Executive of the Eli settlement, 32
Born in Kfar Etzion, West Bank
Interviewed in Eli, West Bank
We first meet Amiad Cohen in 2012 while on a United Nations–sponsored tour of freshwater springs in the West Bank. Much of the West Bank outside the valley of the Jordan River is arid, and the struggle for control over water resources is a major flashpoint in the tensions between Palestinians and Israeli settlers. At Ein Al-Arik, which is located halfway between the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Nablus, the springs have been developed into natural bathing pools and a park by the nearby Eli settlement.1
As part of a group of journalists and NGO workers, we walk among olive trees on a sloping, rocky hillside while our guide tells us of the Palestinian villages cut off from the spring by its recent development by the settlement into a park. Soon an Israeli security truck pulls up, and Amiad and one of his students get out to see what’s going on. Before long, Amiad and the head of a local Palestinian village are engaged in heated argument—the Palestinian man claims the lands where the springs reside belong to his family. After things calm down, we approach Amiad and explain our work.
Later we meet Amiad in his office in Eli, a settlement laid out over eight hilltops twenty minutes north of Ramallah. He has brown eyes, a three-day beard, and his hairline appears to be receding towards his yarmulke. His desk is strewn with papers, binders, large rings of keys. “Someone told me a messy desk means a messy mind,” he says. “So what does an empty desk mean?” His office is modest, without much more than a computer and some security monitoring equipment. He’s not there very often. His real office is his truck, which he drives from neighborhood to neighborhood in the settlement.
Amiad takes us on a tour of Eli in his truck, showing us mountain views, soldier memorials, and Bnei David—a pre-army school that Eli is known for. He also invites us to his home, a trailer he shares with his wife and two young children. The floor of his small living room is strewn with plastic toys, and one wall of the room is packed with books.
When we check on Amiad at Eli two years later, he’s been promoted from head of security to a position he describes as CEO of Eli. Essentially, he says, he oversees the day-to-day operations of Eli, from the water and sewage systems to the building of new community projects. Still, he says, he only spends an hour a day in his office.
“WE’RE ZIONISTS, WE’RE GOING TO ISRAEL”
I was born on a kibbutz in Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem in the West Bank, in 1982.2 I have five siblings—two younger brothers and three older sisters. I’m the oldest boy. The kibbutz where I grew up was part of the only Jewish settlement that was demolished in the ’48 war. The Jordanians and other Arabs conquered it in ’48 and killed almost everyone. Then in 1967, a man who had been a child there and one of the few survivors of the ’48 war came back and established a new settlement.3
My mother grew up in a very blue-collar family in Batya near Tel Aviv, and my father grew up in Be’er Sheva.4 All my family is originally from New York City and Long Island. My grandfather, my father’s father, fought for the U.S. in World War II. He married my grandmother in 1950 and told her, “We’re Zionists, we’re going to Israel.”5 First they moved to Batya. But my grandfather wanted to go into the army and build settlements, so that’s what he did.
I was born in Kfar Etzion, but when I was three and a half, my family moved to South Africa—to Johannesburg. We lived there in the apartheid days, and we had five helpers living in the house. I was a good student, a good kid. But I couldn’t go out of the house often because of security problems.6 We could be kidnapped or killed. So I went to school on a bus with an armed guard, and then I’d head straight home after school. To visit friends in another neighborhood, we had to make an appointment two weeks ahead for an armed escort. It was crazy.
We returned to the settlements in 1989, when I was seven. This time we moved to Efrat.7 But we had a nice home, a big home with a pool. My father is very intelligent, and he got into the computer business sometime in the early nineties, right around the time the Internet became popular. I learned about computers early. As a thirteen-year-old, I wrote HTML—and that was when it had just been invented. I also taught computers to adults. I taught Excel, PowerPoint, and Word when I was a teenager.
I left school a year before graduating from high school, in eleventh grade, because I was bored. I felt like I was wasting my best years and I thought, What am I doing now? I have a problem with not doing anything. I like to be busy. So I dropped out. I volunteered for a year, teaching and working with children. Then I came to Bnei David, the pre-army academy here in Eli, studied here for a year, and then I joined the army.
ELI IS STILL NOT LEGALLY RECOGNIZED BY ISRAEL
The settlement I came to for school, Eli, was established in 1986. Eli comprises eight separate hills. We’re on top of a hill in the original part of the settlement that was established by twenty, thirty families.
Plans were made to settle the area in the late sixties, after the ’67 war, and settlers started coming here in ’76, something like that. Originally, the Israeli government planned a city of 100,000 people, and the first residents came from Shilo, just south of here.8 Building Eli was all part of the dream of many of us settlers to bring as many Jews as possible to this part of the West Bank—a million Jews to the West Bank. In the 1980s, the government of Israel tried to encourage people to move to this region by paying for homes, roads, everything.9 And then in the mid-nineties the government stopped promoting settlement.10 So Eli didn’t grow as fast as its planners had originally hoped.
