MEVASSERET ADUMIM, West Bank. Her heart pounding, the 15-year-old girl with a long, honey-colored braid down her back scrambled down the steep hillside in the black of night, running from police who had swarmed in to evacuate her and others who had come to set up an illegal settlement outpost.
It was a scene that has become familiar in the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between youths determined to spread Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the police charged with stopping them.
Ayana and her comrades were the foot soldiers in a campaign launched by a splinter settler group to take over nine hilltops across the West Bank over Chanukah. Overall, there are some 100 illegal outposts across the West Bank.
This one, its supporters say, is meant to ensure neighboring Ma'ale Adumim, one of the largest settlements in the West Bank, is expanded into an area called E-1 ‹ a controversial swath of land many say cuts off the northern and southern parts of the West Bank.
If this land is annexed by Israel ‹ most Israelis expect Ma'ale Adumim, which is only a few miles from Jerusalem, to become part of Israel in a final-status agreement with the Palestinians ‹ Palestinians say their state could not be contiguous.
These settlement outposts have been ongoing thorns in the side of successive Israeli governments, which are under international pressure to dismantle them but often have lacked the political will to do so.
Although Foreign Minister Tzipi Linvi said recently that the government's commitment to remove the outposts is unshakable, Israeli human rights activists long have complained that settlers act with impunity in the West Bank.
"It's clear that if Palestinians seized land that was not theirs, they would not be allowed to stay for more than five minutes, but the approach to settler youth is very different," said Lior Yavne, director of research for Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group. "Basically the law enforcement system is nonexistent when it comes to handling repeated offenses related to settlers taking over land."
The youth who settle the outposts say they are not deterred by the illegality of their actions.
"There is a clear commandment to settle the Land of Israel according to the Torah. It has been ours since the time of Abraham, so we don't need permission," said David, 17, his kippah covered partially by a black wool hat.
"The police are not with us; they are against Torah and have forgotten the laws of Judaism," Ayana said before sitting down on a blanket with her friends, waiting until the police returned.
