Maya Rosen
Jewish Currents / August 19, 2024
Building on the successes of the movement of Jewish settlers a new ultra-right group is seeking to open yet another front for conquest.
On July 30th, in a matter of hours, Israel assassinated senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas’s political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, in attacks that regional experts have called an unprecedented escalation. “It’s crossing a red line,” Karim Makdisi, a professor of international politics at the American University of Beirut, told Jewish Currents. “And now there are bound to be responses from Lebanon and from Iran.” Despite these projections, however, many in Israel celebrated the news of the killings, with government ministers tweeting their joy and everyday citizens handing out sweets to passersby.
Since October 7th, the drive to war has been widespread within Israeli society—especially in the country’s north, where mayors and heads of local municipalities facing Hezbollah attacks have been demanding that Israel enter Lebanon, destroy its southern region, and occupy parts of the country as a means of ensuring security. Ministers and Members of Knesset have joined these exhortations, with MK Avigdor Lieberman arguing that “everything between the Litani [River] and Israel must be under the control of the IDF.” Such remarks make it clear that both war and occupation are firmly on the agenda as Israel expands its military operations toward Lebanon. Now, a new Israeli group is looking to push this extreme vision even further. Uri Tzafon, named for a biblical verse literally meaning “awaken, O North,” was founded in late March with the goal of demanding not only war and reoccupation but also Israeli civilian settlements in southern Lebanon. The group, which has amassed a following of several thousand, argues that settling Lebanon is both a pragmatic necessity—a way to “grant true and stable security to northern Israel,” according to its official WhatsApp channel—as well as part of a messianic quest to “reclaim” territory that falls within the biblical boundaries of Land of Israel. “The Israeli-Lebanese border is a ridiculous colonial border,” Eliyahu Ben Asher, a founding member of Uri Tzafon, told me, building on previous statements arguing that “what is called ‘southern Lebanon’ … is really and truly simply the northern Galilee.”
Uri Tzafon was founded in memory of Yisrael Socol, a 24 year-old Israeli soldier who was killed fighting in Gaza this January, and who, according to his family, dreamed not only of Jewish settlements in Gaza but also of settling in Lebanon himself. “Yisrael and I had a running joke between us that we would live in Lebanon,” Yaakov Socol, Yisrael’s brother, told Jewish Currents in an interview. “But the joke was always serious. It’s land that needs to be in our hands.” After Yisrael’s death, Amos Azaria—a professor who is active in the growing movement to re-establish Jewish settlements in Gaza—came to his shiva and spoke with the Socol family about how to realize Yisrael’s dream, conversations that resulted in the founding of Uri Tzafon. In the short months since its launch, the group has grown rapidly, with its official WhatsApp forums now boasting some 3,000 members from around the country. In these virtual spaces, leaders regularly share photos of explosions in northern Israel and Lebanon; detailed critiques of Israel’s supposedly-docile policy in the region; suggestions for Hebrew names with which to replace the names of existing Lebanese towns; and advertisements for future kayaking trips in southern Lebanon, featuring the words, “it’s not a dream; it’s reality.”
In addition to building this digital community, Uri Tzafon has also organized actions attempting to grow its presence on the ground. It has led postering campaigns in towns across northern Israel, where public spaces including playgrounds and bomb shelters are now adorned with signs calling for the settlement of Lebanon. On April 10th, Uri Tzafon held its first protest at a roadside outside of Kibbutz Alonim, where members rallied for settlements in southern Lebanon; from there, they drove an hour north and hiked Mount Meron, whose multiple lookout points made Lebanon visible. “We looked out at Lebanon. God willing, we will make it there soon,” they wrote on WhatsApp, alongside a picture of a smiling group at the top of the mountain. In the months since, dozens of Uri Tzafon members have repeatedly gathered at similar protests. At one such action, they used drones and balloons to send flyers to the Lebanese side of the border, bearing the words: “Caution! This is the Land of Israel that belongs to Jews. You must evacuate it immediately.” On another occasion, the group organized an overnight Shabbat retreat near the border for families ready to settle. “By physically approaching the border, we express our desire to settle southern Lebanon,” they wrote. These local actions laid the groundwork for the group to hold its largest-yet event in the form of a virtual conference in June, where Uri Tzafon leaders and guest lecturers addressed hundreds of attendees about the historical Jewish connection to Lebanon, Lebanon’s geopolitical context, Israel’s strategy at its northern border, and past models of successful settlement. The gathering, which received widespread coverage in mainstream Israeli press, put Uri Tzafon’s otherwise-marginal ideas on the map, and since then, the group’s mission of conquering and settling southern Lebanon has gained ground with some prominent figures, including former Member of Knesset Moshe Feiglin. Amiad Cohen, the CEO of the Herut Center (the Israeli branch of the Tikvah Fund that now operates independently), even spoke at the group’s conference as a military expert on the north—his Herut affiliation went unannounced—saying that Israel must take over Lebanese land because “the enemy must pay a price.”
