BBC’s tense encounter with sanctioned Israeli settler whereas filming in West Financial institution

Mud was rising on the monitor. It hung within the sizzling noon air because the white jeep got here in the direction of us. The motive force was lower than a minute away.

“I feel it is Moshe Sharvit,” stated Gil Alexander, 72, a religious non secular Jew who tries to guard Palestinian shepherds from intimidation by Jewish settlers.

Over the past yr we have been documenting his work with shepherds within the northern Jordan Valley, within the Israeli-occupied West Financial institution.

The person approaching us was positioned below sanctions by Britain and the EU final yr after they stated he had used “bodily aggression, threatened households at gunpoint, and destroyed property as a part of a focused and calculated effort to displace Palestinian communities”.

In a case reported by our colleagues at BBC Eye Investigates final yr, a Palestinian grandmother alleged that Moshe Sharvit had pressured her to depart her household dwelling in October 2023. Ayesha Shtayyeh additionally stated he pointed a gun at her head and threatened to kill her.

“We have been right here for 50 years…What have I ever carried out to him?” she requested when BBC Eye interviewed her.

She stated her household’s troubles started after Moshe Sharvit established a so-called ‘outpost’- a settlement that’s unlawful below each Israeli and worldwide regulation – chasing away the household’s sheep, damaging property and continuously threatening them. The alleged incident with the gun was the ultimate straw.

Moshe Sharvit didn’t reply to BBC Eye’s requests for a response to Ayesha’s account.

Again on the mountainside, the person accused of this violence stopped his automobile and approached us. Nodding in the direction of Gil Alexander he requested us: “Are you aware he is a really harmful man?”

When our translator defined to Moshe Sharvit we had been from the BBC he stated: “Ah the BBC… nice lovers of Israel…” He went on to name us unhealthy and harmful folks.

Addressing our translator he stated: “So, do you perceive that they are the people who find themselves most harmful to the State of Israel?”

Then he phoned the police, asking them to return to the scene. When he wasn’t calling the police he filmed us filming him.

Moshe Sharvit and Gil Alexander characterize starkly completely different visions of Israel’s future.

Whereas Moshe Sharvit believes the entire West Financial institution – which settlers and the Israeli authorities name Judea and Samaria – got by God to the Jews.

On this he’s supported by senior ministers within the authorities, together with the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and the Minister of Public Safety, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Each males are settlers and leaders of far-right ultranationalist events.

Smotrich has stated Gaza will probably be “completely destroyed” and that its folks will probably be “completely despairing, understanding that there is no such thing as a hope and nothing to search for in Gaza and will probably be in search of relocation to start a brand new life in different places”.

The ‘different locations’ he envisages are overseas nations. Ben-Gvir, who’s accountable for the police, has convictions for inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, depends on the assist of the far-right settler motion to maintain his authorities in energy.

He criticised the sanctions imposed on Moshe Sharvit and different settlers, saying his authorities seen the transfer “with nice severity”. US sanctions in opposition to Moshe Sharvit had been dropped when President Donald Trump got here to energy.

The UN’s high court docket dominated final yr that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is in opposition to worldwide regulation and that each one settlement exercise is illegitimate.

Israel rejects this and argues that settlements are mandatory for safety, citing deadly assaults by Palestinian gunmen on settlers, such because the killing of three folks final January within the West Financial institution.

Settlement enlargement is anathema to Gil Alexander. He considers himself a Zionist, however inside the present borders of Israel.

These are the frontiers that existed earlier than it seized the West Financial institution within the 1967 Center East conflict, after neighbouring Arab nations launched a shock assault.

He’s a part of a community known as the Jordan Valley Activists – Moshe Sharvit calls them “anarchists” – providing solidarity, and dealing for peaceable co-existence with the Palestinians.

“What they [the settlers] need to see occur,” Gil Alexander instructed us, “[is] that it is going to be an space fully freed from Arabs. It is not Moshe. It is all of the folks above him who despatched him right here. Which means from the highest”.

Moshe Sharvit’s want to have the Jordan Valley empty of Palestinians is shared by the chief of the regional council, a government-supported physique, David Elhayani, who has visited the sanctioned settler.

In his air conditioned workplace about 15km (9 miles) from Moshe Sharvit’s settler outpost he instructed us “the notion of settler violence is an invention of the anarchist, excessive left meant to hurt the settlement picture”.

As for the way forward for the Palestinians, he was emphatic. They need to go to neighbouring Jordan.

“This nation must be freed from Arabs. It is the one approach. It is a international curiosity. Why international? As a result of the minute there will not be Arabs right here it is going to be a Jewish nation for the Jews who will not have to harm one another, there will not be battle, there will not be something.”

Gil Alexander and Moshe Sharvit have a historical past of antagonism. Throughout an altercation on a Palestinian farmer’s land in January 2023, Moshe Sharvit says Gil Alexander tried to grab his firearm from its holster.

Whereas chatting with our translator he produced a video of the incident on his telephone.

“You’ll be able to see Gil Alexander. Identical hat and glasses. That is me. Right here you see he grabs my gun.”

Gil Alexander says he was appearing in self-defence after Moshe Sharvit had grabbed his strolling stick, and the telephone of his good friend and violently pushing it.

He says he feared Moshe Sharvit was going to make use of the weapon. Consequently, Moshe Sharvit obtained a restraining order which forbids Gil Alexander from being inside 2.5km (1.5 miles) of his farm.

The police have charged Gil Alexander with unlawful possession of a weapon (the one he allegedly tried to take from Moshe Sharvit) and assault. The difficulty will probably be thought-about by the Israeli courts.

