The Unsettlers

Maizelis's distaste for the occupation is shared by a majority of Israelis, as expressed in opinion poll after opinion poll. A recent one found that 78 percent of Israelis would be willing to give up the vast majority of settlements in order to strike a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

But despite those polls, and despite international laws prohibiting settlement in occupied territories, Jewish settlement in the West Bank has expanded continually since the land was captured in the 1967 war. At first, settlement was rare, undertaken only by religious extremists. In that era, the government tried to prevent the building of settlements in Palestinian population centers, a policy that led to repeated evacuations of religious settlers by soldiers.

When the Likud Party came to power in 1977, though, the government began constructing Jewish villages and cities all over the territories. Ariel Sharon, then the minister of agriculture, engineered a settlement plan with financial incentives that made the territories an attractive home even for Israelis who didn't feel strongly about the political ideology that drove the settlement project. The settlements grew quickly, and there are now 400,000 Israelis living outside the country's 1967 borders -- 200,000 in East Jerusalem, and another 200,000 deeper into the West Bank and Gaza. (...)

Maon Farm is also on Ben-Eliezer's ''dismantled'' list. But when I visited, the outpost was being rebuilt in the forest 200 yards from the hill where the army destroyed the young settlers' cabins and homes. It is a particularly volatile outpost: last year, a resident of Maon Farm was among a group arrested and charged with planting a bomb at an Arab school in Jerusalem.

The founder of Maon Farm, Yehoshefat Tor, says he still thinks the bombing was a good idea. ''The Torah says we should kill all the Arabs,'' he told me. ''Not just Arabs who maybe help terrorists. Everybody.''
[more]