It is tempting to dismiss Uri Tzafon as fringe. After all, even Israel’s far-right, ultra-nationalist ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir—proponents of war with Hezbollah as well as the military occupation of southern Lebanon—have not yet mentioned civilian settlements. And every policy expert I spoke with agreed that the chance that Israel would actually establish settlements in southern Lebanon is very low. Natasha Roth-Rowland, a scholar of the Israeli far right, explained that there simply isn’t the political will to advance settlements in Lebanon, especially when the Israeli military apparatus is so overstretched. And yet, experts warned me again and again that the movement to settle Lebanon ought not to be discounted lightly. “It’s easy to dismiss, because it’s so far removed from reality,” Makdisi told me. “But I don’t see this as fringe. It’s been in the political imagination forever, and it’s not going to go away.” Roth-Rowland agreed, noting that “there is a fairly well-established track record of even the most fringe parts of the movement of Jewish settlers becoming not so fringe over a period of decades or even years,” and pointing to the ways that the movement has succeeded in establishing and growing settlements, including, for example, the particularly violent one in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron. Many of the unauthorized outposts this movement has created have even been retroactively legalized, pointing to how, in Roth-Rowland’s words, “settlers have made political gains over the last several decades by outflanking the government from the right and forcing concessions.” In this context, experts noted that the mainstreaming of a group like Uri Tzafon could be more feasible than it first appears. “That’s how the settlement movement started,” said Jewish settlement historian Akiva Eldar. “They planted seeds, which grew into trees, which grew into a jungle.”
In Uri Tzafon’s worldview, the Israeli settlement of southern Lebanon will begin with a war with Hezbollah—which they view not as a last resort barring a diplomatic solution, but as the only reasonable path forward. “To make an agreement with an organization whose sole purpose is to destroy Israel … is to give them time to better plan our annihilation,” Doron Nir Zvi, a lawyer who works to advance settler land takeover in the West Bank and is involved with Uri Tzafon, told Jewish Currents. Experts noted that these arguments appeal to an Israeli public that increasingly views war as the only way to ensure its safety: “Just as they say, ‘patriotism is the refuge of a scoundrel,’ so security is the refuge of the settlers,” Eldar said. “It’s the weapon they use in order to say they will protect Israel.”
After defeating Hezbollah, Uri Tzafon insists, Israel must conquer territory in southern Lebanon. “True victory in the Middle East, and in general, is taking land,” Ben Asher, told me. At the conference in June, Cohen of the Herut Center also argued that land capture was “not ideological or idealistic, but rather pragmatic and very realistic.” To secure the captured land into the future, Uri Tzafon’s leaders say that Jewish settlements must be established in the region. “In every place that there isn’t settlement, at the end of the day, the military leaves,” Nir Zvi said. “And if the military leaves, a vacuum is created which the enemy enters.” In contrast, Ben Asher said, “if southern Lebanon becomes a Jewish settlement and an integral part of the State of Israel, that is when the Iranians will really think twice before starting another war.” Uri Tzafon is clear that expelling the region’s current residents is necessary for their vision to succeed because, as Ben Asher said at the conference, “there is really no way to logically and reasonably manage southern Lebanon with the existence of an enemy population.”
The emphasis on an overt policy of ethnic cleansing means that the most conspicuous model of Jewish settlement—the West Bank—is not Uri Tzafon’s primary blueprint. Ben Asher told me that the West Bank “is a weak model” because it “ignores a foundational geopolitical problem: the massive presence of the Arab population, which is something that settlement leaders haven’t really proposed a solution to. It’s a strategic blindspot.” Instead, he said, Uri Tzafon’s “golden model” for settlement in Lebanon is the Golan Heights—Syrian territory that Israel occupied and ethnically cleansed of much of its population following the 1967 Six-Day War, and which it has since successfully annexed. “The settlements in the Golan created peace and security through a mass exodus of the Syrian population,” Ben Asher said. “Now, the border with Syria has been quiet for 50 years.”
