“It’s so easy to live here.” Jewish settlers moving to the West Bank say they are motivated less by politics than by economics and lifestyle.
By Felicia Schwartz | Photographs by Corinna Kern for The Wall Street Journal Nov. 10, 2019 1:03 pm ET ARIEL, West Bank—When the Jewish settlers who founded this town scouted the land in 1978, they chose a rocky outcrop where Palestinian villagers warned nothing would grow. It was called the Mountain of Death.
Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, one of the most emotional issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have gone mainstream among Israelis. Places once viewed with skepticism, if not downright hostility, by other Israelis are now home to 450,000 Israelis, up from 116,300 in 1993. They account for 15% of the total population of the West Bank, which also includes an estimated 2.6 million Palestinians, and 5% of the Israeli population.
Settlements are Jewish towns established beyond the Green Line, the demarcation line between Israel and the West Bank since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Residents are Israeli citizens and live under Israeli law. Under the law, the government recognizes certain places in the West Bank as permissible settlements, and it provides them with ample funding. All other places drawing settlers without government approval are considered illegal.
She said she was surprised by the diversity of Jewish Israelis living there. “I thought that the people who lived in the West Bank are religious people or ultra-Orthodox,” she said.Tomer Marshall, an educational-technology entrepreneur, moved to Ariel in 2007 with his wife, to a five-room duplex apartment with a view of Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea. Some of their left-wing family members opposed the move, but the decision was driven largely by economics.
The Trump administration views at least some settlements as essential to Israeli security. U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who was a financial supporter of the Beit El settlement before joining the Trump administration, calls the West Bank by the area’s biblical names—Judea and Samaria—as Israeli officials do. He doesn’t use the term “settlement,” which he says implies they are temporary.
Palestinian officials say Israel’s continuing development of settlements will make it more difficult to create a contiguous Palestinian state. The Israeli government has issued more calls for more settlement construction during the Trump administration than it did during the eight years of the Obama administration, according to Peace Now. The population of Jewish settlements in the West Bank is growing 3.5% annually, government figures show, nearly twice the rate of Israel’s overall population, now about nine million.
Some Palestinians who live near Ariel and work in or near the settlement said that Israel’s settlement expansion has degraded their quality of life. They said they experience long waits and sometimes humiliating searches at military checkpoints, which Israel says are necessary to maintain security. Some also said the opportunity to work in Jewish Israeli towns and do business with Israeli customers earned them more money.
Ariel’s founding families, many with ties to Israel’s military industries, were motivated by a conviction that Israelis should lay down roots in the West Bank. Its first mayor, the late Ron Nachman, “thought that to prove that we own the land, we have to settle it,” said his wife, Ms. Nachman.
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