Beni Katzover has an unusual view about Jews living in Judea and Samaria, which is what a lot of Israelis call the West Bank.
He wants Jews who live there to be thought of as unremarkable, like Jews living in West Jerusalem—as barely worthy of notice.
In fact, he said, West Jerusalem wasn’t the predominantly Jewish area it is now until after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
And he said he thinks that in the future, Arabs can also live in Judea and Samaria.
While some Jewish ultra-nationalists would like to see them gone, Katzover said he thinks they can have self-governing status, much like they have now under the Palestinian Authority.
However, he doesn’t want a separate Palestinian state. And he’s worked his whole life to get enough Jews to move to the West Bank to make that separate state less and less likely.
What happens in the West Bank matters. Palestinians and their international supporters tend to call it “the occupied West Bank,” while Israelis refer to it as “the disputed West Bank.”
On Sept. 18, the U.N. General Assembly passed a nonbinding resolution demanding Israel leave all lands the United Nations considers Palestinian—primarily the West Bank—within 12 months.
It has already recognized a Palestinian state encompassing it and the Gaza Strip.
And what Katzover thinks about it matters as well. He is one of the founders of Gush Emunim, a movement that emerged after 1967’s Six-Day War. Its mission is to promote the right of Jews to settle in Judea and Samaria, the heart of Israel’s biblical kingdoms.
Over the past half century, the movement has brought more than 500,000 Jews—Katzover thinks as many as 800,000—to this highly contested piece of land.
“There are 800,000 Jews on the ground today,” he told The Epoch Times on Sept. 19, speaking through a translator. “This is already beginning the process where the Palestinians and the world realize that the case of a Palestinian state is getting farther and farther away from reality.”
Continued Jewish immigration should bring that to at least 1 million Jews soon, he said.
“A Palestinian state with 1 million Jews inside it is an impossible situation,” he said. “The world will recognize [their living there] or accept it. Slowly, slowly.”
It’s not just world opinion that backs the Palestinian state. Parts of Israeli society do as well, he said. But as we approach the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, fewer Israelis subscribe to that now, he said.
Evicting Jewish residents, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did when it pulled out of Gaza in 2005, would probably be a non-starter.
The IDF had to remove some of those kicking and screaming from their homes, but there were only 9,000 of them.
It took more IDF troops than that to protect them, one reason then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon opted to withdraw.
After the Six-Day War, Katzover, a native Israeli who was a reserve paratrooper in the IDF, moved to Hebron in the newly conquered West Bank.
Hundreds of religious Jews, in moves their government at first opposed, have settled there, despite resistance and occasional violence from their neighbors.
A large Arab city, Hebron has been a flashpoint for Arab-Jewish tensions.
Called Kiryat Abba by Jews, it has deep religious significance. It is one of four cities in Israel considered holy.
The patriarch Abraham moved there, and earlier, as tradition has it, Adam and Eve moved there after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
In 1929, Arabs rioted against the Jews in what’s now called the Hebron massacre, killing 67, wounding 60, and ransacking homes and synagogues.
In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish physician, opened fire on praying Muslims in Hebron, killing 29 and wounding 125 before survivors killed him.
The site, the Cave of the Patriarchs, is holy to both Jews and Muslims.
Tradition holds that the three biblical patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and three of their four wives, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah, are buried there.
Hebron was the only Arab city in the West Bank where part remained under Israeli military control after the Palestinian Authority was created during the Oslo process. This was done to protect the Jewish residents.
The West Bank didn’t have any Jews living in it in 1967, Katzover said. By 1968, there were four Jewish communities launched in Judea, south of Jerusalem, but nothing in Samaria north of the Israeli capital. And there still wasn’t by 1973.
“There were no Jews in the 100 kilometers from Jerusalem to Afula,” an Israeli city just north of Samaria, according to Katzover.
That’s when he and others founded Elon Moreh, a few miles east of Nablus. Deep in Samaria, it was a statement. The community could not be seen merely as a subdivision built near existing Israeli cities.
Katzover is sometimes referred to as the godfather of Jewish settlement in the West Bank. But according to him, Elon Moreh’s founding was a group effort.
Katzover was president of the Samaria Regional Council from 1980 to 1993 and is still active in it. He said he has seven children, as well as “many grandchildren and even some great-grandchildren.”
