At the intersection of a winding West Bank road and a nondescript dirt track, set at the bottom of a steep hill a few kilometers east of Modiin Illit, stands a sign pointing the way to Sde Ephraim.
After perhaps overshooting the access road and doing a questionable three-point turn a dozen meters down the road, a driver can turn up that hill, approach the gate and, if given permission to enter, proceed slowly and with great caution up an even narrower and more treacherous dirt path with a precipitous drop just centimeters from its edge.
Presuming no great calamity transpires, the visitor will level out at the top of the incline to be greeted by vistas of the rolling hills of the Samarian uplands to the north and east, and the coastal plain of Israel to the west, finding themselves in the freshly legalized settlement outpost of Sde Ephraim.
The homestead is a tiny cluster of farm buildings, several makeshift residences and a communal center, but it was nevertheless one of five illegal West Bank outposts to be retroactively legalized by the cabinet at the end of June.
The legalization was celebrated in early July in an inauguration ceremony for the outpost attended by three cabinet ministers, Settlements and National Missions Minister Orit Strock, Housing and Construction Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf and Energy Minister Eli Cohen, who all lauded what they described as the tenacity of Sde Ephraim’s settlers.
Although the outpost has now been approved by the cabinet it still lacks a zoning masterplan and construction permits for the buildings currently at the site, but they will likely be issued in the coming months.
Just five young families live on this lonely hilltop (although several more are expected to arrive in the coming months), which is not connected to the electricity grid, has no security fence, and is surrounded on all sides by Palestinian villages.
Of those families, two are not currently at the outpost as the husbands are both on IDF reserve duty.
So how, and why, would young men and women with small children come to live at the summit of a remote hilltop, with no permanent dwellings, no amenities, and scant security, and without legal authorization to do so?
The Times of Israel visited Sde Ephraim following the cabinet’s legalization of the outpost and spoke to one of its founders and permanent residents to find out.
An outpost is born
Tamar Ahituv, 29, lives in Sde Ephraim with her husband Amiel and their two young children, including a baby a few months old.
Sitting on the wooden porch in her rudimentary three-room home overlooking central Israel, Ahituv recounted that the spot for Sde Ephraim was found in 2018 by Eitan Ze’ev, a settler activist who had already established several other illegal outposts with his wife Leah — the granddaughter of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the founding fathers of the settlement movement.
Ze’ev’s modus operandi, Ahituv said, was to go to an uninhabited place in the West Bank with a herd of goats, create an outpost, bring in families, and once it was settled and established move on to create a new outpost elsewhere.
Sde Ephraim was established on state land, West Bank land which is not registered as being privately owned by anyone. Such outposts are nevertheless illegal if they do not have state approval — which Sde Ephraim lacked until this June — and they are not zoned for residential purposes and have no planning permission for construction.
Eitan Ze’ev began by planting olive trees on the hillsides below the site where he would eventually establish Sde Ephraim. He obtained the assistance of three young men to guard the trees in shifts during the day, one of whom was Ahituv’s brother.
Repeated protests by Palestinians from surrounding villages ensued against the presence of the settlers and their nascent outpost, resulting in clashes with Israeli security forces.
Residents of the nearby village of Ras Karkar maintain that land on the ridge on which Sde Ephraim was built belongs to various families in the village who they say have cultivated it for generations.
Palestinians living close to illegal outposts often view them as a threat to their ability to access and use land in the West Bank, be it private or state land, while in general seeing them as a serious obstacle to their goal of sovereignty in the territory.
Despite the difficulties for the fledgling outpost, the young Israeli men protecting the new olive grove persisted, and in the spring of 2019 the Ze’ev family moved to the hilltop with their four young children and lived there in what is known as a “residential truck” — essentially a long truck furnished inside with the trappings of a domestic residence.
The benefit of such a contraption, Ahituv explained, is that should the Defense Ministry’s Civil Administration order the residents to leave the site, the truck dwellers could merely move their mobile home a few meters away.
The Civil Administration would then need to secure a fresh order to remove the truck from its new site, she said, making the task of removing the settlers from the outpost more difficult.
Building homes on the ground, however basic they may be, always exposes a new outpost to the possibility of demolition, so the residential truck idea was key to getting Sde Ephraim up and running.
“It’s a clever trick for how to start up an outpost,” said Ahituv.
Ze’ev and his family brought with them a herd of goats which, Ahituv said, “is the best way to take control of land,” by virtue of the wide grazing area on which they can be pastured, which helps lay claim to unused land in the West Bank.
“With the help of the goats, we control 2,000 dunams [500 acres] of land by grazing them here,” she said. Establishing farming outposts has indeed become a primary tactic of such activists to take control of far larger swaths of West Bank land than is afforded by merely residential settlements.
During the first years of the outpost’s existence, it was the target of several apparently lone-wolf Palestinian terror attacks. In one incident, however, an alleged assailant who entered the outpost in the middle of the night and reportedly tried to break into the Ze’evs’ home was killed by Eitan Ze’ev and a guard, in murky circumstances which were never investigated by the Israeli authorities.
The IDF began posting two soldiers to protect the illegal outpost at night following these attacks.
The army provides security for some wildcat settlements and their residents, since its mission is to protect the lives of Israelis wherever they are regardless of whether they are there legally.
Other state institutions, including some government ministries and regional municipal councils in the West Bank, also assist the establishment of such outposts in different ways.
Although security was bolstered by the presence of IDF soldiers, attacks against Sde Ephraim continued, including one in January 2023 caught on security camera in which a Palestinian man entered the outpost by car early one morning armed with a knife and rocks and rushed at one of the resident’s, who shot and killed him.
