Israel's enemy within: The "Hilltop Youth"

SHVUT AMI OUTPOST, West Bank — Aaron Gottlieb is 15 years old, speaks in a rapid-fire American accent and is yet to have his first shave. He does not look like much of a threat but he is part of a movement that has many in Israel deeply worried: the Hilltop Youth.

Gottlieb grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and emigrated to Israel with his family when he was 9. Whenever he can get away from his yeshiva in the Israeli town of Petah Tikva, he spends the night in a cave on top of a hill in the West Bank with other teenage boys.

Although without a central organizing body, the Hilltop Youth receive support from several adult settler leaders. But the mainstream settlement movement — essentially, these kids’ parents — have disowned them and their frequently violent tactics. Seizing and occupying yet more hilltops in what they call “outposts” is, in the eyes of many mainstream settler leaders, pointless provocation to a government whose support the settlers need. There are about 100 outposts in the West Bank, according to Peace Now, which monitors settlement activity.

The outpost Gottlieb visits and has helped build is called Shvut Ami. It sits next to Route 60, next to the hardline settlement of Qedumim, one of the first to be established in the West Bank. Israeli police have tried numerous times to remove the teenage settlers, arresting them and destroying their temporary structures on top of the hill, but the kids keep coming back. In four months over the winter, the teenagers used picks and shovels to dig a sizeable cave out of the hillside, giving them a more permanent dwelling — unless the police or army use dynamite to collapse the roof of the cave. The boys live there among dusty blankets and pillows, a gas heater keeping them warm at night, studying the Torah and building a Jewish presence on land they believe was given to the Jews by God.

Other than two friendly dogs and some iron bars, the kids on the hill have few weapons. Gottlieb keeps a small can of pepper spray in the pocket of his cargo pants in case of attack by people he calls his “enemies.”

“The people over there,” he said, pointing to a Palestinian village across a valley to the west. He looked around him, pointing to other Palestinian village. “The people over there. The people over there. The people over there. The people over there.”

Like most settlers, he doesn’t call them Palestinians. The name Palestinian implies, to them, that there ever was or ever will be a country called Palestine. Sometimes they’re “Arabs,” but mostly he calls them “terrorists.” Gottlieb said he was not afraid of them.

“God’s with me,” he said. “We’ve been here forever. This land has been ours forever. This land has been promised for God.”

Gottlieb’s belief in his right to live in the West Bank, in spite of the condemnation of much of the world and the insistence of his own government that he is breaking the law, is total. Like many of the new generation of settlers, he believes we are living in a time when the messiah will return to Jerusalem, when his law will rule the world, and when the Jews will be the rulers under the messiah. “Jews are different,” he said.

I asked if by "different," he meant better?

“Different better,” he said.

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