“Call me Yakov,” the burly, red-bearded settler told the Palestinian villagers who lived in his shadow. They should, it was understood, consider him their mukhtar, their chief, mayor and sheriff.
It was only after he was singled out for sanctions by the US government last week that they learned his real name: Yitzhak Levi Filant.
On paper, Filant is merely the security coordinator (ravshatz) of the Yitzhar settlement, perched on a West Bank hilltop south of Nablus overlooking a string of ancient Palestinian villages strung out on the steep slopes below.
However, with the frequent and arbitrary use of force, he has made himself a warlord of the whole Jabal Salman valley. He has stood out from a phalanx of brutal settler bosses to earn himself the title of “specially designated national” from the US treasury and state department, for “malign activities outside the scope of his authority” – blacklisted and banned from receiving funds from Americans.
The citation against him last month mentioned an incident in February this year when “he led a group of armed settlers to set up roadblocks and conduct patrols to pursue and attack Palestinians in their lands and forcefully expel them from their lands”.
This was just a single sample drawn from a regular pattern of intimidation which has continued up to the imposition of sanctions on 28 August. A week earlier, armed men had fired teargas into the football field of Burin high school while children were playing.
“We haven’t come here for more than a week because we are afraid the children will get injured. We can’t take responsibility for that,” said Ghassan Najjar, the head of an agricultural cooperative, who also helped with the football training.
Najjar was speaking near a low stone wall at the back of the pitch, watched intently by armed men in a concrete observation post 100 metres up the hillside.
He said it was impossible to tell if they were regular troops from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) or settlers in uniform. Since 7 October, when a surprise Hamas attack killed 1,200 Israelis and the Gaza war started, the distinction has blurred.
Reservists such as Filant were called back into duty and he has recruited young male settlers to form what is known locally as “Yakov’s army”. Yitzhar’s religious school, or yeshiva, is known for teaching Jewish militancy, and was closed for more than a year in 2014 on the grounds it served as the base for attacks on Palestinians.
On the afternoon of 18 June, that militia descended on Burin and went on a rampage, attacking anyone they found out on the street.
“I could see people running away and first I thought it was the army, then I saw the men attacking us were naked from the waist up and had their T-shirts around their heads to hide their faces,” Najjar recalled. “They set fire to a car, and attacked the driver, and they attacked the grocery store here.”
IDF soldiers did arrive in the village not long after the attack began but did not stop it, he alleged. Quite the opposite.
“They didn’t make the settlers go away. They started shooting rubber bullets, and stun grenades and teargas at the people in the village, at the Palestinians,” he said.
Everyone in the area has a story about “Yakov” and his men. His white pickup truck with yellow flashing lights and antennas on its roof is a frequent and feared sight. He and his men set up impromptu checkpoints between villages and are accused of roughing up drivers and stealing their money.
In March last year, Idris and Amala Khalifeh had just done their shopping for Ramadan and got in their son’s car with his wife and daughter when they were attacked by a gang of settlers from Yitzhar who smashed the windows with an axe, hit Idris with a rock and squirted pepper spray at the passengers.
His son managed to reverse abruptly and flee the attack but their car was intercepted and chased by Filant himself, who the Khalifehs said fired a shot through the rear window.
“The only reason nobody was hit was that the women’s faces were burning from the pepper spray and they were crouched down in their seats protecting our granddaughter,” Amala said.
At harvest time, the settlers routinely stop the villagers reaching their olive trees and have, on occasion, set fire to the hillside groves.
According to Najjar and another local man, the settlers set trees alight in early August and Filant prevented the village fire truck from reaching the blaze for crucial and costly minutes before the army arrived with a military fire engine. Significant losses resulted.
Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organisation which monitors the area, said it had “documented incidents of violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers and security forces throughout the years, including dozens of incidents involving Filant”.
The administration of the Yitzhar settlement did not respond to emails seeking comment, and neither did the IDF. The Samaria Regional Council, which represents settlements in the northern part of the West Bank, issued a statement rejecting the allegations against Filant and complaining that the sanctions would impose hardships on his family.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he viewed with “utmost severity” the US sanctions on Filant and a group called Hashomer Yosh, which provides guards for illegal settler outposts on the West Bank. The Biden decision was also lambasted by US Republicans such as Senator Marco Rubio, who said: “Israel has a functioning judicial system that is fully capable of prosecuting crimes committed within its borders.”
In the occupied West Bank, whatever judicial system exists is erratic, dependent on what area is involved and whether the victims and perpetrators are Israeli or Palestinians. In practice, the soldiers defer to Filant, the villagers said.
When a local man threatened to complain about his activities to the IDF district liaison office (DCO), “Yakov” reportedly told him: “I am the DCO, I am the Shabak [the security agency], I am the police, I am the army. I am all of them. I am all the world.”
Ziv Stahl, the head of Yesh Din, said: “What happens on the ground is that the security coordinator becomes more of a commander of the soldiers, and not the other way around, as it’s supposed to be.”
Stahl said she thought that the US sanctions on Filant and Hashomer Yosh, combined with scrutiny from the international court of justice and the international criminal court since the Gaza war began, has finally begun to threaten the impunity of settlers such as Filant.
“I think with the Israeli public too, there’s a change because there’s much more talk about settler violence,” she argued. “The issue is more on the agenda of the media.”
A letter from Yesh Din to the IDF command demanding Filant be fired has so far been ignored, however.
In Burin, Najjar is sceptical about any dramatic change for the better in the lives of the local villages.
“Do you think this will stop him?” he asked. “I don’t want Yakov punished. I want the Americans to push the government to stop him. And then, even if we stop this Yakov, there are a lot of other Yakovs in the settlements.”
