Settling In for the Duration

OFRA, West Bank —  The new pizza parlor in this Jewish settlement does a brisk business.

Religious girls in long skirts push tables together and elbow each other for a taste of the thin-crust tomato-and-cheese pies that Aron Saban pulls from his wood-burning oven. Shy boys arrive for take-out. Parents jiggle babies in strollers while savoring their meal -- even as army patrols and armed guards glide by outside.

Saban, a French Algerian Jew, moved to Ofra about 10 months ago with his wife and infant daughter and quickly created a piece of suburbia in the middle of a war zone. Seeing no pizzeria, he refurbished one of Ofra’s oldest houses, painted its walls powder blue and crafted a two-chimney oven.

He is not the only one investing in Ofra’s future. Sivan Nachliel spent tens of thousands of dollars making her new home look like something out of Town & Country magazine. Families continue moving into a line of trailers on the outer ridge of the settlement. Another synagogue was recently established in a far corner.

Ofra and other Jewish settlements across the West Bank are expanding nearly unabated, contrary to Israel’s long-stated official policy. New housing, new roads and new construction are progressively chopping up the territory claimed by Palestinians for a future state.

Much of the growth has occurred since the start almost 27 months ago of a bloody era of Israeli-Palestinian fighting in which settlers have been fair game for Palestinian gunmen. Some of the neighborhoods that have popped up here are named in honor of residents killed in Palestinian attacks.

Jewish settlers see the land as their God-given legacy. Every Israeli government for the past three decades has allowed expansion of the settlements with few restrictions and often with overt support. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon regards them as a strategic imperative, a way of ensuring Israeli security by blocking contiguous Palestinian territory.

But Washington and most of the world view settlements as a major obstacle to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The international community regards them as illegal because they were founded on land that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War.

No other component of the conflict inflames Palestinians as do the settlements, whose population has more than doubled to 225,000 -- excluding those living in Jerusalem -- since the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993.

Ofra, with 2,254 people, was founded in 1975 and is one of the oldest settlements on the West Bank. Four of its residents have been killed in Palestinian attacks since the start of the intifada, and ambushes on the roads around it have claimed victims from other settlements.

But spend some time in Ofra, and it’s clear that the people who live here are determined to hold on to their homes. They are confident they will be allowed to do so.

If you can suspend for just a moment the idea that you are encamped nine miles north of Jerusalem behind barbed wire and surrounded by hostile neighbors, Ofra is quite pleasant. Wildflowers, peach and cherry trees, and bramble bush cover the sloping hills. Deer are often spotted scampering about.

Almost every male carries a gun, but children play out of doors well into the evening, riding scooters and bikes, their parents unconcerned. Unlike some settlements, Ofra has been spared an attack within its boundaries.

Safe in the certainty that the many security guards will sound an alert in the event of danger, Ofra residents often spend their nights visiting each other’s home, drinking coffee or wine, or sharing a meal. At dusk, the muezzin’s call to prayer in nearby Palestinian villages drowns out the murmuring prayers of Jews in Ofra’s two synagogues. At night, glistening rows of streetlights crisscross Ofra like candles poking from a skewed birthday cake.

In a settlement where everyone knows everyone else, there is little in the way of formal entertainment. But the Bnei Akiva youth movement -- a kind of religious version of the Scouts -- organizes activities for children and teens: sing-alongs, nature hikes and camping trips.

During the days, residents shop at a single grocery store and a separate produce market. Boys and girls attend separate primary schools and play soccer or volleyball. A metalworks and a carpenter shop, two businesses that complement Ofra’s building boom, provide employment.

Although Ofra is in many ways an island, most of its residents leave daily to go to work or college. Many take armored buses that run every hour or so. And teenagers, remarkably, continue to hitchhike on Highway 60, the road outside Ofra’s front gate, on which Palestinian ambushes have claimed many Jewish lives.

Hitchhiking seems to be part of the Ofra ethos of defiance. Settlers have erected concrete blocks, which provide cover in case shooting erupts, at the roadside stop where people wait for rides.

“My mother trusts me. I know which cars to pick,” said 13-year-old Morit Shelem, who says she hitchhikes with her parents’ blessing.

Settlers live in a place like Ofra for many reasons. Some like the fact that housing is cheap and the lifestyle is rural. Some are drawn by ideology or by religious beliefs.

“I’m here for Zionism,” says Saban, the pizza man. “And it’s not just Ofra. All the settlements -- it’s important to strengthen them.”

His wife, Smadar, acknowledged a degree of anxiety at their choice of home. But overcoming fear is the pillar of claiming the land, she said.

“If everyone succumbed to their fears, we’d lose half the country,” she said. “We don’t have that freedom.”

