In 2015, Dov Morell participated in the infamous Jerusalem “hate wedding” where young settlers were filmed dancing with guns and knives, mocking the three members of the Dawabsheh family who had been killed in a recent Jewish terror attack in the West Bank.
Seven of the wedding participants, including Morell, were convicted of incitement to violence and terrorism. However, by the time the sentences were handed down in Jerusalem District Court this spring, Morell had undergone a dramatic transformation.
A former member of the “hilltop youth” – radical, often violent young settlers from illegal outposts – Morell had been no stranger to police cells in his youth. A month before the “hate wedding” video surfaced, in a rare move the Israel Police barred him from entering Jerusalem for six months. At the time he was a leading activist in the Return to the [Temple] Mount movement, whose members were identified with the far-right Kach movement founded by the late racist Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Now, though, he is a left-wing Meretz supporter, saying that after many years, he has come to the conclusion that he does not believe in God enough to hurt other people. Even the judges at his trial appeared stunned at the metamorphosis: he was ultimately given 200 hours community service, a lighter sentence than most of his codefendants.
That transformation, he says in an interview, was due to spending time in the United States and gradually becoming exposed to different views – especially through social media.
“I’m very radical. If I believe in something, I go with it until the end. It’s the same today,” says the 29-year-old master’s student in law, explaining how even now he feels much more comfortable talking to extremists on the right or left than centrists.
While he supports the pro-democracy protests taking place in Israel, he admits to feeling uncomfortable about the protesters presenting the Supreme Court as a champion of human rights, in light of injustices toward Palestinians but also its treatment of settlers during the 2005 disengagement from Gaza.
His criminal record has also affected his professional life. It prevented him from finding work as a student, he says, and he was not permitted to complete his law internship (a mandatory part of his bachelor’s degree) until after the verdict was announced.
Radicalization
Morell’s views may have shifted dramatically leftward, but the number of extremist Israeli settlers is on the rise. The UN humanitarian agency OCHA recorded 591 attacks by settlers against Palestinian people and property in the first six months of 2023 alone. This comes after the number of attacks in 2022 was already the highest since the agency began keeping records in 2006. This data only includes information on attacks that resulted in bodily harm or property damage.
Often, only the most dramatic cases make the headlines, such as the settler riots in the Palestinian village of Hawara earlier this year that left one Palestinian dead and about 100 others injured. And last weekend, a group of hilltop youth entered the Palestinian village of Burqa and killed a 19-year-old Palestinian man, Qosai Jammal Mi’tan. One of the two suspects detained by the police, Elisha Yered, is an ex-spokesman for a far-right lawmaker from National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s extremist Otzma Yehudit party.
Morell says it is “surreal on a personal level” to see childhood friends in positions of power in the government. Yered, for instance, used to be a close friend. “It amuses me when the weekend news broadcast opens with Chanamel Dorfman [Itamar Ben-Gvir’s chief of staff], the kid I met when he was 13. Or Elisha Yered, who I met when he was 9, and who used to explain to me how to straighten nails with a rock. But after it amuses me, it scares me. Especially Ben-Gvir.” Morell says that while Ben-Gvir did not used to support police violence against Jewish left-wingers, that has now changed.
A combination of teenage rebellion and a radicalizing religious education system drove Morell to the hills as a young man.
He grew up in the Talmon settlement, west of Ramallah, to parents who immigrated from the United States for Zionist reasons. His parents did not support his radicalized views, though, and none of his younger siblings ended up like him. In fact, whenever he was detained by the police as a minor and told to call a parent, he would phone a friend who pretended to be his father.
According to Ami Pedahzur, a University of Haifa professor and scholar of the far right, Morell’s story fits the general profile of those who become hilltop youth. The mostly young men who join the movement represent a “mixture of those who are highly ideological and those who cannot find their place in a more conventional setting,” he says. Some of those who join are yeshiva school dropouts.
For Morell, his religious far-right ideology began in an elementary school known as a Talmud Torah. There, he was taught by extremist rabbis and learned songs praising Baruch Goldstein and the killing of Arabs. Goldstein, a Jewish settler, massacred 29 Palestinians at Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994.
The disengagement from Gaza in 2005, when settlers were evacuated by the Israeli army, was a formative moment for him, as it was for many settlers. He followed the news closely and tried to forcibly prevent the clearing of illegal West Bank outposts such as Amona. In order to be closer to the “action,” he later opted to study at a yeshiva in the illegal outpost of Yitzhar. It was here that he first defined himself as “anti-Zionist.”
Radical power
From there, the path to the hills was clear. It began with short visits to the outpost of Ramat Migron (where Yered lives), and then for longer stays. Run-ins with the law were common. He was convicted as a minor for pepper spraying a Palestinian and received numerous administrative detentions.
Violence against Palestinians was widespread, with limited army intervention. “Every time there was a terrorist attack or clearing of an outpost, everyone in Yitzhar would gather by the gate, go down to the intersection, throw rocks on Palestinian cars and sometimes go down to a faraway house in Burin, near Yitzhar, cut down trees, set fields alight, throw rocks,” he recounts. “It was a regular feature, and the army knew about it too.”
The youngsters would also take extensive security precautions to avoid getting caught by the Shin Bet security service, says Morell. Since they assumed that their cellphones were being bugged, if they wanted to coordinate an attack, they would write the details on a note and then burn it. They were also careful not to leave any forensic evidence in Arab villages (no urinating; no spitting) and refused to talk during investigations.
There seems to be less pressure to stop the hilltop youth from committing attacks on Palestinians under the current government, though. Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, links the extremists’ increasing attacks to the rise of Ben-Gvir – who has gone from being a thrice-convicted scourge of the police to their boss.
Magid says very few people in the 1990s used to pay attention to the hilltop youth, who were seen as wayward fringe figures living in the hills with their goats and illegally planted crops. “Now, all of a sudden they have an incredible amount of power, because they have a political figure who is basically allowing them to do [what they want] and making them more radical.”
These days, the people who were once being surveilled by the Shin Bet are no longer hiding. They are calling the shots from the Knesset, to the concern of left-wingers like Morell and many more.
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