As illegal settlements spread, the settlers' political power grew, which caused the Israeli government to shift on what was legal.
The settlers seeking a permanent home near the Palestinian city of Nablus, were part of the Gush Emunim "Bloc [of the] faithful," an Israeli messianic, right-wing activist movement committed to establishing Jewish settlements in what they call Samaria and Judea.
The current location of Elon Moreh (a contemporary picture is shown above) was established in February 1980, with the help of the Israeli government which declared the land Elon Moreh desired, to be "state land," "essential" for Israeli security.
The name Elon Moreh, is derived from the name of Abraham's altar location (Genesis 12:6). The settlement and its outposts dominate, Hass writes, "about half of [Deir el-Hatab's] 12,000 dunams (some 3,000 acres)."
Because the heavily armed and hostile Jewish settlers are living so close to the village of Deir el-Hatab, the Israeli army enforces strict access to farming areas, which includes many dunams of ancient olive trees.
Hass writes in Ha'aretz:
"Because of the proximity to the settlement, the village's farmers are not permitted to cultivate about 6,000 dunams of their land, nor are they permitted to walk there, graze flocks, rotate crops, plow, weed, watch birds or transmit their family's accumulated knowledge to the young generation. They may go there only two or three days a year to pick the olives that Allah made to sprout with his rain and that unknown Israelis did not manage to steal."
It is this militarily-enforced control over the daily lives of the Palestinian residents of Deir el-Hatib, a control driven by the religious zeal of the Orthodox Jews of the "Bloc of the Faithful," that Hass identifies as the embodiment of evil in Israel's occupation.
"Put everything together and you get another innovative technique from the producers of Israeli evil: How to murder human beings without using an explosive or a knife, how to empty them from within, how to steal from workers of the land the thing they hold most dear -- not only their livelihood and their children's future, but also the deeply-rooted relationship of love they have with their homeland."
Hass offers additional examples of Israel's "innovative techniques" of repression, and then concludes her column with these searing words:
"To keep our blood pressure down, we have not touched on the evil embodied in the killing of children by Israeli troops, the evil of Israel's collective disregard of the inevitable wrath that builds up with the burial of each bullet-riddled child, the evil that exists in the evasive wording imposed by so-called objective traditions of news reporting.
"Killing? Israeli soldiers shoot at Palestinian children because that is the job of soldiers who are sent to protect, with self-sacrifice, the colonialist enterprise and the benefits that it provides to the master nation. Is it any wonder that so few Israelis are emigrating abroad?"
President Barack Obama has responded to worldwide criticism of Israel's excessive military assault on Gaza's civilian population this summer. His words of condemnation were more forceful than those he used during the assault...
Certainly Obama's criticism of Israel was considerably stronger than the message from Obama's top military leader, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey. (below)
The General "went against the Obama administration's own line when he said Thursday that the Israeli military acted 'responsibly' and went to 'extraordinary lengths' to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties during Operation Protective Edge last summer."
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