On the ground in settlement Anatot

Anatot is 20 minutes outside of Jerusalem by car, perched over a canyon northeast of the city. Residents are urban and secular, and meeting them in a bar or restaurant, you wouldn't have any idea they were settlers. Hours later, invited to back to their home for tea, watching the white terraces of Pisgat Ze'ev stream by outside the car window, you'd be caught off guard by the sudden appearance of the separation barrier, and your vehicle's sudden sharp turn into the checkpoint.

Elsewhere in the world, Anatot would be a sleepy, 300-family bedroom community, a suburban housing development embodying the natural relationship between wealth and boredom. Kids ride their bikes up and down the steep streets, each steering with one hand as he tries to eat ice cream with the other. Teenagers stroll aimlessly through the neighborhood, or meet at its one coffeeshop, waiting for the weekend. At home, their parents relax in modest two- or three-bedroom homes, watching TV or making dinner after another day of work at a job somewhere in Jerusalem.

But Anatot is not elsewhere. It is here: a little under 15 kilometers inside the West Bank, located six kilometers north of Ma'ale Adumim, the largest settlement in the area. From Anatot's strategic location at the top of a cliff, visitors and residents can see Kfar Adumim and Nofei Prat, two more settlements that have hilltops of their own four kilometers further east. 20 kilometers beyond Kfar Adumim lies the Jordan river, the end of the West Bank.

Scattered amongst these settlements, generally in the valleys between them, are Arab villages. It takes a bit of practice to discern what kind of town you're seeing when you gaze out over the Bank, but with patience you can learn the tricks. Settlements are built at high altitudes so that they can be easily defended. Their houses have red rooves and are in orderly rows. They are invariably surrounded by razor wire and fences, and have gated entrances with armed guards.

Arab villages are found in the valleys. They tend to be older than the settler conflict, and therefore poorly placed for defense--the valleys were chosen because they were an easier place to find water, and a more convenient place to build. Arab homes are undecorated concrete. At night they're easy to spot: a village of any size will have a mosque, whose tower is lit with green light.

Setting aside the politics for a moment, the West Bank is a fascinating glimpse into an Israel/Palestine that existed before colonial rule and modern development--an endless vista of rolling, sparsely-vegetated hills, unbroken by any building larger than three stories. Looking out over the land, the overwhelming feeling is one of emptiness. Compared to Jerusalem's crowded interior, the West Bank seems like a ghost country, something from the Bible come back to haunt its modern counterpart.

The best view is from the coffeeshop, which serves hot drinks, pizza, and ice cream. The owner looks and sounds Israeli, but she was actually born and raised in Chicago--you can order in English, if you like. Though it's on the opposite side of the settlement from the canyon, the coffeeshop has found its own little cliff, and from a seat on its porch it's easy to imagine you're sitting at the end of the world, enjoying the last ever cup of tea as you wait for the distant Jordanian mountains to crumble.

The ten or fifteen kids running around take no notice of this phenomenon; they're used to it. They will, however, notice you, a face they don't recognize in their insular community. In between chasing one of the settlement dogs or pouring individual packets of what looks like Kool-Aid into cups of water, they'll cast the occasional glance your way. So will their mothers, middle-aged women enjoying a cup of coffee before going home to get dinner ready, letting their youngests burn off some energy in preparation for early bedtime. The summer heat arrived just a week ago, and the children are wild and intoxicated with it.

Sitting there, it's hard to believe that these are the people who so many claim are jeopardizing Israel's future and robbing the Palestinians. Their lives don't appear to be so different from suburbanites in Herzliya or Atlanta. They aren't marching out to destroy Arab homes or groves. Many have been in this settlement since it was founded, 25 years ago. They keep to themselves, as do their neighbors. On the weekends, they see movies in the city.

Yet between Anatot, Ma'ale Adumim, and Kfar Adumim, a triangle of 10 kilometers has been unilaterally sliced out of land that Israel has repeatedly promised to the Palestinians. And these are only three settlements in a much larger local network, concentrated around Ma'ale Adumim and running between Jerusalem all the way to Jericho. The ultimate goal of this string of settlements? To slice the West Bank in half, effectively ending the chance for the formation of a Palestinian state. Grove-burning or not, it's a cruel and dangerous plan.

Apologists for Palestinian terrorism and rocketry (and of course, those perpetrating these acts themselves) are eager to portray the settlers as bloodthirsty, or lunatics. This is the retreat of extremists, the refusal to engage with one of the fundamental paradoxes of the settler movement: that many of them are not cruel people on a personal level, whatever their ideological motivation; or, failing that, that many of them are not settlers of choice at all, but rather children, or to poor to leave.

Yet there is another extremist tendency running counter to this one: the desire to portray settlers as harmless suburbanites, devoid of the slightest malice, morally unimpeachable because they build their homes in nice rows and keep their gardens growing. This, too, is a canard: the settlement project is malignant, its members engaging in, at the very least, an active repression of conscience and good moral practice in the hopes that one day those pesky Palestinians will just "go away." Where? Who knows! But "away," that's the point.

Outside Anatot, its children are obscured by political dogma. Inside, they are instead used to obscure it. Both extremes engage in this contemptible practice, and so neither is able to defuse the extremism of the other.

It is a testament to the failure of leadership in Israel and Palestine that this manipulation occurs at the highest levels of government. Hamas and the PLO treat settlers as abstract demons, as if they had crawled out of the earth, a whirlwind of teeth and claws. How can one not advocate for or commit violence against such creatures?

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu calls for the continued expansion of settlements, couched in the phrase "natural growth." Anyone who questions the wisdom of such a policy is brow-beaten for failing to think of the children. After all, what kind of monster wants to keep parents from having kids? To keep some sad-eyed 8-year-old from finally getting his own room?

Until the moderate center of this issue is able to have an honest debate about what is to be done with settlers, there will be no progress toward peace. It almost goes without saying that is not a dialogue that is going to start in Israel, the place where respectful political conversation comes to die.

After a year here in Israel, I am more convinced than ever that a solution to settlements will have to be developed in the United States, and ultimately implemented as much by American Jews as by Israelis. Israel and Palestinians are facing a crisis of leadership that, outside of a miracle, looks set to last for the next decade. That is not an amount of time that either side can afford to lose. For their sakes, American Jews are going to have to remember both the children in Anatot and Anatot itself.