Bnei David was established in 1989 by a rabbi who wanted to make a new kind of school that would be a pre-army yeshiva.11 The goal was that students would study the Torah to build themselves into better soldiers, better civilians, better people.
Bnei David was the first school like that. And now it’s a revolution in the Zionist community. There are twenty pre-army schools that are religious like the one here in Eli, and there are twenty secular pre-army academies. I teach here at Bnei David, and I teach in Tel Aviv in a secular one. And it started here in Eli. Most of the population of Eli today graduated from this yeshiva, and now we have high-ranking officers in the army who live here. Generals, major generals live here—ten, fifteen generals in a small town of almost 4,000 people, because of Bnei David.
But the problem we have in Eli is that the town is still not legally recognized yet by Israel. Or I should say, Eli was recognized by the state of Israel, but they didn’t finish the process. They encouraged the settlement back in the eighties but haven’t officially recognized the settlement following the agreements in the mid-nineties. The secretary of defense needs to sign an order to recognize us, but most of the secretaries of defense in the past twenty-five years have been too far left politically to acknowledge settlements like Eli.12 That’s one problem. The second problem—we live in a place that is in between two administrative areas. There are Areas A and B, which are supposed to be governed by the Palestinians, and Area C, which is for Israel and the settlers.13 We’re exactly in between. That means that land ownership and enforcement of the law in this area are very unsettled. That’s an understatement. For the Arabs around here, there’s no bookkeeping about who owns what land, and so a lot of Arabs make claims on land as personal property without having any written records. No one knows the facts. We can’t prove anything about land ownership, and they can’t prove anything, so it’s a problem.14
WHEN IT’S WAR, IT’S WAR. WHEN YOU’RE MORAL, YOU’RE MORAL.
After graduating from Bnei David, I joined the army. In 2001, when I started, the mandatory conscription was for three years.15 I was in the Golani Brigade.16 And in Golani they have special units, and I was in a special unit whose expertise is demolition. I worked with explosives—RDX-10, C-4.17 Our job was to demolish Palestinian bunkers and weapons caches throughout the Gaza Strip, in the West Bank, in Lebanon. Our unit could do crazy stuff with explosives. We could go into a building and blow up only one room without hurting the building, for instance. There were situations where we might find Palestinian explosives in a room and need to detonate them, but we didn’t want to destroy the whole building. We’d have to make a hole in the wall and set up our explosives a certain way so the explosion was directed out of the building. It was very difficult. Sometimes it didn’t go as planned, and the whole building would crash down. We tried to do our best so that nobody was hurt or killed.
The most difficult period of my service was fighting in the Gaza Strip in 2004 through 2005.18 It was very extreme, very frightening there. Plenty of friends were injured, plenty of my fellow soldiers. In Gaza we were fighting mostly Hamas. But we couldn’t always distinguish who was Hamas and who was not, and my soldiers and I had plenty of talks about how to be moral about war. Questions that you don’t hear plenty of people ask. When it’s war, it’s war. When you’re moral, you’re moral. The two don’t always go together. But we tried to ask the questions, How do you do it? How do you act morally in this situation? If a child gets caught up in our operations, what would we do?
And it was dangerous, too. I was shot at by Palestinians when I was a soldier. I was in a civilian car hitchhiking to my base, and two Palestinians ambushed us and shot at our car. I stopped the driver, and I ran after the two gunmen. We ended up capturing them, and they were sent to prison.
When you join with a military force, you divide the world into the good guys and the bad guys. I’ve been there. That’s how you educate soldiers. A soldier needs to know that he’s good and the enemy’s bad. If he thinks that he’s maybe a little bad and the enemy’s maybe a little good, then he’s not a good soldier. That’s the army world. But now I live in the civil world, a much more complicated world.
I’M MARRIED TO MY WIFE AND MY M-16
After the war, I came back to Eli and started teaching at Bnei David. Then I met my wife through a friend in 2007, and I knew right away I wanted to marry her. When my students ask me how you choose your wife, I tell them, “First of all, you need to have chemistry. And then you have to have the same ideas about what you want in life. Then you need to earn her—not win her—you need to change to be better to earn her.”
When we met, my wife worked with handicapped adults. And when I saw how she treated them, I knew she was a good person, that she had a big heart. And I wanted a big-hearted wife. I told her, “You’ll be my wife, now you just need to decide that I’ll be your husband.” And it happened. We were engaged half a year after we met and married in eight months. Our first child was born in 2009 and the second in 2011. Around the time my wife was pregnant with our second child I also started working as head of security in Eli.
I drive my truck a lot on the job. I have a knife, a Motorola, and my M-16. I’m married to my wife and my M-16. It goes everywhere I go.
