After the disaster in the village of Tel: The IDF is putting order into hiking in Judea and Samaria – and the field is in an uproar

At 5:30 on Friday morning, July 24, a group of dozens of Israelis set out on a hiking trail more than fifteen kilometers long, from Har Bracha towards Havat Gilad. The hike was organized by the "David and Ahikam Hikers" group. A few hours later, the route became the scene of a terror attack.

Major Yuval Ezra, 27, a battery commander in the Artillery Corps, was killed. With him, Binyahu Malet, 32, a member of the Havat Gilad standby squad, a father of two daughters, was killed. Four Palestinians, residents of the village of Tel, were also killed after one of the Palestinians snatched a weapon from one of the armed Israelis who were at the scene and fired at the Israelis.

The military investigation, presented on August 5, found failures in command, in the amount of forces, and in medical evacuation, and determined that the soldiers and security personnel acted bravely and prevented further casualties. It also determined something that has since become the center of the debate: the army knew in advance about the intention to hold the activity in areas A and B, did not approve it, and did not prevent it.

The army did not wait for the investigation to have its say. On July 26, just two days after the event, the Central Command's Territorial Defense officer, Lt. Col. Elitzur Trabelsi, published a document titled "Clarification of hiking coordination procedures in the Central Command area," addressed to "whom it may concern." The document opens by commemorating the two who fell and defines what happened near the village of Tel as a terror event.

Trabelsi writes in the document that entering area B, and certainly area A, without prior coordination and without appropriate security cover, endangers human lives. He adds that beyond the risk to the hikers themselves, such events often require the activation of security forces and their entry into a complex area under time and resource constraints, while exposing them to operational risks, as happened in the last event. It is further written that whoever did so without the required approval bears responsibility, and that entering area A without approval constitutes a criminal offense.

Alongside this, the document does not close the door. It determines that the Central Command sees importance in making heritage and history sites accessible throughout Judea and Samaria and acts consistently to allow visits to them, and lists as such the Tomb of Joseph, the site of the Seventy Elders, Solomon's Pools, and the Hasmonean Palaces in Jericho. For this purpose, it is written, there is an orderly coordination mechanism through the territorial defense officers in the divisions and brigades. Each request is examined according to the situation assessment, the threat level, and the operational capability at the requested time. Where it is possible to approve safely, an effort will be made to approve. Where it is not, it will not be approved, "and this decision must be respected."

This is a phrasing that both sides of the debate can read into what is convenient for them. From the hikers' point of view, the command recognizes the principle of Israeli movement in the area and commits to assisting it. From the critics' point of view, the document does not prohibit the activity but conditions it on coordination, meaning it transfers the decision to the local and changing discretion of commanders in the field.

Sarit Michaeli, who worked for many years at B'Tselem and is currently active in the field within the framework of protective presence groups, believes that the debate over procedures misses the point. "It's not a matter of years, it's a matter of decades," she says. "The idea of presence demonstration hikes, hikes in which settlers show Palestinians who is the landlord, is not new. What is new today is that these things are happening everywhere, and in very explosive places."

According to her, it is impossible to examine the event in Tel through its final moment. "You have to look at the whole background. To claim that a group of Israeli hikers who entered a Palestinian village armed is the victim, is like taking a magnifying glass and looking only at the last moment of the event." She emphasizes that there is no justification for violence and that the killing was unnecessary from all directions. "I think the killing of all the people was terrible, not just the Israelis. An officer, a standby squad member, and four Palestinian residents were killed as a result of an event that simply should not have happened."

Her main criticism is not directed at the hiking groups. "I don't have a common discourse with them. My argument is with the army and the authorities that allow these hikes, even though everyone sees that the idea is friction." She points to what she describes as asymmetry in the field. "Any Palestinian whose land a settler enters cannot even push him out. They also cannot turn to the police or the DCO, because they know it won't help." And against the claim that a hike is a hike regardless of where it arrives, she replies that the test is prior knowledge. "I can't say they predicted the results of Tel. But it is clear they should have known that something terrible could come of it."

In the hiking groups, they reject this description fundamentally. Shai Harlap is one of the three founders of the "Hargavim" group. He is a farmer and winery owner, from the settlers. His partners are Ben Zion Afarsimon from Givat Ronen, a foreman in a construction company, and Ofer Kellerman from Kidah, a civil engineer. The three have been hiking together every Friday since 2014, and once every two months they open a hike to the general public at no cost. Between fifty and seventy people arrive.

