“If one of us was to throw a stone at a soldier, you would put the entire city under curfew. Soldiers would have entered the homes at night and removed the men. You would have forced us to reveal who threw the stone, even if it was a child,” says Hussam Hassan, owner of a pastry and baklava store in downtown Nablus. “But when the settlers act this way to soldiers, the soldiers are afraid of them. If that’s what they do to soldiers, think of what they do to us.”
Hassan expresses the feelings of many Palestinian residents of the Nablus district who are well-acquainted with the Yitzhar settlement. Yitzhar was established in 1983 as a Nahal [paramilitary] settlement; it was first called “Rogan,” a kind of joke at the expense of Ronald Reagan, who called for a settlement freeze just the day before it was built. Over the years, families settled the place, and after the evacuation of Joseph’s tomb in Nablus at the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, the Od Yosef Chai (Joseph Still Lives) rabbinical college was also transferred to Yitzhar. Numerous of those who call themselves the “hilltop youths” live in Yitzhar and several outposts have been established within its boundaries.