Moshe Sharvit himself is the topic of a restraining order forbidding him to method a Palestinian household residing close to his outpost for six months, since March this yr.

Throughout our encounter the settler claimed that Gil Alexander had breached his restraining order by taking us to the excessive floor overlooking the valley. The peace activist instructed us later that he had mistakenly strayed simply over half a kilometre inside the realm of the order.

Though Moshe Sharvit’s settlement is illegitimate, even below Israeli regulation, it has not been eliminated.

Human rights organisations and quite a few eyewitnesses testify that the Israeli military and police regularly stand by whereas settlers assault Palestinian villages.

The violence has escalated sharply for the reason that 7 October 2023 Hamas assault on Israel by which about 1,200 folks had been killed and 251 kidnapped, and which triggered the Gaza conflict.

In accordance with a report issued by the UN workplace for Humanitarian Affairs there have been 1,804 assaults by settlers in opposition to Palestinians within the interval January 2024 to March 2025.

The Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din (There’s Regulation), reported that solely 3% of complaints made in opposition to settlers resulted in a conviction. In six days final month – from 22 to twenty-eight April – the UN recorded 14 incidents involving settlers that left 36 Palestinians injured.

Within the tense environment on the mountainside, and eager to keep away from any escalation, we determined to depart.

As we walked away, Moshe Sharvit went to his jeep and drove forward of us, stopping the place the monitor turned down the mountain. Our approach out was blocked. There was no-one we may enchantment to other than the person stopping us from leaving.

Once more, he phoned the police asking them to return. Gil Alexander phoned the police and his lawyer. Our staff was apprehensive that extra settlers would come.

Then one thing stunning occurred. I advised to Moshe Sharvit that he ought to conform to be interviewed. After a short pause, he stated: “Convey the digital camera.”

What adopted was much less an interview, than a sequence of declarations. He was doing the work of God, he stated.

Why did native Bedouin shepherds say they had been very afraid of him? I requested.

“No, that could be a lie. They’re telling tales so the world will assume we’re loopy. It is not true. It is all lies which are constructed on lies of dozens of years of mendacity…” he stated.

“The Arabs, for the reason that formation of the nation and earlier than – all of the previous 77 years they have been preoccupied with harming the folks of Israel, harming the land of Israel and inflicting the nation of Israel to be depressing and pitiful. However they do not perceive that the more durable they fight, the Lion will wake from his sleep and inside sooner or later we’ll finish this story.”

He repeated the analogy of the Lion later within the interview saying, in what appeared like ominous phrases, that the Palestinians had been “pushing the lion so laborious into the nook that there will probably be no selection left however to complete this story”.

“7 October was small. Sooner or later it will be huge.”

As for peaceable co-existence corresponding to Gil Alexander helps, he stated there was “no such factor as peace with enemies who attempt to destroy you”.

Moshe Sharvit’s brother Harel was killed combating in Gaza in December 2023.

His world is the pastureland, the stony hills of the Jordan Valley, his sheep and cattle, the mattress and breakfast he has opened.

He produced a shiny video, replete with a backing monitor of American nation music, to advertise his enterprise.

He spoke with contempt for the British sanctions in opposition to him. They had been a brand new form of antisemitism, he claimed.

“The minute somebody tries to harm me I get stronger. My spirit…I obtain energies, my spirit continues on its mission, I proceed advancing ahead and planting roots deep into the land of Israel. I am not bothered by Britain or America or anybody.”

Then he drove away. We had been free to maneuver on. Later as we had been having lunch in a café about 15km (9 miles) away, a policeman appeared, in search of Gil Alexander.

He went with the police officer for questioning. After about an hour he returned, telling us he had been ordered to not enter the Jordan Valley for 2 weeks. He plans to lodge his personal grievance in opposition to Moshe Sharvit over the incident.

We went to Gil Alexander’s dwelling in a kibbutz inside Israel that overlooks the Valley. Gunmen from the Palestinian metropolis of Jenin fired on the kibbutz two years in the past.

Gil Alexander isn’t a pacifist. If he’s attacked by Hamas or every other group, he’ll defend himself.

He stated: “A son of our buddies, two months in the past he was killed right here by a terrorist. He was a soldier within the reserves, 46 years outdated with six youngsters. He volunteered for the reserves to guard me.”

“If the military hadn’t been there, they’d have come right here. He was killed whereas defending me. And at present he’s buried subsequent to my two sons.”

However Gil Alexander appeared weary as we sat ingesting tea amid the intense crimson flowers of his well-tended backyard, and the fluttering yellow flags that symbolise Israel’s hostages held in Gaza.

He spoke of a beloved nephew killed combating in Lebanon in an earlier conflict.

Did he not, I puzzled, on the age of 72, take into consideration retiring from the battle and having fun with his backyard? He laughed.

There was no likelihood of that. After two of his sons took their very own lives – one was within the military, the opposite was about to enter the navy – he had discovered a function in working for what he calls the “humanitarian” beliefs of Judaism.

“After the tragedies of my sons, if I do not discover which means in life, I am going to go loopy… And the issues I do, are issues I imagine in. And these are issues I additionally obtained from my father who was within the French underground throughout World Warfare Two and fought for French liberation however was in opposition to any kind of occupation and stated, ‘Occupation is Occupation.'”

Two days after our encounter with Moshe Sharvit, a lone lady peace activist filmed him banging on the window of her automobile and rocking the car.

The girl is clearly frightened by the intimidation. Moshe Sharvit acts as if he has nothing to concern.

With extra reporting by Oren Rosenfeld and Nik Millard.