Elegy and anthem for a Hilltop they can’t keep down

There is a crib standing in the open air on a hilltop in Samaria. Its slats are still intact. Inside it lie a fleece blanket, a tangle of electrical cord, an empty plastic jar, a lulav still in its case and a white pillow that someone slept on last night. Beside it stands a stroller with a lace shawl draped over the handle, a low wooden table built by hand, and a cardboard box filled with the broken remains of domestic odds and ends. A few meters away, a refrigerator stands upright in the brush with its doors taped shut, as if it were waiting for someone to come home and plug it back in. On a well-used couch dragged out into the dirt lies a small pile of siddurim and seforim with a tallit folded over them, as though the people who threw them there could not quite bring themselves to throw them any farther.

A few days ago, some sixty soldiers, police officers and Border Police, accompanied by ten Arab contractors and tractor drivers, came up to this hilltop outpost in a convoy of thirty vehicles, including armored vehicles, trucks and tractors, to destroy what a handful of Jewish teenagers had built with their own fingers and the sweat of their brows. The tractor demolished the OSB walls, which were held together by little more than string and stubbornness, and twisted the tin roofing into crumpled sheets. They punctured the mattresses, smashed the dressers, broke the refrigerators and hurled them out of the huts where two families lived with their new infants. They threatened to shoot the dog. When they were finished, they took some of the boys away under arrest and left the hill looking like the aftermath of a storm that had a grudge.

This is not the first time. It is not even the tenth. This is the twenty-fifth time that our own government has descended on this hilltop to flatten it. And yet, only hours after this desecration, four teenagers who had escaped into the hills to save their herd of goats from confiscation were already back at work. They were clearing debris, folding the recently torn blankets, salvaging what can be salvaged, and waiting for their friends to return from custody so they could rebuild v.26. I have spent decades studying what makes human beings resilient, and I have rarely seen anything like it.

It is worth asking why these young people keep coming back to this particular spot, to rebuild dozens of times, and why the state keeps coming back to destroy it. The answer is the same in both cases, and it is not an accident. The hilltops that these youth choose are precisely the places that, if left empty, provide territorial contiguity for a future Palestinian state. Every open ridge connects one Arab village to the next. Every empty hill becomes a link in a chain that, once completed, would place a hostile entity within rifle and rocket range of Ben Gurion Airport, the entire coastal plain, and the Jewish towns and roads of Judea and Samaria. The Hilltop Youth understand the map. They are not building vacation homes. They are standing in the gaps left by their confused elders.

Meanwhile, the other side is not waiting. The Salam Fayyad plan, which openly aimed to build a Palestinian state from the ground up by creating facts on the ground, is alive and well. Arab construction continues at breakneck speed along the edges of Area C, in exactly the locations that would sever Jewish communities from one another and position future attackers closer to our homes and highways. This is not a secret. Its architects have said so publicly. Regavim has documented it in detail, and both Regavim and Israel Hayom have reported on the steady emergence of what can only be described as a rising Palestinian army. Yet the same forces that arrived here this morning with sixty personnel and thirty vehicles are not dismantling that army. They are throwing Jewish refrigerators out of Jewish homes.

There is a word for what happened here Tuesday morning, and it is not law enforcement. It is chillul Hashem, a desecration of God's Name, carried out in full view of the nations and of our enemies. It is also an absurdity so complete that it borders on collective madness. Jewish police officers drove up a Jewish hill with Arab contractors and Arab tractor drivers in tow, and handed them the dirty job of tearing down Jewish homes.

We did not merely fail to stop our enemies. We hired them, escorted them and protected them while they did it. A nation that does this to itself is like a wounded animal tearing at its own flesh, mistaking its own body for the source of its pain. And from the villages on the surrounding hills, I have no doubt that our enemies watched with quiet satisfaction or exuberant glee as the Jews fought one another and cleared away with their own hands the very obstacles that stand between those villages and their double-forked plan to take the land and create a terror state that could make October 7 look like a rehearsal, G-d Forbid. Every outpost we demolish is a gift to the people who dream of looking down on the coastal plain from these ridges. We are giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and we are doing it at our own mortal expense.

I want to be absolutely clear about one thing. This is not an attack on our soldiers and police officers. These are wonderful men and women who put their lives on the line to defend this country every single day. They did not choose this mission. They are being ordered to carry out a despicable and suicidal policy that is beneath any Jews Jewish dignity, a policy that turns the defenders of Israel into the pitiful demolition crew of their own safety net. The disgrace belongs to those who give the orders, not to those forced to follow them and, for many, to suffer the shame.

Yes, these outposts are not legal. I do not pretend otherwise. But legality is a decision, not a law of nature, and a government that understood its own interests and obligations to its nation would make a different one. It would recognize that these teenagers, these farms and these outposts are doing for free what the state should be doing with its full strength. It would legalize them, support them, and redirect its bulldozers toward the real threat.

Why doesn't it? Because this government, which calls itself right wing, does not know who it is. In my clinical work, I see this pattern constantly. A person who has no solid sense of self organizes his behavior around the approval of others. He cannot hold onto his own position under pressure, so he sacrifices his own interests in order to appear reasonable to people who will never be satisfied. That is what we are watching on this hilltop. We are so desperate to look reasonable in the eyes of nations that wish us gone that we have lost the ability to recognize our own self interest. A nation that knew who it was would be far beyond slogans and election season posturing. It would see the existential danger of the "Palestine" being built around us, and it would act accordingly. Organizations like Regavim, the Hilltop Youth, the Hilltop Macabees, and the shepherding farms would be government approved, if not government funded.

Instead, the state chases after the goats and chickens of teenagers, the very chickens the Arab subcontractors tried to steal until those same teenagers stopped them with a roar. Instead, it sends armored vehicles against a crib.

As I write this, the light is breaking through heavy clouds over the valley, falling across splintered wood and torn roofing and the stubborn green of the terraced hills. The boys stop hauling boards and rebuilding the bulldozed stone walls, put on Tefilin, and get ready to daven the Mincha prayer. As I leave at sunset, these young pioneers and defenders of Israel are preparing to continue rebuilding into the night with flashlights.

The prophet Jeremiah promised this land something long before any government existed to break that promise: "Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin of Israel... Again you shall plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria." These teenagers believe him. Tomorrow, they will still be here, and so will the hill. The only question left is whether the State of Israel will ever decide to stand with them.

To share in the rebuilding of the Ura Yisrael outpost, please visit us here.

Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage and family therapist, lecturer, and author who studied with Dr. David Schnarch, creator of the differentiation-based Crucible Approach, from 1998 until Schnarch's death in 2020. He runs twelve-hour intensives for couples and has trained more than 150 senior therapists worldwide in the Crucible Approach. He also serves in the IDF reserves and volunteers as a Magen David Adom medic, with ZAKA, and on the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team. His website is DanielWinston.com.