Are Jewish settler families now less ideologically committed to their cause?
As we drove into the car park of the Gan HaShlosha National Park, nestled at the foot of the rugged Gilboa Mountains, on Monday, 1 October, the sticker on the back of the car in front said it all. The sticker, which showed Jordan, the West Bank and parts of Syria as integral parts of Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel), was one of many on the hundreds of vehicles in the car park sporting orange ribbons and admonitions to the Israeli government not to give up on lands considered by the settler community and supporters to have been vested in the Jewish people by God. Tens of thousands of national religious and Orthodox of every stripe take the opportunity afforded under religious prescriptions to travel the country in the interim days of the Succot holiday – one of the few festivals in which this is allowed. The importance of the presence of so many settlers in a park in Israel proper- situated just north of the West Bank – on Monday lay in their absence from a major operation by various sett
