mediterranean! This long march of the settlers began on June 7, 1967. On this day, the men of the 55e Brigade of paratroopers storm the Lions Gate to gain control of the Old City of Jerusalem, raising a wave of Messianic emotion that overwhelms the country.
At the end of this lightning war, Israeli soldiers seized the Temple Mount (the Mosque esplanade for Muslims), then controlled by Jordanian troops. They pray before the Wailing Wall, where the first temple was erected, that of King Solomon, until its destruction in 586 BC.
One of these soldiers was Sergeant Israël Harel, 28 at the time. Born into a strict religious family in Haifa, he was a minority among his comrades in arms: in his brigade, only two officers wore the knitted kippah of religious Zionists. As a teenager, he dreamed of joining the army and the pioneers of the Labor Party youths, those strong, tanned and free laymen who built the country, when he remained occupied with scriptures in his yeshiva (religious school), subject to his teachers and his rabbis.
