The human element of this type that is willing to do anything in exchange for land was one of the important elements for the success of the Zionist project by establishing kibbutzim as a means of settlement and creating an organic relationship between the Jew and the land.
Today, a West Bank settlement movement has emerged, calling itself the “Hilltop Boys” and identifying themselves as vanguards who complete the settlement mission begun by their ancestors. However, they proceed from religious ideologies that revolve, they say, around the divine promise called the Land of Israel. Those early were left-wing workers.
These boys wear T-shirts that read in Hebrew “Wherever the plow passes, there our borders pass” and this quote derives from the quote of one of the pioneers of the second Zionist immigration, Yosef Trumpeldore, who immigrated to Palestine in 1912, where his statement became one of the slogans of the Quebusian movement that took over the task of settlement at the time.
The “hilltop girls” herding sheep and cattle, farming and guarding settlements. They also perform an important function: to displace Palestinians by attacking Palestinian villages where they kill and steal, thus effectively completing what Yitzhak Ben-Zvi began when he established Hashomer in the early twentieth century, which was then in charge of guarding Jewish settlements, attacking Palestinian villages and killing their people.
Military and political control alone is not enough to complete this project, and it can only be achieved through settlers, their livestock and farms, which crowd out Palestinians for their land and property and gradually deprive them of them.
What treaties and negotiations are we talking about in front of what is happening, and such people contribute to preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state by preventing the creation of geographical contiguity between parts of Palestinian villages and cities by creating settlement outposts that cut off the land and thus eliminate this contiguity??
Today, in its war on Gaza 2023-2024, in the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz on January 24, we receive a news item entitled: “The occupation army is considering arming the hilltop boys with anti-armor missiles.”
Citing its fear of repeating the October 7 scenario in the Gaza envelope, this step comes in light of the increasing intensity of confrontations and clashes between the resistance and the occupation army in the West Bank, which portends the outbreak of a new intifada.