Majd al-Krum's Protests Forced Settlers to Withdraw, but Villagers Fear More Provocations After the Election

Residents of Majd al-Krum in Israel have forced settlers to dismantle an outpost through peaceful protests. But the village's Palestinian residents fear further provocations after Tuesday's national election.

It began in mid-September. A couple of weeks earlier, Israeli settlers from the occupied West Bank had begun building an outpost on village land at al-Rus, a pine-covered hilltop above Majd al-Krum — one of the first such attempts on this side of the Green Line, the boundary between Israel and the occupied West Bank.

The young settlers said they were there to graze livestock with a Jewish National Fund (JNF) permit. But there was no livestock, noted Hussein Mannaa, 50, a lawyer and member of the town's Popular Committee. Within a week, the camp had grown from a handful of people to between 25 and 30, with a kitchen, a toilet, a water line and electricity.

Villagers rushed to the scene, so police closed the road to the site. Yet local Palestinians came in droves nonetheless, climbing the steep hill by horse, off-road vehicle and on foot after the road to al-Rus was closed.

Anas Sgaier, a 21-year-old law student and youth organiser, made the nearly hour-long climb. “I remember one moment: I'm going up and it's hard for me to breathe,” he said. “And to my right, I saw an older woman, in her 80s, with her husband, walking up 50 minutes, just to show her presence.”

After almost a week of peaceful protests that drew hundreds of Palestinians from Majd al-Krum and across the region every day, the JNF ordered the settler tents removed. By September 16, the site was cleared out.

Mannaa said the popular struggle alongside the legal track is what bore fruit. Young people drove the protests. “Bring your coffee and come,” Sgaier beckoned in social media posts. “We're only going up to drink coffee, because that's our land.”

Not only people from Majd al-Krum came: residents arrived from Deir al-Asad, al-Bi'na, Sakhnin and Arrabeh, and even from the Naqab, Mannaa recalled. Some left-leaning residents of nearby Jewish communities also turned up. “There was this incredible solidarity,” said Husein Khalaily, 50, an economic consultant.

Villagers, however, fear al-Rus was a prelude to what may come next. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is campaigning on a promise to “Judaise” the Galilee, where Palestinian citizens of Israel make up a large proportion of the population, and says he will repeat there “the revolution we carried out in [the occupied West Bank]”.

“The al-Rus experiment is like a pilot experiment: ‘come on, let's see the reaction’,” Khalaily said. Smotrich came to the village and said clearly, “I want to Judaise the Galilee.” In Khalaily's words: “Back in the day, they used to say, ‘we want to develop the Galilee.’ Today, the language is clear.”

On August 27, Smotrich posted a plan promising one million more Jews and 40 new Jewish communities in the Galilee and al-Naqab. His party then released an AI-generated video in which a West Bank Palestinian frantically warns a relative in the Galilee that “the Jews are coming”.

On September 18, police announced the arrest of a 32-year-old Majd al-Krum resident over alleged contact with a Lebanese agent. Smotrich seized on it, saying Galilee residents were “in the atmosphere of October 6”, a reference to the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Mannaa believes the provocations are intended to lead people into a confrontation, because chaos benefits those behind them. On the eve of the election, villagers fear al-Rus was a foretaste of that attempt.