Samaria ‘mostly normal’, but sometimes a bumpy ride

Ofir Dayan grew up in the community of Ma’ale Shomron in the West Bank, where, she said, “Jews and Palestinians coexisted”.

Though people have fixed ideas of so-called “settlers”, Dayan told a Limmud Johannesburg audience that West Bank Israeli communities were generally made up of a third secular, a third national religious, and a third ultra-Orthodox communities.

Dayan lived in Samaria for 23 years before she moved to New York for her education. “Setting aside the Second Intifada, I’ve never had any security issues there, not a Molotov cocktail, not a stone, nothing”.

She said the West Bank, otherwise known as Judea and Samaria or the “occupied territories”, was initially established as an area delineated by an armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan.

The area is divided into three areas set out by the Oslo Accords in 1993: area A, with full Palestinian control; area B with civil Palestinian and Israeli security control; and area C, where there is full Israeli control.

“It’s important to know that the Oslo Accords was never meant to be a permanent solution. They were supposed to be a starting point for negotiations,” said Dayan, “However, that all fell apart with the intifada, with thousands of Israelis murdered in the streets of Tel Aviv, Judea, and Samaria, Jerusalem, and other places. So, the negotiations never materialised.”

Dayan grew up in the height of the Second Intifada, which lasted from September 2000 to February 2005, in which 1 083 Israelis were killed, of whom 741 were civilians.

When she was in Grade 1 in 2000, her memory of her first day at school was being taught by her teacher to duck and hide under the seats of the bus on the way to and from school.

“This is how we drove to school for the next two or three years – under the seats. It’s not normal for a six-year-old to have to know to do that,” said Dayan.

One of Dayan’s most memorable moments was when on the way home from school in Grade 1, a group of Palestinian teenagers were running towards the bus with lit torches wanting to burn the bus down.

“Our bus driver made what I now know wasn’t a very smart decision to stop the bus. He opened the door, got out of the bus, and shot twice in the air. It didn’t help. The Palestinian teenagers kept running towards us. He shot another shot in the air, and they ran away. Thankfully, nobody on either side was hurt,” said Dayan.

There are now about 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank under the governance of the Palestinian Authority, with 92 000 Palestinians working in Israel. The number of those working in Israel has diminished since 7 October.

There are different reasons why Jewish people move to these areas, she said. For national religious communities, they do so because they want to be in the areas where stories of the Torah occurred.

The ultra-Orthodox community move there because they want to live in an area with a high concentration of ultra-Orthodox. Though the main concentration is in centres like Jerusalem, it has become too expensive, so they live in the West Bank.

“Life is mostly normal in communities in Judea and Samaria. People live there at the end of the day because it’s liveable. Most go to work. They send their kids to school. It’s mostly normal.

“On the ground, a lot of initiatives are bridging the gap, contributing to talks, and on a day-to-day basis, shopping centres are shared by Palestinians and Israelis. This is where they interact,” said Dayan, “Unfortunately, this is also where sometimes we see terror attacks, taking advantage of the fact that they can easily get to a place where many Jews assemble. But it’s mostly a place of coexistence.

“In the past few years, maybe decades, we’ve been looking at it all wrong,” said Dayan, “In 2005, Israel decided to disengage and expel all Jews from the Gaza Strip and four communities in northern Samaria. Before that, the Israeli government, headed by Ariel Sharon, said, ‘If we just give the settlers money, they will leave willingly. They’ll buy a house in Tel Aviv, Kfar Saba, or Herzliya, and it’s going to be fine.’ It failed because people who are ideologically motivated aren’t going to take money and leave. This isn’t how it works. And if we think that if we just give Palestinians work permits in Israel, or a few more dollars, whether it be in Gaza with Qatari money, or in Judea and Samaria with other money, they’ll just get up and leave, or the radical elements among them wouldn’t want to fight Israel anymore, that’s not only wrong, it’s racist.

“Thinking that others are less ideological than yourself and you can just bribe them not to fight you for what they believe in isn’t how it works. It’s a problematic way to think about this issue,” said Dayan.