The mayor of one of the biggest settlements in the West Bank has belied the stereotype of “settler image” by speaking out strongly against Israel’s security wall.
Oded Revivi, a lawyer serving his third term in charge of the settlement of Efrat, made the comments as a group of international Jewish journalists toured parts of the West Bank and met Danny Tirza, the architect of the separation wall.
Mr Revivi also called for an end to the so-called “price tag” violence in the region, referring to attacks against Palestinians that are said to emanate from fundamentalist Jews.
The mayor is a hugely popular political figure in the area, urbane and charming with fluent colloquial English. He is also chief foreign envoy of the Yesha council, the umbrella group representing all the West Bank settlements.
Efrat is a 35-year-old settlement and is deliberately not protected by any part of the security fence. Mr Revivi, though a member of Likud, is a strong believer in coexistence with the town’s Palestinian neighbours.
And this is not just talk. Every week, he discloses, three volunteers from the nearby Palestinian village of Husan, once a hotbed of anti-Jewish violence, come to Efrat to teach Arabic to children and adults.
As a result of negotiations dating from 2013, building permits in the territories were first frozen and then gradually issued in response to each batch of Palestinian prisoner releases. The effect on Efrat has been dramatic: 60 per cent population growth, leading to more schools being built, as well as residential homes.
“Many of the newcomers are second-generation Efratis who previously could not find housing here,” Mr Revivi says, adding that property in Efrat is now more expensive than in some less well-off Jerusalem neighbourhoods. But there are also English-speaking incomers, so numerous that he notes with amusement that it is possible to be born, live and die in Efrat without speaking a word of Hebrew.
Perhaps it is they who give the town and its mayor its “soft” liberal outlook. But the mayor, sadly acknowledging that “conflict is the most permanent resident in the region”, is nevertheless defiant in his view that the settlements are “there to stay” and a future peace deal will have to take that into account.
Just the same, he says, “fences [and walls] create a sense of security, but they don’t actually provide security, and there are no shortcuts when you are trying to build relationships with people”.
One suspects he may have political ambitions beyond Efrat when he says politicians in Israel “are not giving good enough answers” to the many questions people have about life in the West Bank. He tells the JC that he believes the security wall should be dismantled altogether, and that “bridges” should be built, not walls.
The majority of settler leaders condemn the “price tag” attacks, he says, but adds: “We asked the security forces to put the people responsible behind bars, but they say they don’t have a clue who is doing it. Whoever it is needs to be caught and sent for trial.”
On the face of it, Mr Revivi has little in common with Danny Tirza, a retired IDF colonel who served both Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak before becoming “wall man”, responsible not just for planning and placing the security wall itself, but also new roads and checkpoints.
Col Tirza’s unenviable job included asking for checkpoint buildings to be designed with an open flap in the roof, so that any suicide bombing blast would detonate upwards and outwards, saving the lives of those still inside the structure.
And yet even he admits: “I don’t regard the wall as a permanent structure”. He points upwards to the top of the nine-metre high stone slabs which form the security wall near the Rachel’s Tomb checkpoint, outside Bethlehem.
“You see those circular holes at the top? We call those the ‘holes of hope’. They are there so that, as soon as the decision is taken to dismantle the wall, cranes can move in and hook each segment away, and we put the holes there precisely in order to make it easier for them to be removed.”
