Law, Power, and Justice

www.nytimes.com/2023/11/12/world/middleeast/west-bank-israelis-arab.html

I’m struggling,” he says. “Six weeks ago, I was arguing for peace, I was sending my kids to an Israeli-Palestinian summer camp, I was shopping in the village at Arab stores and embracing the ideology that went with that. And now I’m like: ‘What’s next? Can we really go back to that? Was I, in the past, too naïve?’”

Tekoa is one of the 130 or so West Bank settlements, built on land Israel seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Many are like islands, plunked down in the middle of Arab areas. They are often criticized, even among many Israelis, as the biggest obstacle to peace. Roughly half a million Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, alongside an estimated 2.7 million Palestinians. The settlements reflect a wide range of politics and lifestyles, from ultranationalist communities to more moderate ones focused on agriculture.