In West Bank, little hope for change despite U.S. shift

For Jews, Palestinians, security concerns persist on conflict’s front line

OFRA, WEST BANK— Benny Aumann, 62, a travel agent, admits to harbouring a back-of-thebrain kind of insecurity living as an Israeli in Ofra, a Jewish settlement deep in the mountainous heart of territory claimed by the Palestinians.

“There’s a feeling that’s always floating above our heads,” he said, that should a peace agreement come about, “we could one day get notice to leave.”

Just up the road in Silwad, a Palestinian village whose land was confiscated to establish the Ofra settlement nearly half a century ago, Nihaya Hamed, 35, lives with a very different sort of insecurity.

She is raising four girls and a seven-year-old boy, who she fears will grow up to risk jail, or worse, by demanding his human rights, like the older youths who used to clash with Israeli troops outside the windows of her home every Friday.

The announcement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday that the United States no longer views Israeli settlements on the West Bank as necessarily violating international law has done little to change the essential insecurity on both sides of the conflict’s front line.

While experts debated whether the announcement gave Israel a green light to annex parts of the West Bank or flouted established international law, the only practical effect in the West Bank on Tuesday was a subtle shift in morale: It left Israeli settlers feeling slightly more confident and Palestinians slightly more depressed.

“I love this declaration, because it fits with my ideology, my opinions,” said Yossi Berkovitz, 57, who has lived in Ofra for 23 years and, like most of his neighbours, identifies with Israel’s national-religious movement: Orthodox Jews and Zionists who believe that Israel’s sovereignty and Jewish population should sweep over the biblical land of Israel all the way to the Jordan River.

“But if you ask me if it will change anything, it will not,” Berkovitz said. “Because there will come another administration, and they will say something different.”

Hamed, too, said the Trump administration’s policy shift would change little, but for a different reason. “America is biased,” she said. “The U.S. is proIsrael, this is certain.”

Still, she said, it did chip away at one of the few ways that Palestinians could console themselves about the failure of their national project: that at least they were legally in the right.

Silwad’s 7,000 residents, looking across the road, might covet Ofra’s idyllic subdivisions, with rows of red-roofed bungalows shrouded by enviably irrigated gardens and backyards.

But at least, Hamed said, they knew that the settlers were outlaws in the eyes of much of the world.

“Seeing it as a crime was helpful,” she said.

“Legally, politically and emotionally.”