As head of security of Eli, I haven’t had to shoot my rifle. And I don’t want to. I know when to hide it and when to show it. The people of Eli all own a lot of weapons, mostly pistols. It’s common. It’s for their own security. Here people don’t just feel threatened, they are threatened. But many settlers don’t know how to use their guns, which is dangerous.
There are areas where it’s much more dangerous, and areas where there’s less danger. Now, it’s quiet. From 2001 till 2005, shootings in the roads in this part of the West Bank were common.19 But in the past three years that I’ve had my job, there have been three shootings in the roads here. Still, we’re surrounded by neighboring Palestinian villages, and each one has about 5,000 people. So we’re surrounded by 12,000 or 15,000 Palestinians, and there’s less than 4,000 of us here in Eli.
When I have security situations, I’m very stressed. But I run and I swim. That’s how I calm down. We live a regular life here in Eli, but we always carry something inside—fear. Because every night when I get a telephone call from my subordinates saying the radar system we use sees something weird, I jump. Because I can’t stand the sight of a murdered family. I’m afraid that my wife and kids will get hit by stones. It happens every day. And the Molotov cocktails thrown at cars—that happens once a week, every two weeks.
In the summer of 2010, I got a call that there was a fire just east of Eli. So I got my deputy and a couple of other guys, we called the army for security, and we went to put out the fire. Palestinians from the village just east of here, Karyut, they had burned out one of my security cameras on the edge of Eli’s jurisdiction.20 I knew it was set on purpose, because it was started with a burning tire. Setting fire to tires and putting them by something else is a good way to burn something down, and something I’ve seen villagers do it before. The wind was from west to east, the fire spread to an olive grove, and olive trees were burning. I had the phone number of the head of security of Karyut, and I speak a bit of Arabic. So I called him, and I told him there was a fire burning down Palestinian olive trees.
I decided to extinguish the fire in the olive grove myself. I don’t like olive trees burning. We believe that the trees have a place in the world, that they’re important.
So the head of security in Karyut came, and he brought cameramen. I came with fire-extinguishing equipment, and he brought photographers. While we extinguished the fire in the olive grove, they photographed us. I took pictures of them taking pictures of me. It was crazy. He told me, “I’m taking pictures to show how you’re burning down our trees!” I put out the fire anyway, despite the Palestinians’ accusations against me, because it was the right thing to do.
What I feel isn’t anger. It’s frustration. Yes, we all know there is a conflict. I’m not trying to hide the conflict. But there is a way to solve the conflict—that’s through negotiation. You want to come and negotiate, come. You don’t, pay the price.
TO ME, “SETTLER” IS A GOOD WORD
We stay here despite the threat because of ideology. Zionist slash Jewish slash God—different sides of the same thing. They kicked us out of Europe—thank you very much for kicking us out of Europe. We don’t care who wants us and who doesn’t. We decided, We’re here and you don’t play around with people like us. We’re here, and we’re able to fight to stay here. Last night I had a conflict with a Palestinian. And he told me, “Now you’re strong, so you can kill us. But when we are strong, we’ll kill you.” I said, “Yeah, okay, so when you think you’re strong enough, call me.” That’s an answer for people who only understand power.
I feel powerful now. In the larger world, “settler” is not a good word when talking about the West Bank. But to me, the word “settler” is a very good word. I see a settler as a person who is trying to live with the land, to combine people and the land together in a positive way. We’re trying to build, to grow here in Eli. We want to bring as many people as we can here. Plenty of the wives here work only part-time jobs, because the main goal is building a new generation. Now my wife is a social worker, working with kids, broken families, divorced parents, parents in prison. But it’s only a part-time job. We want to grow our family.
I don’t hate Arabs. I don’t want to kill them, I don’t want them dead. I’m not against them. The Jewish nation’s place is here. I don’t want a conflict with you. You can live here. You’re invited. Meanwhile, there is a Palestinian state—in Jordan. We need to put everything in place. I don’t want Egypt, I don’t want Syria, I don’t want to conquer Europe. We want our place. Mine. This small border, this is mine. Give me my place. I don’t want your place.
I’M VERY OPTIMISTIC ABOUT LIFE
I hope that my kids will be much better than I am. I don’t believe that I’m so good, but I pray that my kids will be much better. Because the world is going forward. It’s not going backwards. It’s getting better and better every day. And I’m very optimistic about the future.
Today, I know how to control myself and my anger. I’ve worked on it the last few years by studying the Torah. Now I think of how to choose every minute of my life. I have responsibility for my feelings. I choose my feelings, I know how to control them. Because everything you feel, everything you do, you choose.
