Word: weste
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Watch TIME's video "Protesting Gaza, Carefully, in the West Bank...
...obstacle to peace. They can sometimes see Palestinian Arabs on the green flats far below but have no interaction with them. Most people in Efrat take bulletproof buses to Jerusalem, 15 minutes away, via a "bypass road" - one of a vast network Israel has built in the West Bank. The Katzes believe Arabs arrived in the area only in the 1970s. "People tried to build here many times and failed because the conditions were very harsh, rocky, no water," Israel Katz explains. "Jews are very stubborn people. If they want something, they won't stop. Jews started coming here...
...Netanyahu government, like its predecessors, makes a distinction between what it calls "legal" settlements like the Gush Etzion bloc (pop. 75,000) and "illegal" outposts deeper in the West Bank. Within sight of the Arab city of Nablus, settler Itay Zar, 33, lives in a two-room shanty with his wife and their five children, above a stretch of road at risk from Palestinian snipers. Zar's father, Moshe Zar, is one of the biggest - and therefore most despised by Palestinians - Jewish buyers of Arab land in the West Bank. Zar grew up in the West Bank. His outpost - named...
...Plumbing and Powerful Men For every Itay Zar (there are at least 100 hilltop settlements like his in the West Bank), there are thousands of Sharon Katzes in communities with plumbing and Little League. These suburban settlers make up the established West Bank colonies that Israel does not want to relinquish - in fact, would like to expand. So far, Netanyahu has not directly challenged Obama on the settlements, other than to say he won't stop "natural growth" (that is, houses for expanding families). Since the Israeli army is always skirmishing with radicals like Zar, giving up the occasional outpost...
...sound militant. Indeed, to American ears, their version of the national narrative sounds rather familiar. "I would love it that the little outposts someday have their own playgrounds and Little League," Sharon Katz says. "Israel shouldn't leave any hilltop! How did communities start out in the American West? With one log cabin. When we bought this land, it was a rocky hillside. Look what it looks like today...