The Sabans also were attracted to Ofra by some of the same incentives that have lured newlywed couples, young families and recent immigrants -- Russians, Ethiopians, even Peruvians -- to dozens of settlements on the West Bank. Low rents, subsidized housing, incredibly easy-term mortgages and other government-provided benefits and freebies make it much cheaper to live in a settlement than in the average Israeli town or city.

Smadar says they could not have afforded to open their business in Jerusalem. But living just a few miles away in Ofra means they can have a home and their business.

Aron, 25 and bearded, bakes pizza on stones that he brought from France. Smadar, 24, is dressed as an observant Jewish woman, but with flair: a long black skirt, fur-trimmed sweater and a head covering that braids stylishly into her own hair. She wants to design fashionable clothing for religious women.

Ofra calls itself a religious settlement, which means everyone observes the Sabbath strictly and keeps kosher. But while every man wears a kippa, the women reflect gradations of the dress code. Some wear pants, others don’t cover their heads. It creates a feeling of tolerance and flexibility -- within bounds.

Settler leaders openly say their plan is to establish a string of outposts southward along the stony hilltops here that will eventually link them to settlements ringing northern Jerusalem.

While successive Israeli officials have assured American presidents that there are no plans to expand settlements, the reality on the ground is quite different.

An estimated 40 to 60 outposts -- the first step in expanding a settlement -- have been established throughout the West Bank since Sharon took office 21 months ago, according to both Peace Now, an Israeli group that opposes settlements, and the Defense Ministry. Hilltop positions serve as lookouts to help protect the roads Israel constructs largely for settlers to travel on.

Sharon is among Israel’s biggest champions of the “settlement enterprise,” the notion of seizing control of land to extend Israel’s reach as deeply as possible into territory that some see as historic Palestine and others, the biblical Land of Israel.

The West Bank is basically the shape of a kidney bean, with Jerusalem at the indentation. Settlements are gradually dissecting it east to west in at least two places north of Jerusalem, while also slicing it north-to-south along Highway 60, the spine of the West Bank. Settlements also are on track to form a ring around Jerusalem that would separate the contested city from the West Bank.

Settlements often start as nothing more than a water tower and a trailer. Then an army unit is dispatched to guard them, and over a period of months permanent housing replaces temporary shelters. In Ofra and in most other settlements, houses are nearly uniform, white with red roofs and lined up in neat rows. Many settlements have schools, industrial parks, their own cemeteries.

Each new community makes a contiguous, viable Palestinian state less likely and, to Palestinian minds, belies any Israeli claim of wanting to solve the conflict.

The settlements are controversial in Israel, too. A slight majority of Israelis wants to be rid of them, according to polls. In addition to the implications for Palestinian-Israeli relations, cost is an issue. Israel spends hundreds of millions of dollars to build and protect settlements, even though the country is mired in economic crisis.

Debate over the $140 million allocated in this year’s budget to the nearly 150 settlements helped trigger the fall of Sharon’s coalition government and new elections scheduled for Jan. 28. Critics argue that millions more are funneled into settlements in hidden funding.

In varying degrees, U.S. governments have long opposed the settlements, too. U.S. Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer approached a senior Israeli official four times in the last year to protest their expansion, with maps of the growth in hand, according to sources familiar with the contact.

Each time, the government assured Kurtzer that settlements were only accommodating “natural growth,” even though much of that comes from active recruitment and many houses sit empty while construction continues. Recruitment helps fuel a population growth among settlers that last year was four times the rate among other Israelis, according to government statistics.

The mayor of Ariel, for example, is inviting teachers from Russia to live in the second-largest Jewish settlement in the West Bank; fundamentalist Christians also are paying to relocate Jews from America to the settlements.

A senior aide to then-Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the recipient of Kurtzer’s entreaties, said limiting the growth of settlements was simply not a priority at a time of war.

Yossi Rund, a 51-year-old beekeeper, has lived in Ofra almost from the start. His eldest daughter was born on an anniversary of its founding and is named after the settlement.

He and his wife, Haya, are true believers in what settlers see as their manifest destiny. The real trouble began, they say, when Palestinians thought the autonomy they gained in the 1980s and ‘90s meant they could control the land as opposed to simply control their daily lives. That, the Runds contend, was never the idea; the land is ours.

Their determination was tested on June 6 when their son Erez, 18, was shot dead, probably by Palestinian gunmen, as he drove home from exams at his school in a settlement just north of here.

“At first I thought I would lose faith in God,” Yossi said, his eyes reddened and hollowed by sadness. “He was such a pure boy. I try to do all that the Torah asks us to do. I am not evil. But to be punished by the murder of this boy?”

Erez, with tousled hair, wire-rim glasses and a crooked smile, was enormously popular among the teens of Ofra, many of whom he counseled and led in the Bnei Akiva youth movement. His friends still come to the Rund household to sing songs and reminisce.

