Majd al-Krum, Israel – The police closed the road to al-Rus, so the villagers found other ways up there. Beginning on September 13, local Palestinian citizens of Israel made the steep climb to the pine-covered hilltop above Majd al-Krum using horses, off-road vehicles and on foot. A couple of weeks earlier, settlers from the occupied West Bank had begun building an outpost there, on village land – one of the first such attempts on this side of the Green Line, the name used for the boundary between Israel and the occupied West Bank.
The young Israeli settlers said they were there to graze livestock with a Jewish National Fund (JNF) permit. But there was no livestock, noted Hussein Mannaa, 50, a lawyer and member of the town’s Popular Committee. Within a week, the camp had grown from a handful of people to between 25 and 30, according to villagers, with a kitchen, a toilet, a water line and electricity.
Villagers rushed to the scene, so police closed the road to the site. Yet local Palestinians came in droves nonetheless. Anas Sgaier, a 21-year-old law student and youth organiser, made the nearly hour-long climb up the mountain.
By September 16, the site was cleared out. A little more than a month later, Israelis head to the polls on Tuesday, and Palestinian villagers fear al-Rus was a prelude to what may come next. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is campaigning on a promise to “Judaise” the Galilee, where Palestinian citizens of Israel make up a large proportion of the population, and says he will repeat there “the revolution we carried out in [the occupied West Bank]”.
Reaction was swift: the village’s Popular Committee met as soon as the rumours of the settler outpost were confirmed and, with the local council, called daily demonstrations. It was young people who drove the protests, villagers said. Some left-leaning residents of nearby Jewish communities also turned up.
Hanan, a Palestinian Christian from a nearby village, said the outposts she read about in the occupied West Bank had felt far away – until Majd al-Krum. Smotrich came to Majd al-Krum, a village long known for its political activism, to campaign with a police force and a water cannon. But the targeting continued.
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