And several attacks have been carried out since October 7, the latest in June, when armed Palestinian terrorists set fire to one of the trucks serving as the home of a newly married couple. The couple was out at the time, and no residents were hurt.
Settling in
The Ahituvs moved to Sde Ephraim in early 2021, becoming the second family at the outpost. Like the Ze’ev family, they made use of a residential truck as a home, although a small building was also built for several young single men residing in the outpost.
When they moved in, with Tamar heavily pregnant with her first child, there was even less infrastructure than there is now, including no permanent water supply.
Currently Sde Ephraim’s main source of electricity is solar panels. These are backed up by a generator to ensure the provision of basic needs at night, as well as to power the security camera system that is Sde Ephraim’s principal form of protection against attack.
Asked whether she was afraid to go and live at the outpost under such circumstances, Ahituv gave an answer typical of such activists.
“There is never a good time to come. There is always a reason not to come. If you are strong enough in your ‘yes’ then you can deal with all the obstacles in your way. If it burns inside you, then you deal with the problems,” she said.
And she went on to explain why going to live on such an isolated hilltop was so important to her.
“Settling the land burns inside me out of love for the Land of Israel itself, and also because I see how much the Arabs are taking over so quickly. I can’t sit on the sidelines and just hope and pray. I need to act.”
She also contended that the Palestinian reaction to Sde Ephraim had been so fierce because the outpost “simply cuts off the Arab plan for territorial contiguity” in the region.
Ahituv was referring to Palestinian expansion from Area B of the West Bank — where the Palestinian Authority has civil but not security control — into Area C, where Israel has full security and civilian control and where all the Israeli settlements and outposts are located alongside some 200,000 Palestinians.
The settlement movement and the Israeli right wing accuse the Palestinian Authority of conducting a coordinated campaign to take control of Area C, which comprises some 60 percent of all land in the West Bank, through increased construction. Organizations opposed to Israeli control of the territory say, however, that such construction is a result of the natural expansion of Palestinian population centers in Areas B and C rather than a coordinated plan.
The Oslo II treaty, which brought Areas A, B and C into being, stipulates that Area C will be “gradually transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction” under the Oslo process, but that never happened.
The settler movement sees Area C as a core component of the biblical Land of Israel, and territory over which Israel must assert full control in order to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Connected to the land
Ahituv also said that for her, living on a wild, undeveloped hilltop, and being close to nature and part of an agricultural initiative, was key to connecting with the land.
“With the help of livestock you can best connect to the soil,” she said.
“Moses, King David, the tribes of Israel; our great leaders were shepherds. In the blood of Jews, everything is connected to nature, to your livestock which you use to carry out [the biblically mandated Temple] sacrifices, and when you go to bring the first fruits [Temple] offerings,” continued Ahituv. “Our nature is to raise livestock and grow produce.”
Raising and pasturing livestock is also a means of asserting ownership over the land, she said.
“When you have a flock you’re speaking their [the Palestinians’] language to a certain extent. You are showing them who’s boss. You don’t enter the territory of someone else’s flock — that’s our pasture land,” she said.
This town ain’t big enough…
Despite Ahituv’s idyllic portrayal of life in a hilltop outpost and insistence that Israel should control all of the West Bank, the presence of the local Palestinian population cannot be ignored.
This is manifested in the surrounding Palestinian villages and hamlets, as well as the acknowledged need to ensure security from possible attacks, the presence of IDF soldiers at the outpost every night, and a military watchtower in the middle of the outpost.
Ahituv sees Palestinians as implacably opposed to any Jewish presence in any part of Israel and the West Bank, on both religious and nationalistic grounds.
“In their blood they don’t want us here. They will always hate Jews. Ishmael always hates Yaakov and Yitzhak,” she said, in reference to the figures seen as the biblical forefathers of the Jewish and Arab nations. “There is no dialogue of give and take and then they’ll be satisfied. They will always want more. They want it all.”
She argued that Israel’s response to Palestinian terrorism has not been strong enough to deter violence.
Asked what could happen if Israel one day fully succeeded in halting Palestinian terrorism, and if it would then be possible for Israelis and Palestinians to live alongside each other, Ahituv answered simply.
“To tell the honest truth, I believe that the entire land will be ours and that they won’t be here,” she said. “One way or another. There’s no lack of countries for them to go to.”
She asserted that the Palestinians remain in the West Bank “because they have the best conditions,” which Israel “enables” and which “encourages” the continued growth of the Palestinian population.
“So they shouldn’t have good conditions… They really have enough countries to go to. If they want a developed place, [they can go to] even the US and London. Do a relocation.”
Asked if Israel should encourage this migration, Ahituv said the Palestinians “should flee.”
Until that happens, Israel should impose tough conditions on the Palestinian population, she went on.
“If you are totally secure in your position then you won’t be moved from it. ‘If you want to live under my conditions, these are my conditions — that you should not have good conditions,’” said Ahituv.
“Entry for work in Israel? Never. No one should employ them. Why should we support them? Murderers come out of them. Don’t buy from their factories, dry up their economy.”
A vision for the future?
Ahituv’s ultimate vision for herself and her family is, she said, to replicate the model of Sde Ephraim’s founders, Eitan and Leah Ze’ev, and build more and more outposts.
“God willing, after this spot is settled, we have a dream to move onwards and establish our own farm with a flock, like Eitan and Leah,” she said.
“There are plans to build thousands of housing units here. That’s great, brilliant, people should settle here, but we have done our task here and will move on,” she added.
“In this land there is so much to inherit, there is so much to do. Thank God, we have founded one place. Now, onwards, there are more places.”