He helped found Gush Emunim in 1974. The movement was started by religious Zionists who believed God wanted the Jewish people to live in Israel and that the return of Judea and Samaria to Jewish control represented an opportunity to settle there.
Not all ultra-Orthodox Jews are Zionists. Many oppose or distance themselves from the state of Israel because it did not, in their opinion, come about as religiously prophesied.
Gush Emunim’s founders were led by Zvi Yehuda Kook, son of Rabbi Avraham Kook, Ashkenazic chief rabbi under the British protectorate before Israel’s independence.
They believed that secular Zionists, who were not religiously motivated, had unwittingly ushered in the Messianic Age, which would result in the coming of the Messiah.
A non-religious objective for the group, though, was the recognition that in its pre-1967 borders, Israel was as little as 6.2 miles wide, and thus indefensible.
The West Bank, Katzover said, represents a buffer for Israel’s most populous areas, making them more secure for those who live there.
Gush Emunim eventually waned in importance, effectively disbanding after a splinter group, the Jewish Underground, was accused of plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the Islamic shrine on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
It has been supplanted by the Yesha Council, a more pragmatic umbrella organization for Judea and Samaria’s civic groups.
Gush Emunim may be gone, but according to Katzover, one of its main tenets still distinguishes it from other Jewish ultra-nationalist groups: Katzover and those in his camp don’t think Arabs should be forced out of the West Bank. Rather, they should stay with self-governing autonomy, much as they have now under the Palestinian Authority. They should have their own elections, parliament, and the ability to govern their affairs.
But they shouldn’t have an independent state, Katzover said.
The Epoch Times asked him about the “outposts,” small settlements scattered across the area that many Arabs see as intrusive or illegal.
The land ownership situation in Judea and Samaria is much more complicated than outsiders generally recognize, he said.
He discussed the area in terms of dunams, each representing 1,000 square meters. The West Bank contains around 6 million dunams.
About a quarter of the area, 1.5 million dunams, was owned privately by Palestinians before 1967, he said.
Israel treats that as untouchable by Jews, he said. If Jews settle there illegally, they are ejected by the military. Katzover said he agrees with that policy.
The rest of the land, though, was Jordanian public land before 1967, and Jordan withdrew from the area. That land, he said, Jews have every right to settle on.
A system that emerged during the unsuccessful Oslo Accord peace process in the 1990s, and altered after its failure, divides the West Bank into three zones: lands where only Arabs may live, lands where only Jews may live, and lands where either can live.
Jews are often accused of forming illegal settlements in the West Bank, but few note, Katzover said, an opposing phenomenon. He said that Palestinians now own 3 million of the area’s total 6 million dunams.
“Where did they get that?” he said. They got it, according to him, through donations from European nations and illegal settlements.
The Epoch Times asked Katzover about recent instances of Jewish violence against Arabs in Judea and Samaria.
On Aug. 15, about 100 masked Jews entered the Arab village of Jit, west of Nablus (called Shechem, in Hebrew) in Samaria. They torched cars, set buildings on fire, and killed one Palestinian.
After a delay, the IDF intervened and stopped it. Three adults and a juvenile were arrested, and the adults were later charged and held.
Katzover said settlers are frustrated by the IDF’s failure to address low-level aggression by Palestinians against Jews, including “stone-throwing, blocking roads, Molotov cocktails, taking out trees and orchards.”
“Some people are taking the law into their own hands,” Katzover said. “They’re saying, if the police and army are not doing the job, they will do it. I personally don’t think this is right.
“It’s more harmful to the Jewish settlement project than any deterrence it might make against the Arabs doing whatever they’re doing.”
Meanwhile, he said, the Palestinians benefit from worldwide headlines on it, reaping the propaganda value.
“The Arabs are purposely exaggerating or magnifying these actions with world support,” he said. “They’re making it look like all Jewish settlements, the people there, are acting in this manner. It’s totally far from reality.”
Other West Bank leaders, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, publicly distanced themselves from the attack.
“The rioters tonight in Jit have nothing to do with the settlements and the settlers,” he said in a social media post. “They are criminals who should be dealt with by the enforcement authorities with the full severity of the law.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of his governing coalition also distanced themselves.
Katzover said he doesn’t think denying a Palestinian state in the West Bank is a problem.
“There was never, for one second in history, a Palestinian state,” he said. “The whole history of the Jewish people started in these areas.”
