A stout wind was blowing across the high ground in the West Bank as we watched a group of teenagers attempt to give birth to another Israeli settlement.  They had a few pieces of particle board, studs, a finishing hammer and nails that didn’t look long enough to hold a shack together in this wind.  These are the kids often referred to as the ‘hilltop youth.’  Dedicated young Jews who call the West Bank Judea and Sumaria and believe that God promised the land to them and therefore they are obligated to claim every inch of it. This, despite the fact that the international community considers them part of the problem and their own government considers their actions illegal.

They got two sides of the shack propped up. Young settlers made a futile effort to hold them steady in the wind. Without a ladder, one of the settlers climbed on the shoulders of another and thumped haphazardly with the finishing hammer at nails trying to get the structure solid enough that it would stand on its own. Watching this, my crew and I wondered how long it would be until someone got hurt. It wasn’t long.  A big gust of wind toppled the shack on the settlers and one TV crew.  No one was hurt badly and the settlers went back to work. Realizing they could not build with hammers, nails and wood in this weather, they started stacking rocks to build a structure. That very basic act speaks volumes to the determination of the people involved in the settler movement.

The hilltoppers had coordinated an effort to scramble to the top of 11 mountains from the North to the South of the West Bank and start building settlements on the high ground.  The effort was timed to coincide with the diplomatic blitz the US is executing in Israel. US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell is here, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, National Security Advisor James Jones and Presidential Advisor Dennis Ross are all in Israel or coming soon. They have two issues to address: The Iranian Nuclear threat and freezing the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

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There was still tear gas in the air when we arrived in Hebron. My eyes burned. My producer, Yonat Friling, offered me her scarf to cover my face, but I figured it would make me look like one of the masked settlers who had been throwing rocks at Police and Palestinians.  Besides, my experience with tear gas has been that a dry scarf doesn’t help.  There were burning tires off in the distance.  Jewish settlers were calling Jewish police officers Nazis. All of it, the result of the lightning raid conducted by Israeli police which had cleared the disputed “Peace House” in 20 minutes.

Peace House is a name the settlers gave to an old stone building in Hebron, a flashpoint town in the West Bank. Both Jews and Muslims claim to have a religious stake in the town where several hundred Jews live surrounded by about 160 thousand Palestinians.  Settlers claim that they purchased the building from Palestinians for a million dollars. Palestinians claim they never sold to the settlers. More than a year ago, dozens of Jewish settlers moved in, dug in and refused to leave.

Israel’s Supreme Court never decided who was right.  2 weeks ago, the judges only decided that the building needed to be evacuated within 30 days so the dispute could be resolved.  The settlers defied the ruling and Israel’s leaders declared that the law would be upheld.

So, there’s a degree to which none of were surprised. In the community of foreign journalists living in Israel, this was a primary topic of discussion for the past two weeks.  Each of us asking the other, when they planned to head to Hebron, hoping to gain some knowledge about when exactly the evacuation was coming down.  I saw most of my competitors mulling around Jerusalem this morning.  The settler leaders met this morning with Ehud Barak.  That should have let some steam off the pressure cooker and delayed the inevitable.  But apparently after the meeting Barak determined that the settlers were not going to be talked out. So, he moved quickly when most were not expecting it.  Many of the settlers had wandered outside of the barricade and gone about their own lives when the police made their move.

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