“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.
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.
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”.
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.”
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.”
A letter from Yesh Din to the IDF command demanding Filant be fired has so far been ignored.
the Guardian