There is a national conflict, and I believe that is a moral conflict. I need to ask myself in what ways we are we acting immorally towards the Palestinians and try to fix that. And I know what apartheid is in South Africa—I lived there. The basics are very different. The English, French, and Dutch came to South Africa as conquerors, as imperialists, and conquered Africa—that’s very different from what’s happening here. To say that we are treating Palestinians like the South Africans—it’s wrong, it’s not happening here.
I don’t believe that, as a whole, Arabs in Israel want to push all Jews into the sea. It’s much more complicated than that. Whoever holds Islamic ideology definitely wants to kill all the Jews. They say it, loudly. You just have to listen. Read their books, their newspapers. Whoever embraces the Palestinian national identity, they want to kill us in a war. They say it. When they draw the map, they don’t draw the ’67 borders, they claim all of Israel.21 They want everything.
I do not think that everything Israel does is moral. We are not as good as we want to be. My explanation for our problems is that we don’t know yet who we are and what our goals are. We have problems with human rights with the Palestinians. And the extreme left wing wants to keep these problems, actually, so they can show we are not moral people, and the Jews are not what they claim to be. So I try to fight that perception.
To build our identity as Jews in Israel, who we are, we have to start by asking questions. And we have to have problems to force us to ask questions. So, thank God we have the Palestinians. Thank God we have that problem, so we can ask ourselves who we are. It’s more than useful. It’s an integral part of who we are.
What is immoral about settlement buildings? The world expects the Jews to be more moral than others. When I educate, I explain that criticism comes out of a belief. When you criticize something or someone, you believe they can change. If you don’t care about someone, you don’t criticize them. The world is looking up to the Jewish nation and the Jewish community and the Jewish country because they believe there is something different here.
1 Today, Eli is a cooperatively-run settlement of nearly 3,500 people about thirty miles north of Jerusalem.
2 Kfar Etzion is a settlement of under 1,000 people located four miles south of Jerusalem. A kibbutz (Israeli collective farming community) was built on the current location in 1927.
3 The kibbutz at Kfar Etzion was completely destroyed after a two-day battle during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. The destruction of the village by Arab forces (in retaliation for the destruction of an Arab village), is memorialized throughout Israel. After the 1967 Six-Day War, a newly established Kfar Etzion was one of the first planned Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The new community was led by Hanan Porat (1943–2011), a prominent settlement activist who, as a child, was one of four survivors of the original Kfar Etzion’s destruction.
4 Mazkeret Batya is a city of 10,000 located sixteen miles south of Tel Aviv. Be’er Sheva is a city of over 200,000 people located sixty miles southwest of Jerusalem.
5 Zionism is the movement to create a Jewish homeland that led to the formation of Israel in 1948. For more information, see Appendix I, page 295.
6 During the late eighties, opposition to South Africa’s apartheid policies intensified and resulted in widespread violence and a national state of emergency.
7 Efrat is a settlement with 10,000 residents that was established in 1983. It is located three miles east of Kfar Etzion.
8 Shilo is a settlement a few miles east of Eli. Shilo was established in 1978 and has a population of nearly 2,500. It was one of the first settlements constructed by the Gush Eminum movement, which sought to claim all of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) for Israel. For more on Gush Eminum, see the Glossary, page 304.
9 The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank quadrupled between 1980 and 1983, from 8,000 to approximately 32,000. Expanded construction of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza was promoted by the government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin following the Camp David Accords and the peace agreements with Egypt, Israel’s most powerful neighbor.
10 The first Oslo Accord was signed in 1993 and slowed the growth of settlements in the West Bank for a couple of years after implementation in 1995 (though settlement construction expanded in 1997). For more on the Oslo Accords, see Appendix I, page 295.
11 A yeshiva is a Jewish religious school dedicated to the study of the Talmud and Torah.
12 The Israeli government officially recognizes 125 settlements in the West Bank, and over 100 more have been established without formal recognition (and contravening Israeli law), but with support for infrastructure and security.
13 For more on administrative Areas A, B, and C, see the Glossary, page 304.
14 Parts of the land Eli Settlement is built on are categorized as Palestinian private property according to a 2013 survey conducted by the Israeli Civil Administration.
15 Israeli citizens (with some notable exceptions) are required to serve in the military, usually starting at age eighteen. For more information on the Israeli Defense Force, see the Glossary, page 304.
16 The Golani Brigade (also called the 1st Brigade) was responsible for major combat operations throughout the West Bank and Gaza during the Second Intifada.
17 RDX-10 and C-4 are both explosive compounds used commonly in warfare.
18 Fighting throughout the Gaza Strip during the Second Intifada lasted until the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli security forces and settlements between August and September of 2005.
19 This was the period of the Second Intifada. For more information on the Intifadas, see the Glossary, page 304.
20 Karyut is a village of less than 5,000 people located a mile east of Eli.
21 The ’67 borders are the borders demarcated by the Armistice Agreement of 1949, otherwise known as the Green Line.