In the Land Of the Lonely

Deep inside Palestinian territory, the Jewish community of Migron sits, precariously, on the crown of a skull-white hill. On a winter day, the wind is so fierce it rocks the trailer homes, knocks over the kids' plastic tricycles in the muddy driveways and threatens to rip out the young fruit saplings planted by the 90 young settlers who call Migron home. A guard dog the size of a lion prowls the hilltop to scare off Arab prowlers--or terrorists. Migron is a hard and unforgiving place, especially these days.

Itai Harel, 32, founded the Migron settlement in 2002, on his honeymoon. Harel and his bride were fulfilling a dream: Jews repossessing the biblical land of Judea and Samaria, nearly 2,000 years after they were exiled. It matters little to Harel and the other Israelis who have settled in Migron that they are living on land that much of the world believes belongs to the Palestinians, in homes that many of their own countrymen would just as soon see abandoned. In fact, the residents of Migron seem to pride themselves on being among the biggest loners in the Middle East. "We're supposed to be a Jewish, democratic state," says Harel, a broad-shouldered ex-paratrooper still in the army reserves. "But if you ask me, it's more important that this be a Jewish state than a democratic one, and for us, Judaism is the land of biblical Israel. It's more here than in Tel Aviv."

Settlers were once considered the golden pioneers of Zionism, the force behind the creation of Israel and, later, the occupation of territory seized after the 1967 war. But the future of the settlement movement, and the settlers themselves, has never seemed more uncertain. More than 270,000 Israelis live beyond the Green Line, as the old border is called, most in walled-in suburbs like Ma'aleh Adumim outside Jerusalem, which could be an estate of southern California condominiums if it weren't for the 300-year-old olive trees implanted in the traffic circles. The vast majority of Israelis living in the West Bank today do so less out of any ideological fervor than because the housing is cheap. But some 70,000 settlers are religious nationalists like Harel, who consider Palestinian land to be their Jewish birthright. They tend to live in remote outposts, surrounded by hostile Palestinians and occasionally harassed by Israeli authorities under pressure from the international community to evacuate the settlements. In 2005, Israel did just that, withdrawing 9,053 settlers from the Gaza Strip, the first time in more than two decades that Israel had voluntarily given back occupied territory.

The evacuation of Gaza was supposed to be the first step in Israel's "disengagement" from the Palestinians, followed by withdrawal from settlements in the more historically and strategically important West Bank. Those plans were shelved last year by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, as conflicts with militants from Hizballah and Hamas soured many Israeli officials on the idea of giving up any more ground. But Olmert is weighing a pullout again. The Bush Administration has signaled a new determination to forge a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Palestinians. And the success of those negotiations will hinge in part on whether Olmert's government can sustain support for dismantling the West Bank settlements, more than 40% of which have been built illegally on private Palestinian land, according to Peace Now, an Israeli pacifist group.