In the end, Yossi said, tragedy only reinforced his faith and his will to remain. As he spoke, he showed a visitor a family tree dating back to the 19th century. Many in the family were represented by yellow Stars of David; those are the ones killed in the Holocaust.

“This isn’t a picnic. It’s a war,” he said. “The war took my son. When everyone realizes that this is a war, we will win it.”

Yossi and his wife say they trust God to protect them and so they do not use the armored buses or flak jackets others use when they leave the settlement. (A couple of weeks after he was interviewed, he was shot and wounded while driving on Highway 60 a short distance from where his son was killed.)

The Ben Ari family, on the other hand, is careful to put on the vests, have their Uzi and army-issue assault rifle always at hand, and restrict trips off the settlement to necessities such as dental appointments. Ofra has two doctors but no dentist.

Ayelet and Netanel Ben Ari, and their two children, Roni, 5, and Matan, 2, are one of two families and about 15 young adults living in 16 trailers along a ridge half a mile south of the center of Ofra.

Theirs is a new neighborhood, Ginot Aryeh -- or Aryeh’s Gardens -- named for Ofra resident Aryeh Hershkowitz, killed on Jan. 29, 2001, when his car came under fire as he drove from the settlement. (His 30-year-old son Assaf was killed in almost identical circumstances three months later.)

The Ben Aris arrived at Ginot Aryeh last year from another settlement. Initially, Ayelet, a schoolteacher, resisted the move. She was tired of living in trailers, the first stop of many a settler. She was ready for a real roof, a real floor. But Netanel, an out-of-work computer programmer, convinced her Ofra would be different.

With generous, tax-subsidized help from the Ofra leadership, they were able to spruce up their new home. They welded two trailers together, producing a two-bedroom home with den and computer room; put in linoleum tiling; installed a new kitchen; tacked screens to the windows; and painted inside and out.

They say they have been assured that Ginot Aryeh soon will be formally incorporated into Ofra, which means paved streets and houses will replace gravel paths and trailers.

As a settlement evolves into permanency, the army shares its security duties with well-armed patrols made up of residents.

Azriel Simhone, who has lived in Ofra for 26 years, is one of its security guards. With an M-16 slung across his back -- one 29-bullet magazine loaded, another affixed at the ready -- and a pistol on his hip, Simhone mans the guard booth at Ofra’s entrance just off Highway 60 and also patrols the roads, valleys and hills that make up the settlement.

The job is “more intense” now than it was two years ago, before the latest Palestinian uprising, he said. “There are more people doing more things in more places, around the clock. It takes a lot of energy.”

To Simhone, the West Bank was still in its biblical state of shepherds, oxen and goats as recently as the 1960s and ‘70s, when Jewish settlers, reclaiming a legacy two millenniums old, arrived and brought modernity.

Peace could be possible with the older generation of Arabs, he said; it’s the younger, demanding ones who are full of unrealistic hopes.

“When it comes to the simple Arab, we can live in peace, we have in the past and we can again,” he said. “The older generation of Arabs saw things better. They never expected to rule, they expected us to rule. With them, we can live in peace.”

At the guard booth, where the glass is bulletproof, Simhone eyes every car that approaches before pushing a button that raises the yellow metal arm. If he doesn’t recognize the driver and occupants, the car does not enter.

As it grows, Ofra is gradually coming nose to nose with the Palestinian villages that flank it: Ein Yabrud, over the highway to the west, and Taibe, a Christian town, across a valley to the east.

“As long as we can afford it, we will expand,” Simhone said. “Our concept is that every life that they kill, we build more.

“We have to decide, is this Israel, or not? And if it is, we must build everywhere, and if they object, we throw them out.”

Ideology is a main motivation for Simhone and many like him. But so is lifestyle.

Sivan Nachliel sought the small-town feel of Ofra, plus the financial breaks that allowed her to decorate her home to the hilt: faux-marble tiles, terra-cotta inlays, a designer kitchen with granite countertops, a small movie theater upstairs, a Japanese bonsai tree in the living room, where lithographs from a renowned Israeli artist hang.

Hers is the last occupied house on a new road, which continues downhill carved in red dirt, where more houses will be built.

Nachliel, an English teacher, and her husband, a traveling salesman, spent about $150,000 on the house and moved in four months ago, after initially renting elsewhere in the settlement.

She says she loves living in Ofra, in part because it feels so safe for her children. Where else can her first-grader put on his helmet and ride his bike to school by himself?

And if her sizable investment goes up in smoke -- if Ofra is dismantled in a future deal to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- then so be it. Many expect government compensation if that day arrives.

“If a government tells me to leave my house because it will bring peace, then I will go. I will not sit on the roof and fight,” said Nachliel, 36. “If God tells me my leaving will bring peace, fine.

“But I don’t think that will happen. And if it does, at least in the meantime I’ll be living comfortably.”