Hilltop Youth

And so for them, as you're looking at this election, are you gonna give me an Israel that I could be proud of? Are you gonna give me an Israel that I could present to my friends? That my friends are gonna look at it and say, "Yes, this is a great country"? And as a result, for many North American Jews, just not Netanyahu is as central as it is for you.

Hilltop Youth is an expression of the moral abominations that are being advocated for or allowed by this government, by Netanyahu.

The toxicity of Netanyahu, the...

Give me another face.

That's one thing.

And then you have the other thing called Hilltop Youth, Na'aranot.

This is the most hated group internationally.

Mm.

The funny part, it doesn't exist really a group called Hilltop Youth.

They don't have an office.

They don't have email address.

Hmm.

And this is on Barry Weiss' CBS, which is hyper-Zionist.

But they did a special on the Hilltop Youth, which as we know, Sharif, the Hilltop Youth are the cause of everything.

In 1890, they're the ones who told Theodor Herzl that it would be a good idea to colonize Palestine.

They're the ones who arranged the Balfour Declaration.

I know they weren't born then, but secretly they are to blame for everything.

This is what I've heard at least from liberal Zionists.

that BB and the rogue hilltop youth are the only problem in the West Bank.

And that's basically the framing that 60 Minutes did.

The fact that violence exists doesn't change the merit of the right that we have to this land.

The violence is often carried out by these young shepherds known as hilltop youth who have flocked here for a sense of adventure, told they're on a God-given mission to redeem the land.

So they routinely storm Palestinian fields and villages, harassing farmers and livestock, cutting olive trees.

Over 1,600 incidents so far this year.

Only a tiny number of these cases ever get prosecuted.

Mohammed's brother, also named Hassan, tried to take us to the family's house.

But within seconds, the hilltop youth in their black hoodies came running down the hill, one after the other.

Soon, the teens were blocking Hassan from reaching the house in the distance.

We were there to document the violence, and we felt that documenting was one of the ways in which we could help prevent it.

As months went by, no matter what we documented, the Hilltop Youth that were there felt emboldened to do whatever they liked.

But we, nothing that we did was illegal.

Nothing that we did could be construed as illegal, could be construed as a security threat, any more that going to visit friends in Alon Shvut is not a security threat.

So...

But a radical movement, radical... movement of young israeli women is leaving civilian life and education behind to live in rudimentary hilltop tents across the occupied west bank dubbed the hilltop girls this group champions a strategy of soft settlement replacing weapons and military patrols with seemingly mundane daily activities by portraying their presence as a natural family-oriented social project the aim to legitimize the gradual seizure of private palestinian land and the establishment of new outposts so who are these young women Well, the women are in many ways an extension of the Hilltop Youth, a radical religious Zionist group that emerged in 1998 when then-Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon urged settler youths to seize West Bank hilltops to preempt final status negotiations.

Sound familiar? So while the broader movement is infamous for orchestrating deadly pogroms and seizing territory by force, I mean, the hilltop youth were like actively violent and pretty documented to be so.

The female offshoot embraces an ideology geared towards establishing a greater Israel that extends beyond historic Palestine to include Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula.

Um, so, uh, which this is, this is that map, right? Remember that, that green line, yellow line, all that stuff, right? If you look in orange, right? This is like Palestinian population centers in orange and red are these settlement outposts, right? And like, you see what they're trying to do.

But, yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, they tear them down, they rebuild them like they don't even listen to their own government's wishes on this stuff because they know deep down they're doing what the government wants anyway.

So like.

Yeah, I mean, also, the government still provides nearly 40 million in food and clothing subsidies to these hilltop youth members, right? So, like, they're actively supporting this as well.

Uh, it's just not one of the things I'm doing at the moment.

But when I was doing it for 11 years, uh, those Jews, the Hilltop Youth, the, you know, the, the least settler, most violent Jews were exactly the Jews I would try to bring to the dialogue sessions because they're the Jews who I think can really have a healthy relationship with the Palestinians once they get over seeing each other as the enemy.

For example, you know, even though I think, uh, Benjamin Netanyahu is the best prime minister we could have right now, I, I find it really problematic when he talks about, like, civilization versus barbarism, or when Ehud Barak talks about Israel as a villa in the jungle.

That's a very colonialist way of thinking.

Felice wrote about an attack that happened just last week in the West Bank near the Palestinian village of Jalud.

Over the summer, some young settlers who are associated with a group called the Hilltop Youth set up an encampment around, um, three houses on the outskirts of the Palestinian village Jalud.

And essentially, they besieged the houses.

They blocked their access to, uh, essential goods and harassed the residents until, uh, in, in late July, they felt so unsafe that they fled.

And the, the people who choose to live in these places, uh, tend to be very young, uh, very extreme ideological settlers.

Hmm.

You mentioned something called the Hilltop Youth.

Who are they?