Beit El Settlement, West Bank — When President Obama meets with Palestinian leaders in Ramallah tomorrow, he’ll be a stone’s throw from this Jewish settlement.
But he won’t be visiting the controversial outpost.
Moshe Rosenbaum, who heads the town council here, believes Obama should, to learn about the settlers whose conflict with Palestinians constitutes one of the most challenging obstacles to peace.
Rosenbaum wrote Obama, as well as the US ambassador to Israel, with an invitation to see the sturdy, red-roofed homes atop a hill here within view of the angry Palestinians below.
“It’s a shame they didn’t give me an answer,” Rosenbaum said, speaking out of a small office with aerial maps of the homes to 7,000 residents.
“While he comes to Ramallah, I wrote him, ‘Jump to here for a few seconds, for half an hour, and hear what we say.’ And we have a lot to say.”
Rosenbaum grew up on another settlement, where his family farm grew from one dairy cow to 150. Then he moved here in 1978 to help found the settlement, on land next to an Israeli army base seized from the Jordanians in 1967.
“This is our homeland,” Rosenbaum said. “God brought us back from the diaspora to this land — like my parents came after the Holocaust.”
His mom survived Auschwitz, and his parents met in what is now Slovakia before moving to Israel.
“I had a very strong feeling that we had to settle here because this is our land and God brought us back. So we left our nice apartment in Jerusalem and lived in a smaller room than this, no toilet, no kitchen, no water.”
“We were pioneers. We believed in our idea,” he explained.
According to the Bible, Abraham passed through here, as did Jacob, who dreamed of a ladder going to heaven here. A huge oak tree thought to be 1,000 years old marks the supposed spot.
But there are other documents in the settlement’s past that tell a different story. An Israeli court ruled that some of the homes here were on private Palestinian land, and some land records had been forged. The settlers were forced to level five illegal buildings.
Rosenbaum’s determination to be a pioneer has come at a personal cost. During the two intifadas, he says, an Arab man threw a Molotov cocktail at the bus in which Rosenbaum and wife were riding. He says his car was pelted by stones 20 times while he drove through Ramallah.
The body of his sister, who was buried in a settlement near Gaza, had to be exhumed on orders of the Israeli government.
Nowadays, Palestinians can’t come here without clearing an Israeli checkpoint. But the land — which lies across the “green line” marking Israeli territory — could shift back to the Palestinians if they ever get their own state.
“Beit El is deep in the heart of the West Bank and there is no chance for a Palestinian state without the evacuation of the settlers in that area,” said Yariv Oppenheimer of the group Peace Now. “Their goal is to keep the West Bank forever in Israeli hands without giving the Palestinians the same rights that they have — actually to continue the situation of occupation forever.”