An Impossible Position
Most Israelis Believe Settlements Like Adora Can't Stay as They Are. Surprisingly, The 40 Families of Adora Might Agree

By Ari Shavit

Sunday, June 16, 2002; Page B01

ADORA, West Bank

Illia Greenberg, 19, goes over and over the details of that fateful Saturday morning, seven weeks ago. The sound of automatic weapons fire woke him. He ran down the stairs of his family's small cottage, found nothing, ran upstairs again and found his brother, Nathan, 14, in bed, wounded. Nathan was only mildly hurt so Illia hurried along the corridor and opened his parents' bedroom door. There he found his father, Vladimir, 51, in bed, with five AK-47 bullets in his arms and head, and his mother, Katya, 45, lying in a pool of blood, dying.

Yaacov Sheffi, 31, still ponders that Saturday morning, too. He was coming back from the local synagogue when he saw two men in Israel Defense Forces uniforms standing in the small front yard, trying to get into his home, two doors down the pink cobbled road from the Greenbergs. "Hey, guys, what's up?" he asked them, but they didn't reply. Instead they started shooting at him. As he rolled down the hill to get away and find shelter at a neighbor's place, the two men, who turned out to be members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, broke into Sheffi's cottage. They passed by the TV set, the Disney videocassettes and goldfish aquarium, and went up the three stairs that led to the nursery. There they found his wife, Shiri, combing the hair of their daughter, Danielle, age 5. And while Shiri was trying to hide Danielle under the toddler's bed, along with 4-year-old Eliad and 18-month-old Uriel, one of the liberation fighters put the barrel of an AK-47 against Danielle's little head and pulled the trigger.

The Greenbergs and the Sheffis live in the West Bank, in a small Jewish settlement called Adora, six miles west of Hebron. The location of their settlement is untenable: The 200 Israelis living in Adora and 90 others in its sister settlement of Telem are surrounded by 180,000 Palestinians, who have every reason to regard the Israelis living among them as illegitimate settlers. Trapped between both Israeli ambitions and Palestinian anger, the settlers have, in effect, become hostages to both.

That the settlers live here at all is partly due to actions taken by Ariel Sharon long before he became Israel's prime minister. Between 1977 and 1981, as agriculture minister and chairman of the Ministerial Committee for Settlement Affairs, Sharon stuck more than 100 pins, each one representing a new settlement, into the map of the West Bank and Gaza. In doing so, he changed the outline of Israel, shaping the current nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and drawing new front lines. Two of the blue-headed pins that Sharon stuck in the map were the twin settlements of Telem and Adora.

"The settlements are Israel's answer against the establishment of a Palestinian state," he said, as defense minister, at a state ceremony for the turning over of an army outpost to civilians for a new settlement in 1982. Using the ancient Jewish names for the West Bank, he said, "We have made clear our commitment to ourselves that we will not leave Judea and Samaria, but continue to build with all momentum, and forever, Jews will live in Judea and Samaria alongside Arabs."

But Sharon's answer has become Israel's greatest security problem -- a collection of scattered communities that require constant military protection. It has also become a major political problem, tearing apart Israeli society. What it hasn't been is a viable answer to the pressure to create a Palestinian state.

On April 27, 20 years after Sharon's celebratory speech, two terrorists made their way from the nearby Palestinian village of Tufah and carried out their attack on Adora.

Walking down Adora's half-deserted streets, past the closed shutters of many of its dusty, abandoned cottages, it is difficult to understand what Sharon had in mind when he put this tiny settlement on this isolated hill. What did he think a few Israeli Jews would do, outnumbered 600 to 1 by the Palestinian Arabs surrounding them?

And what sort of people agreed to put themselves in such an impossible position?

Some Israelis came to the settlements sharing Sharon's expansionist ideas. Their migration created friction in Israel's dealings with the United States, and the devotion of many settlers to a greater Israel and these parched hills is often cited as the obstacle to peace accord with the Palestinians. Even after the Oslo accords, the number of settlers rose sharply.

Yet neither the Greenbergs nor the Sheffis match the stereotype of zealous, ideological and belligerent settlers. Vladimir and Katya Greenberg emigrated to Israel from the former Soviet republic of Moldova 11 years ago because they feared that local anti-Semitism in their home country would endanger their lives. They settled in Adora a few weeks later simply because this was the only place -- thanks largely to government subsidies -- where they could afford to buy a small home. With the Sheffis, it was a bit different. Shiri Sheffi, 29, was born in one of the oldest settlements, Kiryat Arba, set up shortly after the 1967 war. She is part of the growing population of second-generation settlers. She herself is secular and not very political. All she wanted when she and Yaacov moved to Adora four years ago -- before the current uprising -- was a nice home in a nice community. Adora's small yards, fine mountain views and quiet appealed to them as a place to raise children in peace.