The Golan is such an attractive template for Uri Tzafon because it models how even seemingly impossible ideas can be mainstreamed through settler action—proof, in Nir Zvi’s words, that “settlements can change borders.” As the organization’s leaders pointed out in a WhatsApp message, the Golan was the “the most ‘audacious’ occupation the State of Israel has ever carried out” because it was outside the borders of even the British Mandate, and had been populated with hundreds of Syrian villages. But, Nir Zvi said, even in these circumstances, “a few people went up to the Golan Heights and founded [the settlement of] Merom Golan.” Nearly 15 years later, the Israeli government formally annexed the Golan Heights, and about four decades after that, United States President Donald Trump officially recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights (a position recently reaffirmed by the Biden administration). For Nir Zvi, this story highlights that “if you will it, it’s no dream,” quoting the famous maxim of political Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl. “You just need patience.”
While aspiring to replicate the Golan model, Uri Tzafon’s leaders are also gleaning insight from the broader history of Israeli success in conquering territory—particularly, insights about the impotence of the law in arguing with facts on the ground. For instance, as Nir Zvi pointed out at Uri Tzafon’s June conference, after Israel conquered the Galilee in 1948 or expanded its territory fourfold in 1967, “it’s not that it went smoothly at the UN.” However, he said, ultimately “the dogs barked, and then things moved on”—a history which teaches their movement not to “attribute too much importance to the legal aspect” as “it’s pretty much nonsense.” For more contemporary examples of legal impunity, Nir Zvi pointed to cases where the Israeli Supreme Court has allowed for new settlements in contentious areas of the West Bank when they were framed as being “security” necessities. Thus, he said, “the matter is solely dependent on us. If we designate southern Lebanon as a security settlement, then the legal path is much easier and more open.”
In making such seemingly-premature plans, Uri Tzafon is betting on the idea that the rising tide of settler power will lift their boat as well, and experts say the gamble may pay off. According to Asher Kaufman, a scholar of Israel’s relationship with Lebanon, following the First Lebanon War in the 1980s, there were prominent figures pushing Israel to settle in southern Lebanon, but “back then, the settler movement had little capacity to shape politics. Now they are the masters of the land, shaping government policy large and small.” In 1982, when the idea of settlements in Lebanon was first raised, there were only about 21,000 Israeli Jews living beyond the 1948 boundaries; today there are over 700,000 and counting. This growth, as well as in the newly ascendant movement to resettle Gaza, gives Uri Tzafon leaders a window of opportunity. As Socol told me, “since we started the movement and started to act, we’re increasingly seeing that together with talk of settlements in Gaza, settlements in Lebanon are also mentioned, even if as an aside. I think it’s tremendous growth.” Nir Zvi agreed, adding that “after October 7th, everyone understands that we have to push the enemy away and occupy his land, taking it away from him. And this means that conquering both Gaza, and Lebanon, is now possible.”
After Israel’s recent assassinations, tensions at the border with Lebanon have ratcheted up. For the tens of thousands displaced from northern Israel after October 7th, this means that a return to everyday life is not on the horizon. Avichai Stern, a supporter of Uri Tzafon and the mayor of Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s northernmost city, told Jewish Currents that the thousands of residents of his city are still spread out across hotels and temporary housing in 500 different towns across Israel. Roth-Rowland said that the settler movement has historically exploited such moments of turmoil to present people worried about long-term security with “their answer, which is always going to be to settle more territory, expand Israel’s areas of control, and expel more Arabs, whether they’re Lebanese or Palestinian.” Uri Tzafon is now reprising the same dynamic, with its members regularly refining talking points about how untenable Israel’s current approach is. “Bandaids won’t help,” one message in the WhatsApp group read after Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced in April that half of Hezbollah’s commanders had been killed. “Commanders die, but they can also be replaced.” “The ping pong with Hezbollah as a strategy on its own is a disaster,” another noted.
These diagnoses—which emphasize that killing individual militants changes nothing, that having rounds of fighting every few years doesn’t resolve underlying political conflicts, that the borders surrounding Israel come from a colonial history, and that the political echelon is offering no good answers—may at times agree with regional experts as well as disillusioned Israelis. But in the hands of Uri Tzafon, they are being used to build consensus for horrific violence, and absent any other long-term solution, experts worry that this vision might take hold. “When nobody else seems to have an answer for the concerns of people worried about increasing warfare on their doorstep, it creates an opening for this movement [because at least it] is actually paying attention,’” Roth-Rowland said. “It creates space for these very outlandish invasion and settlement proposals to become acceptable.” The group’s leaders told me they are already reaping the benefits of this political vacuum. “People aren’t used to hearing our idea,” Socol said. “But when we start talking with them, we see that they understand that it’s actually logical and correct.” Ben Asher agreed: “We’re offering an answer, and people are listening,” he said. As a result, he said, “the numbers needed to start a settlement? We have them.”
Maya Rosen is the Israel/Palestine fellow at Jewish Currents
