The View from the Green Line
What post-October 7 life in an Israeli border community tells us about the prospects for a two-state solution
A group of friends rise in shock when they realize that a bullet has landed in their swimming pool. Elsewhere, a bullet lands on the porch of a house. On the other side of the wall, there is footage of a Palestinian gunman firing non-stop in the community’s direction from the nearby city of Tulkarm. These are just a few of the scenes from the quiet suburban community of Bat Hefer, home to around 5,000 residents and located between Highway 6 and the Green Line east of Netanya, since October 7.
Bat Hefer is what’s known in Israeli parlance as a “community settlement.” This can sometimes be confusing, as while the word ‘settlement’ in English is used to describe a Jewish community east of the Green Line, in Hebrew there are two words for settlements, only one of which refers to communities in the West Bank. Bat Hefer was founded in 1996 as part of the ‘Seven Stars’ plan (a reference to Theodor Herzl’s idea for the flag of the Jewish state) that saw seven localities (the others are Tzoran, Tzur Yigal, Matan, Lapid, El’ad, and Tzur Yitzhak) built on the Israeli side of the Green Line during the 1990s, with the goal of attracting young families seeking better living conditions to live on the frontier with the West Bank.
In the early 1990s, fewer than 100,000 Israelis lived on either side of the Green Line, while there were over 250,000 Palestinians in the area – both West Bankers and Palestinian citizens of Israel, the latter concentrated in the ‘Triangle’ area (accounting for around 10-15% of Israel’s Arab population). At the time, a two-state solution seemed a genuine possibility, and some Israeli politicians advocated for swapping areas of Jewish settlement in the West Bank for Green Line-adjacent areas in Israel where large numbers of Arabs lived. This idea has since been abandoned, ironically mainly because Israeli-Arabs have made it very clear that they don’t want to live in a Palestinian state. In any case, back then, the government provided financial support for families interested in locating to the area, while private contractors built the houses. The plan had three objectives:
1. Preparing housing solutions…by enlargement of housing supply. 2. Establishing a mixed communal fabric of new olim and Israelis…3. Creating a settlement sequence in the Hills Axis, [with] the aim to thicken the [Jewish] settlement in the area, and to execute the population dispersal policy.
These communities were to be “of communal suburban character, while especially focusing on maintaining the principles of quality of life and environment,” and they would rely on “existing employment, education and cultural centers in Gush Dan and the central cities.” The target population were “housing improvers” – young middle-class families interested in an improved suburban quality of life. With time, these new communities became sandwiched between Highway 6, which was built in 2002, and the separation barrier, which was built in 2006. While the route of the barrier often deviates from the Green Line, in this case, it follows the border between Bat Hefer and Tulkarm.
Since October 7, the security situation in the area has deteriorated. In April, some men stood on top of a building in Tulkarm and shot randomly in the direction of the community. “They’re winning the mind games,” Benny, the community’s head of security, says in a television news feature on Kan 11. “Something like that causes a major panic.” Following footage of another gunman, Benny says: “The films remind everyone of 7 October, and everyone is sure that soon they’ll come to the yishuv [community].” In some cases, people have barricaded themselves in their safe rooms, just like the people of the Gaza Envelope did on October 7.
Another parallel with October 7 is the lack of security funding. The operations room is bedraggled and unfortified; the community pays for its own security cameras; the security officer is only funded half-time. The community was promised NIS50 million at the start of the year, but it has yet to see the funds; in the meantime, the Ministry of Defense has reduced the scope of the community’s security squad, even though one of the conclusions of October 7 is the vital role local communities can play in holding off invaders. “It’s a miracle nobody has been hurt,” Benny says.
It’s impossible not to think about the ‘Seven Stars’ area without also thinking about the development of the Gaza Envelope (which I wrote about here). Just as Ben-Gurion believed that “the line of the furrow” would determine where the border would be, so in the 1990s it was believed that increasing the Jewish population on both sides of the Green Line would ensure that the area would remain part of the State of Israel in the future. This explains why Israel, unlike so many other countries with hostile neighbors, has numerous communities located along its borders. In the Gaza Envelope many of these communities were literally understood as the first line of defense. In the case of the ‘Seven Stars’ project, though, the government had long since abandoned the idea of using collectivist ideas to encourage people to move to the area; instead, they used more neoliberal individualistic motivations. As Gabriel Schwake writes in his book Dwelling on the Green Line: Privatize and Rule in Israel/Palestine: “Thus, using personal interests in self-fulfilment, and investment as settlement tools, these were intended to promote the national geopolitical agenda while producing a variety of new architectural and urban models.”
From today’s vantage point, it is questionable whether the ‘Seven Stars’ project has really made the area more secure for Israel, especially when there is now already a buffer zone between Highway 6 and the separation barrier and Israeli-Arabs are not interested in living in a Palestinian state. On the news feature, the interviewer didn’t ask Bat Hefer’s residents about last week’s decision by Ireland, Norway, and Spain to recognize Palestine, but we can safely assume they would think it was a sick joke. As I have argued previously, the message Palestinians have historically transmitted through violence (and significantly on October 7) is that their objection is to Israel’s existence in any form, rather than the ongoing occupation of the West Bank. While this remains the case, Israelis will rationally do everything they can to resist that state being created, even at risk of international opprobrium.
On the other hand, Israel’s repressive policies towards the Palestinians have only exacerbated the pre-existing problem of violent Palestinian rejectionism. The government lies to the public when it claims that there is a military solution to the Palestinian issue (which is why one Bat Hefer resident thinks that having “zero tolerance for any shooting in our direction” will solve the problem), or that Israel can maintain its occupation of the West Bank indefinitely and cost free; the chaos in Tulkarm is an inevitable result of trying to permanently divide a single territory into A, B, and C (according to the Oslo Accords this was only ever intended as a temporary arrangement). Meanwhile, countries like Ireland and Spain deceive Israelis when they argue that the problem is solely the lack of a political horizon for Palestinians.
“I don’t want terrorists to enter here,” one resident says in the feature. “Of course it can happen. In a second. Did someone think it would happen in Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nahal Oz? It can also happen here – why not?” Right now, the rejectionists on the Israeli side have the upper hand because Israeli withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza have placed border communities under even greater threat than before, the opposite of what they were told would happen following a withdrawal. This is why Israelis are cynical that recognizing a Palestinian state at the present juncture – less than eight months after October 7 - will increase the prospects for peace. But the status quo feels no less fatal. For the people of Bat Hefer, like so many others, the future trapped within this Catch-22 looks bleak.