[MUSIC PLAYING]
SIMON OSTROVSKY: We've seen a lot of settlers, and we've
seen their settlements and their homes, but we really
haven't got the Palestinian perspective at all.
And apparently, the Palestinians are often
attacked by settlers.
So we've come to this town, Asira al-Qibliya, to get their
perspective on things.
This is the end of the road in this Palestinian town, so
these houses here are the ones that are closest to the Jewish
settlement up the hill.
And they face the brunt of the attacks when the settlers come
down throwing stones.
And the owners of some of these houses are telling us
that the Israeli army doesn't do anything about it.
MALE SPEAKER 1: [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
SIMON OSTROVSKY: He showed us videos he'd taken himself of
the settler attacks where you could see youths come down
from the settlement above the village to throw stones.
MALE SPEAKER 1: [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
The worst thing about it was that they were accompanied by
the Israeli army, who were supposedly there to separate
the two groups but were in fact doing nothing to stop the
settler attack.
MALE SPEAKER 1: [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
A few weeks after we visited Asira al-Qibliya, the settler
attacks resumed.
But this time, two Palestinian villagers who were throwing
stones and approaching Jewish youths were shot by the
settlers with live ammunition during two separate attacks.
Both times, the Israeli army did nothing to
restrain the settlers.
Fortunately though, both men survived.
MALE SPEAKER 1: [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
SIMON OSTROVSKY: The situation was obviously very tense and
very dangerous, but this wasn't the only place under a
fair bit of pressure.
The Migron settlement is one of the few Jewish outposts
that have received clear-cut court orders to be totally
dismantled.
This is Migron, an illegal outpost, and Israel has
ordered all of this to be demolished in a few months.
So it's got a bit of a Deliverance vibe going on, not
so much because there's a lot of hillbillies out here but
they're about to flood the valley.
Migron has seen some of its structures knocked down by the
Israeli authorities before, but this time, Israel's high
court has ordered that the entire place be destroyed
because it was illegally built on Palestinian land.
It's a very unusual ruling, and most Palestinians see it
as a one-off rather than a reversal of settlement policy
in the West Bank.
I spoke to one of the residents to find out how she
felt about the impending demolition.
Do you sympathize with Palestinian people who also
see their houses get demolished under Israeli
bulldozers?
FEMALE SPEAKER 1: I see it from another point of view.
I think it's a different story.
Here, nobody killed anyone.
Israel destroying a house for Palestinians
is not for no reason.
Most of the times, it's because they did
a very wrong thing.
People killing people and other things.
The story here is that the families did nothing.
It's not that I don't feel sorry.
I do.
But I more feel sorry about my own people that sits under
attacks every day, and we see it all the time.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: So right now must be a really difficult
time for the residents of Migron because the high court
of Israel has stated pretty finally that by August, they
want all of this to be demolished.
Do you know what you're going to do?
FEMALE SPEAKER 1: We believe that we won't be in the
street, and we work with the government to find a solution
for this hard situation.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: It's easy to get bogged down in the legal
details of the status of each individual settlement, but the
important thing to remember is that while some sites face the
chopping block, the total number of settlers in the West
Bank has grown from just 12,000 in the early '80s to
over 300,000 today.
And that figure doesn't even include a further 200,000
Israelis living in East Jerusalem, according to the
activist group Peace Now.
Many have begun asking themselves if it's even
possible for a Palestinian state to emerge from a
territory crisscrossed with Jewish settlements.
A couple of miles down the road from Migron just across a
small valley, we saw a shack with a couple of teenagers
poking their head out of the door to see who we were.
It turned out that the shantytown of [INAUDIBLE]
was yet another unauthorized outpost.
The place isn't marked on any map, but already it's been
demolished and rebuilt a few times over.
These kids were without any adult supervision.
They told me they've named the place Strength of Zion.
Wow, it's really basic.
There's not even a floor.
It's just the grass here.
You've got holes in the roof.
It's rained today.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: This has been totally incredible.
This is the freshest, most radical outpost that we've
visited so far.
The crazy thing about it is that the more you talk to
these guys, the more somebody tells you that God has given
them this land, that there is no two ways around it.
You start to believe them and get to the point where you
think a peaceful settlement is almost impossible.
With so many settlements being built up on the future
territory of the Palestinian state, you start to wonder if
Israel is working to make the two-state solution a reality,
or if it's just telling the international community what
it wants to hear.
The more Israelis move to the West Bank, the less viable a
Palestinian state seems to be.
So the real question becomes whether Palestinians will end
up citizens of a greater Israel with equal rights or if
they face a permanent regime of occupation.