Israeli and foreign volunteers assist a Palestinian family harvesting their olives near the Kiryat Arba settlement next to the West Bank city of Hebron. (Mamoun Wazwaz, Maan Images)

Midhat Abu Karsh, a teacher in this Palestinian village, got down on the floor to demonstrate how he had been tied to a telephone pole by militant Jewish settlers, a rope around his neck and leg, then kicked by a settler as Israeli soldiers stood nearby.

"I told the soldiers he was coming to hit me, but they let him reach me," Abu Karsh said of the incident in July, which was caught on video by Israeli peace activists and posted on the Web site of the Israeli daily Haaretz.

After the kick, the soldiers pushed the settler away. They later untied Abu Karsh, who had been beaten after he was seized, and treated his injuries before he was taken to a hospital in a Palestinian ambulance.

The incident at the unauthorized settlement outpost of Asa'el in the southern West Bank followed an attempt by Abu Karsh and relatives to work on their farmland nearby. Settlers wielding sticks drove the Palestinians away and seized Abu Karsh, who limps because of a birth defect and could not run. They accused him of setting fire to their land, he said.

The assault on the teacher was part of what Israeli army officials say is a marked increase in violence in recent months by radical settlers in areas around their outposts, many of them makeshift trailer encampments built without government authorization.

"There is a rise in Jewish violence in Judea and Samaria," Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni, the chief of the army's Central Command, told Haaretz in an interview published Friday, referring to the West Bank by its biblical names. "In the past only a few dozen were involved. Today it involves a few hundred people. That is a very significant change."

A recent UN report cited 222 incidents of settler violence in the first half of 2008, compared to 291 in all of 2007.

There are about 100 unauthorized outposts scattered on the hilltops of the West Bank, offshoots of established settlements, where a new generation of young settlers radicalized by years of violent conflict are staking a claim to new territory.

	Related Stories
	The peace of make believe How I became a target for Israel's Jewish terrorists My occupied Utopia

The resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians and the prospect that some of the outposts could be removed by the government have sparked a new activist approach among the younger militants, who have embarked on what they call a "price tag" policy in response to army attempts to dismantle their encampments, and in retaliation for Palestinian attacks, such as stone-throwing or shootings.

"This is a spontaneous reaction of the young people who live on the hilltops and feel that their property and homes are being threatened by the government, and they are organizing in ways to say we are here and don't take us for granted," said David Ha'Ivri, a veteran activist who handles relations with foreign media for the Samaria settlement council.

Ha'Ivri condemned attacks on soldiers but said settlers were responding in kind to Palestinian violence.

In one incident last month, an attempt by soldiers to confiscate construction material at an unauthorized outpost ended in a violent confrontation, and an Israeli army officer suffered a broken hand while another was bitten by a dog handled by a settler.

To read the full article please visit The Chicago Tribune.