The Wild, Wild West Bank

Illustration by Brooks Salzwedel

For a supposed outlaw, squatting in one of the illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank, Aaron Rehberg leads a surprisingly conventional life. He pays rent every month on the three-room trailer he shares with his wife, Shayna, and their beautiful, moon-faced, 8-month-old daughter. He’s up to date on his bills for water and septic services. His DSL line is paid for and legal, just like any other citizen’s (“You can’t be an Israeli without an Internet connection,” he says). He has a contract from a government body — the Land Management Bureau of Israel — leasing him half an acre of nearby land for a year, to grow vegetables; the document even has a helpful map showing him exactly where his plot is located.

Rehberg — 24, formerly of Albuquerque — is part of the myth about outposts. The myth, for years, has been that Rehberg and hundreds like him are the real problem in the West Bank, because they’re out of control: They’re taking over land willy-nilly, setting up illegal settlement outposts in defiance of the government; they’re wild-eyed and fierce; and the government is helpless to stop them.

Rehberg sits at his kitchen table, in front of a plate of oatmeal cookies Shayna just made, and smiles tolerantly at this fiction.

“It’s what Israelis call a kastach, a kisui takhat, a ‘cover your butt,’ right?” says Rehberg. He’s a big, bearded man who still sometimes talks like the hippie teenager he used to be, before converting to Judaism and moving to Israel. “Basically the whole name ‘illegal settlement [outpost]’ means a squatters’ village that the government allowed to be set up. There’s no such thing as a squatters’ village that the government hasn’t allowed, because people aren’t allowed to move caravans [trailer homes] on the roads without the government’s permission, you know what I mean? Cause you’ve seen a bunch of the checkpoints that the army has [in the West Bank], and so if a caravan comes to one of these checkpoints, right, and the government doesn’t like it, then the government says ‘Don’t allow it to pass.’ So, everything that’s happened, the government has allowed and even in a sense wanted and helped with, you know what I mean?”

Rehberg is right, and now there’s a 300-page government report to prove it. The unraveling of the myth started last summer, when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ran out of excuses. He’d been promising the United States for months to dismantle outposts, but the dismantling kept not happening. Sharon said the delays occurred because outpost residents would launch a flurry of legal paperwork against their own removal any time the government got close. So, under pressure from the U.S., Sharon commissioned a report to get to the bottom of the outpost issue: who is funding and protecting them, and how do we get rid of them. This was pure chutzpah on Sharon’s part: As Israel’s foreign minister in 1998, he fanned the fire of the outpost movement by urging Israelis to “run and grab as many hilltops as [you] can, to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will stay ours.” Now, as prime minister, he’s playing innocent: How did all those crazy lawbreakers get there?

They got there, the government report says, because large swaths of the Israeli government have been talking out of both sides of their mouths, for years: publicly declaring that they were shocked, shocked that settlement outposts continued being established, and at the same time secretly supporting those outposts, and funding them to the tune of around $17 million, at the very least. “Massive funding” is the report’s exact wording. This outpost report is an entertaining read; it’s always pleasant when a tone of amazement creeps into a dry legal document, and this one is full of it. “We face not a felon, or a group of felons, violating the law,” wrote Talia Sasson, the former state prosecutor who compiled the report. “The big picture is a bold violation of laws done by certain State authorities, public authorities . . . and settlers, while falsely presenting an organized legal system.”

In other words, if this scam had been an Oscar-winning movie, the thank-yous would have gone on for a very long time. The Housing Ministry created a special, blandly labeled budget line — “general development misc.” — for outposts, and also used its own in-house architects to plan illegal outposts. In the Defense Ministry, the minister’s special aide on settlement issues wildly overstepped his authority and went around writing letters, against his ministry’s policy, saying various illegal outposts were in fact legal, thus enabling them to get government money. The state-funded Settlement Division of the quasi-governmental World Zionist Organization steamed ahead setting up illegal outposts, “and this is not by accident, but rather as a system,” Sasson wrote (the emphasis is hers). The Israeli army’s Civil Administration, which governs in the West Bank, turned a blind eye to outposts when they were being built. Thousands of demolition orders for outposts were never carried out. More than half of the 105 outposts Sasson counted were built, in whole or in part, on privately owned Palestinian land.