At an upmarket cafe in west Jerusalem, Naomi Kahn (61) is fielding calls from the media, which have soared since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza.
The international director for Regavim, an influential pro-settlement lobby group, is criticising the Israeli military’s “selective” demolition of an outpost built illegally by Jewish settlers weeks beforehand in the occupied West Bank, near the boundary line with Israel. “This morning, there was a demolition of a Jewish school within one kilometre of dozens of illegal Arab structures that are being ignored,” says Kahn. The Israeli civil administration denied this claim.
Kahn believes Israel must maintain control of borderland areas inside the West Bank, “or the next massacre of Israeli civilians is only a matter of time”.
Like some 160,000 settlers living in occupied Palestinian territory, Kahn was born in the US. “We have a phrase there that ‘good fences make good neighbours’,” she says with a smile. A graduate of political science and near eastern languages from New York University, Kahn once campaigned for “liberal Democrats” and worked for a civil rights organisation in Washington.
Then, in 1984, she moved with her husband to a fledgling settlement east of Jerusalem. “Many American settlers were Democratic voters and active in ‘60s and ‘70s social movements in the USA prior to their immigration to Israel,” says Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a historian specialising in Israeli and Jewish history. “They felt they were often continuing their activism, now for ‘Jewish civil and human rights’ in the Occupied Territories, rather than seeing their political [transition] from left to right as a rupture.”
Kahn’s activism is now channelled into Regavim. The organisation was founded by Israel’s hard-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and has for almost two decades meticulously recorded West Bank construction through aerial footage and site visits, while lobbying the Israeli authorities to demolish Palestinian structures in Area C, where Israel has full control, including over planning.
“This surveillance and persecution prevented the Palestinians from naturally expanding their lands in Area C,” says Muhammad Mattar (46), the director of the central West Bank directorate of the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission. These restrictions, he adds, have led to vertical construction, overcrowding and high property prices in Areas A and B of the West Bank, where the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority has more control.
The Israeli civil administration for Occupied Palestinian Territories did not respond to a request for comment but, according to its own statistics, 90-95 per cent of Palestinian building applications in Area C are rejected, compared with 30-40 per cent of Israeli applications, while between 2022 and the first half of 2023, 770 Palestinian buildings were demolished in Area C, compared with 88 buildings constructed by Israeli settlers.
The settlements are illegal under international law and some of them are not even legal under Israeli law
— Dror Sadot, B’Tselem
Kahn says that “EU-funded Arab construction” is threatening to engulf Israel’s “security buffer” in Area C, where Regavim has supported legal action to demolish schools funded by the West Bank Protection Consortium, an alliance of NGOs and states including Ireland that supports Palestinian communities at risk of displacement. The consortium’s members have sought more than €1 million in compensation from Israel for projects damaged or demolished since 2015.
Kahn counters that Israel should demand compensation for “environmental damage” and “the costs of demolition”, and that if European governments understood that aid for Area C projects was “going down the drain”, then they might cease funding. The EU representative’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
“Regavim’s strategy is to create a misrepresentation that is the opposite of reality,” says Dror Sadot, a spokeswoman for the Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem. “The settlements are illegal under international law and some of them are not even legal under Israeli law, whereas, the Palestinians live on their land, most of them in villages that were established even before the occupation [in 1967], and sometimes before Israel was established.”
After several hundred Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes in the West Bank due to rising settler violence and demolition orders, according to the UN, Kahn conducted press tours to deserted hamlets in Masafer Yatta in November. These included Khirbet Zanuta, where Kahn said the Bedouin community had been illegally squatting and were not permanently based, echoing a Regavim paper on “the myth” of Bedouin villages.
She suggested the community had, in fact, voluntarily left for nearby grazing land. When this reporter visited Khirbet Zanuta in October, as its residents were packing up to leave, Amin al-Hudarat (41) said he had lived there his whole life but the threat of violence from settlers had become too high. “My son is sad to leave but we’re leaving for him,” he said.
“The state encourages this behaviour of the settlers – it finances the settlements, guards them with the army, and grants immunity to violent settlers,” says Sadot. Aspokesperson at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded that Israel is “a state of law” and that “anyone who breaks the law will be held responsible in the judicial system”. Kahn criticised B’Tselem’s narrative for undermining “the moral underpinnings” of the Israeli military and described proposals by the EU to ban violent settlers as “politically motivated” and “ridiculous”, given Israel’s “anti-violence” programmes – one of which has had funding cut by right-wing minister for national security Itamar Ben Giver due to “left-wing” affiliations.
In the long term, Kahn believes that Area C – making up some 60 per cent of Palestinian territory in the West Bank – should be formally annexed by Israel, and that “20 years down the line, there should be thriving Jewish communities throughout Area C”. Some Palestinians living there could be offered Israeli citizenship, like Israeli Arabs, she said – “and if you don’t want to be in Israel, then renounce your citizenship and move somewhere else”.
Kahn says that Areas A and B could become federalised zones under the control of Jordan, which signed a peace treaty in 1994 with Israel that expressly precludes the “involuntary” mass transfer of Palestinians to its territory. King Abdullah II of Jordan has said the Palestinian-Israeli conflict “must be resolved on the basis of a two-state solution” and that the West Bank and Gaza “are an extension of the Palestinian state”. Kahn, however, maintains that “the two-state solution is Israel and Jordan”.
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