“What they believe,” he said, referring to the Palestinians, “is that this land belongs to nobody. Whoever took it, that’s whose land it is. We took it and now it’s ours. They know that the Jews were here before they were. And now the Jews are back and they are moving along.”

His confidence is the fruit of a long, systematic effort to set facts on the ground. Most Israelis couldn’t care less about this effort, until stories about settler violence started making international headlines. As often happens with unseemly phenomena, by the time they reach the general public, it can mean only one thing: it is already too late.

After October 7, the Israeli military had to allocate more resources to the war in Gaza. The settler movement saw a vacuum, and immediately began claiming territory that just a day earlier was considered off-limits. When they saw that no one was standing in their way, there began a race to break the status quo. Settlers cleared and claimed as much territory as they could. Meanwhile, their representatives in government pushed for policy changes that will make any future attempts at reversal practically impossible to implement.

There was a point when the state of Israel was still the primary force in the West Bank, but most of the region is now beyond the purview of the military. The settlers cut down trees, clear stones, dig roads, pave them, erect signage and the military either stands by helpless, or participates in their efforts. The settlers know the names of each village and its leaders. They can point out which houses are up for grabs, which have to be abandoned in order to be taken, where and when the army is blind.

This is not about ideology, but a system already set in stone. And these are no longer “pioneering citizens” of the Israeli state, but chiefs forging semi-sovereign tribes in a state of their own.

Any attempt to reverse the situation in the West Bank will be met with rebellion. The settlers will never again allow a withdrawal like the 2005 Gaza disengagement. It is their very own “never forget.” Last time they let themselves be hoisted off the dunes of Gaza, but this time there are many who will not only die, but kill for their hilltops. They will fire, not at the military, but at the Palestinians. Either the state will bend to their will, or blood will breed more chaos, stopping any planned withdrawal and accelerating instead the displacement of the Palestinians.

If the first Intifada yielded Oslo, and with it the Palestinian Authority and the division of territories against the backdrop of a two-state solution, whatever comes next will dissolve the PA and blur that division. Each side will see it as an existential war: the Palestinians will fight to salvage the last drops of an already dead political horizon, the settlers to keep decades of labor from going to waste, and the state of Israel to convince everyone, including itself, that it still has a say.

“Wayne Gretzky had a saying,” the settler told me back on the hilltop, perhaps nodding to my Canadian roots. “You gotta skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is now. And the only part of society that is moving anywhere is us.”

He paused for a moment and smiled. “Look at where we were ten years ago, where we are now, and think about where we’re going to be in twenty years.”