The Teenagers Pushing Israel to the Right

“Come as fast as you can,” wrote Yair Greenberg, 18, and his brother Yotam, 17, in a text message to their friends on February 1. The police had just arrived to evacuate Amona, the unauthorized settlement in the West Bank where the Greenbergs grew up, after the Israeli High Court ruled that it was built on private Palestinian land.

The call to protest—issued by many others at Amona that day—lit up cell phones across Israel and the West Bank settlements as word of the impending evacuation spread. Hundreds of Orthodox Jewish teenagers, mostly boys, poured into Amona, an outpost of about 300 people, climbing the shrubby hill in the wind and rain after police closed the roads.

Many of them had been to Amona in the weeks prior to support the embattled outpost—but also to carouse out of sight of their parents. One night in December when an evacuation seemed imminent (before the settlers reached a deal with the government that would