Offbeat Israel: Building Sukkahs in the West Bank
By Nathan Jeffay
There has been wide-scale building in the settlements this week. In some settlements, including most of the Etzion bloc which straddles the Green Line as well as some deep inside the West Bank such as Beth El, there has been almost one new unit built per family.
You probably figured it out. These are religious settlements and the structures being built aren’t permanent, but rather sukkahs — temporary huts — for the festival of Sukkot which begins tomorrow night.
The question is though, with so much media attention on settlement building, will some international journalist see people busily building in the West Bank and get the wrong idea? Stranger things have happened. When my parents moved in to their first home — many many miles from the West Bank — the neighbors, who had never met Jews before, welcomed them to the area. Asked if they were happy in the house, my parents replied that they were, though they hoped to build an extension.
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