Such is Adora. Like the Sheffis and Greenbergs, most of the 40 families who lived in the settlement's modest red-roofed cottages up untilthat Saturday morning shooting were secular and rather moderate politically. Most of them were lower middle-class, middle-of-the-road Israelis.

In this way, Adora's residents represent a large portion of the settler population. Of the 210,000 Jewish Israelis living in the occupied territories, almost 80,000 (nearly 40 percent) are secular and non-ideological, says Amiram Goldblum of the settlements-monitoring team of Peace Now, which has criticized the settlements. Another 45,000 to 50,000 settlers (more than 20 percent of the total settler population) are ultra-orthodox Jews who moved to the West Bank because they could not afford housing prices in Israel proper, especially not in the Jerusalem area. Hence, only 40 percent of the settlers live where they do because of national-religious convictions. And even among them, says an official in the local settlement council board, at least a third are moderates who are willing to accept the existence of a Palestinian state and some sort of territorial compromise.

So the extreme "greater Israel" ideology has the unconditional support of only 50,000 to 60,000 settlers. While substantial, that represents less than 30 percent of all Israelis living in the West Bank and Gaza. Among these, the real radical element -- those who would reject any peace deal and fight eviction -- constitutes only 4,000 to 5,000 people (at most 2.5 percent of the entire settler population). The others seem to be willing to accept decisions concerning their future if made in a legitimate, democratic fashion by the Jewish state. If there were a genuine peace proposal on the table, with support from the majority of Israelis and a fair solution to their own personal plight, most settlers would not resist it. They might oppose it politically, but they wouldn't resist it violently. When push comes to shove, the large majority of settlers will not be the real obstacle to peace.

But for the time being there is no genuine peace proposal on the table. And for the time being the civilian settler population is being attacked on an almost daily basis. The roads that take them home are deadly dangerous and the settlements they live in feel besieged. In the last nine days, three different settlements were attacked. On the morning of June 11, three youngsters coming to pick cherries near Hebron were wounded by explosives; on the night of June 8, four soldiers were wounded when the settlement of Yizhar came under fire; before dawn that day, a young couple was murdered in Karmei Tsur, not very far from Adora. The 23-year-old wife was 9 months pregnant when she was slain. A third person was killed in the attack as well.

That climate helps explain why Vladimir and Illia and Nathan Greenberg, as well as Yaacov and Shiri and Eliad and Uriel Sheffi, are not just survivors now, but hostages. They are the hostages of Israeli governments that have encouraged them to settle in hopeless spots and they are hostages of their Palestinian neighbors who are trying to drive them out of their homes, using the persuasive influence of AK-47s. And they are also the hostages of a rather indifferent international community that would let them bleed while showing very little compassion for them.

Walking through Adora, one cannot help feeling sympathy for its residents, even if they don't truly belong here. Though often seen as gun-toting aggressors, the terrified settlers of Adora are victims, too. Victims of the folly of their own state, victims of the brutality of their own neighbors, victims of a 100-year-old Zionist ethos that was stretched beyond the time (pre-1948) and the space (pre-1967 borders) that granted it success and legitimacy. Many of the settlers feel that the international community and the Israeli left treat them like lepers, while the Israeli right sees them as worthless pawns abandoned on the chess board after the campaign of settling greater Israel failed.

Quite a few of Adora's residents are now packing and moving away. Seven of the 40 remaining families have left since the shooting, five more are on their way. It was a peculiar sort of hometown, anyway. Adora never provided them with work, or commerce -- not even a supermarket. All it offers is a well-kept kindergarten, now surrounded by a tall fence to protect the few children who remain. There is no future in Adora, some of the local youngsters tell me. The Palestinians are driving us out, they say. The Palestinians are winning. Sooner or later Adora is going to be theirs.

Shiri Sheffi wanted to pack up and leave, too, but she can't afford to. She and her husband used their life's savings to purchase their house and now no one will buy it. By refusing to provide them with aid, the governmentcompels her to remain here, she says. "The circumstances I find myself in force me to stay in these tiny rooms where my daughter was slaughtered," she says, "where we wanted our Danielle to grow up in peace." And where, now, she waits for the painters to finish whitewashing the bloody horror of it all.

Ari Shavit is an Israeli journalist for the daily newspaper Haaretz.