"We live here, the areas are close to us," says Harlap. "Most of the State of Israel does not hike here. There are beautiful ruins here, ancient trees, sheikh tombs, springs, water sources, long tunnels." He rejects the claim that the hikes are a provocation without hesitation. "I hike here, I live here. The fact that an Arab throws a stone at me or tells me don't enter my village, that's only in the State of Israel. I don't know another place in the world, and I have traveled the world, where you cannot hike in your own country."

To the question of whether they plan the routes with the thought of possible friction, he replies that the answer is simpler than it seems. "We don't go head-first into a wall. We ultimately come to hike. If trouble starts, we leave. We don't stay in the area." Regarding the relationship with the army, he refines a phrasing that has been recurring among hiking groups for years. "We notify the army. We don't ask the army, because the army often tells you we can't, we are busy. And also we don't want the army to start working for us."

Another veteran hiker in the area, who asked not to be identified, formulates the logic more openly. "We can hike throughout Judea and Samaria. Any place that Jews are allowed to enter, we enter. We walk everywhere, approach villages, do everything we are allowed to do. Does the fact that we hike there mean it's allowed to come and push us? We learned one thing: with the Palestinians, everything is a matter of demonstrating presence. When they feel like the landlords, they act like the landlords. But they are not the landlords. We are the landlords. This is our land, this is our country, and we are allowed to hike wherever we want."

This perception is not new and is not unique to "Hargavim." In an article published in "Kol Yehudi" in April 2017, under the headline "Conquered the Land by Foot," the goal of the hiking group that was at the event at Havat Gilad was presented in a sentence that has since become a slogan: "In the place where the hiker's foot steps, there the border will pass." In that interview, the group's founder explained that they coordinate and notify the army to make it easier for it to secure, but they do not ask for approval. According to him, following the activity, the army understands that certain areas must be secured, and later families can also arrive there. Nine years later, the Central Command document determines a mechanism opposite in its direction: it is not the army that adapts itself to movement in the field, but the movement is coordinated in advance with it.

Yesterday, the debate also turned into a legal demand. The legal advisor of the Association for Civil Rights, Adv. Oded Feller, sent a letter to Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, commander of the Central Command, demanding to immediately stop approving, securing, and accompanying the entry of Israelis into Palestinian localities, their agricultural lands, and areas adjacent to residential houses. The letter relies on the military commander's duties by virtue of the Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention, and on the ruling that determined that the military commander may consider only two considerations: the security interest and the needs of the local population. According to the claim, ideological considerations or leisure activity do not fall into this category. Another focus of criticism in the letter is the allocation of forces. When the army allocates standby squads and territorial defense forces to secure initiative civilian activity, and simultaneously imposes restrictions on Palestinian residents, a situation is created, according to the Association, where the initiative belongs to one side and the security price is imposed on the other.

On the Friday after the event, July 31, more than a hundred Israelis marched again towards Tel. The army closed the entrances to the village, and a Palestinian resident was wounded by gunfire.

Underneath the ideological debate runs a simpler calculation, which command elements have been talking about for a long time: the amount of forces. The sector is in a strained state of resources. Parallel to aggressive activity to thwart terror, to stand on the seam lines, and to the constant need to operate in the friction areas between Jews and Palestinians, the forces are also required to secure initiative civilian activity, including hikes. Each of the tasks is legitimate in itself, but together they make it difficult for the army to operate in the best way in each of them. This is the point that the Central Command document touches on when it writes about introducing forces into a complex area under time and resource constraints. In the event in Tel, the force that arrived entered a developing arena without a full picture of the situation, and this is one of the central conclusions of the investigation.

Between the two positions, there is no major factual dispute. Both sides agree that the hikes arrive near the villages and sometimes to them, and that the encounter with the residents is part of reality and not a rare malfunction. The dispute is about the meaning. One side sees this as the realization of freedom of movement in an area that Israel controls. The other side sees this as an initiative move whose results are known in advance to those who initiate it.

The question that the event in Tel left on the table is not who is right in the ideological debate, but who decides and according to what rule which hikes go on their way and which are stopped at the gate. The Central Command document gave a partial answer, according to which the decision lies with the territorial defense officer in the brigade, according to a point-in-time situation assessment. To what extent this mechanism will be implemented in practice, and how the groups that have been used to notifying and not asking for years will react to it, is what will determine if the event in Tel was a turning point or just another station.