‘I am the police, I am the army’: blacklisted settler’s rule in West Bank
The Palestinian village of Burin and the Israeli settlement of Yitzhar, January 2024
Julian Borger and Quique Kierszenbaum report in The Guardian on 9 September 2024:
“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.