Rachel Braslavi, a native of West Virginia, says she moved to her new home so her family would have more space and more of a sense of community. But she faces bigger questions than she might with a typical home purchase. Their community is the Israeli settlement of Karnei Shomron, located within the occupied West Bank.

Asked if she sees her settler family as an obstacle to peace, Braslavi replied: “No. No. Really not. I feel we have a right to be here. And I feel the Palestinians have a right to be here.”

“On this earth?” I asked.

“Not this house,” said Braslavi. “But I mean, in that area.”

This settlement, like hundreds of others, is carved into Palestinian land, surrounded by a security fence. The border separating the West Bank from Israel is called the Green Line. It was drawn up as part of the armistice agreement following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which broke out when the modern state of Israel was formed.

But after Israel’s stunning military success in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel took more land, occupied Palestinian territories, and Israeli citizens began building settlements.

Today, more than 700,000 Israelis live in these communities, which the United Nations calls illegal. They are scattered throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem. About 15% of the immigrants are Americans.

But Rachel Braslavi doesn’t see herself as living on Palestinian land: “No. I don’t. I think some of the first places that Jews arrived in biblical times were Judea and Samaria. So to me, this is part of our indigenous right to be here.”

I asked, “How much of your decision to move here to the settlement was cost of living versus ideology?”

“I came from America when I was 20 years old to live in Israel,” she said. “And I kind of thought of that move as my contribution to the Jewish people in our homeland. It didn’t matter where I lived in Israel.

“And my husband grew up here and he saw it differently. He really thought that in order to contribute in a meaningful way, you had to go over the green line and establish, like, the facts on the ground.”

What does ‘facts on the ground’ mean?

“Only the strengthening of the existing Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria,” replied Braslavi.

“On the West Bank?

“That.”

The immigrant population has grown by more than 200 percent since 2000. The Israeli government encourages these moves, paying the army to guard them and funding public services like buses and schools.

Judith Segaloff moved to Karnei Shomron seven years ago from Detroit and says she could afford a bigger house here than she would have on the other side of the Green Line. She took us on a tour. “Across the street is our mall,” she said. “We have an ice cream shop. This is where our sushi shop is.”

I asked, “Do you have friends or family who don’t agree with you living in a settlement?”

“Sure,” Segaloff said. “Some of them won’t come to visit.”

Segaloff says she’s excited about plans to expand the resort just up the road. She believes that the Israeli presence offers security.

“But it’s also a contested place,” I said, “a place that’s considered occupied territory.”

“To some,” Segaloff said.

“By the international community.”

“Well, they’re going to have to get over it,” Segaloff said. “You can’t live among people who want to kill you. They’ll just have to move and let us in.”

But not far away, on the other side of the checkpoints and the security barrier, we met a Palestinian Saher Eid, who lives in the West Bank village where his great-grandfather was born.

Asked about the settlers’ claims that – historically, biblically – the land is theirs, Eid said: “We have documents to prove that we own this land, which we have been farming forever. Ask the settlers where are they from?”

He and his wife Tamador, a high school science teacher, invited us to tea. They say they are most concerned about the increase in violence by Israeli settlers, encouraged The increasingly right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Since October 7 last year, according to the UN, there have been more than 1,400 attacks by extremist settlers on Palestinians or their property.

The Bajrams are also frustrated that the fence and checkpoints around the settlement have cut them off from their own olive trees. Saher said his freedom was taken away: “He stole my land. He stole my olives. He stole everything.”

I asked, “Is there room for introspection here? Do you ever think, ‘Maybe we’re not the best partners to try to find a way to peace’?”

“We believe there would be widespread support for peace if there was a Palestinian state without settlements,” Saher said.

The differences on this side of the security barrier are big. Revenues are a fraction of those in Israel, and Israel controls the water and much of the tax revenue.

Saher said that he would welcome an Israeli living in Tel Aviv into his home, but not a settler: “No, because he is a thief.”

Assaf Sharon, professor of political and legal philosophy at Tel Aviv Universityhe noted: “James Carville coined the phrase, ‘It’s the economy, dumbass.’ In Israel and Palestine, ‘Those are settlements, stupid.'”

As for the settlers who claim that they did not take anyone’s land, that no one lived there before them, Sharon said: “Well, of course, it was not done individually. Taking land does not mean you have a house. It can be pasture land for future construction. It can only be an area reserved for the self-determination of peoples.

“Settlers make a security argument, that Israel is safer with settlements,” I said.

“The security argument is completely bogus,” Sharon replied. “Settlements are not security assets, they are security burdenbecause the defense, the protection of the multitude of civilians, deep in the densely populated Palestinian territory, is a heck of a burden for the army.”

He added: “The best way to ensure Israel’s security is to partner with a state or state-like entity that has an interest in preventing exactly this type of hostile activity.”

David Makovsky, associate at Washington Institute for Near East Policyhe said: “We have ideologues on both sides of this equation who are determined to thwart any accommodation.”

In 2013, Makovski was part of a team trying to negotiate a peace agreement. That failed proposal, and two others, resulted in the Palestinians retaining about 95% of the West Bank.

But today, with an increasing number of settlements – blue dots on the map, some of which are far from the green line – it could be even more complicated to determine the borders in a two-state solution.

Negotiations have changed under Donald Trump, Makovsky said: “Until Trump, all US peace approaches were similar. Under Trump, working with Prime Minister Netanyahu, he doesn’t want to choose which deals will work and which won’t. So the prime minister is convinced the president that every single settlement is called Israel, which now creates the impossible situation that every Palestinian entity will be full of settlements.

Now settlers may have another influential ally in President-elect Trump’s nominee to be Israel’s next ambassador: Mike Huckabee, who has said he is open to annexing parts of the West Bank.

But there is a historical precedent for the evacuation of settlements. Almost 20 years ago, the Israeli government advocated that leaving Gaza was the path to peace.

According to Makovski, “2005 is for the settlers their Waterloo, their defeat.” Then Israel removed all 8,000 settlers from Gaza.

Then I profiled a 17-year-old girl who was forced to leave Gush Katif, her settlement in Gaza. Nineteen years later, the settlements are still headline news. Yes, that’s how it is in Israel, said Rachel Yechieli Gross. Today, she is a mother with three children and no longer lives in the settlement.

I asked, “The fact that as a teenager you left your home, your settlement, shows that settlements can be closed. Could this be a step towards peace?”

“After October 7I’m not so sure anymore, because I really believed there could be change,” Gross said. “But I don’t feel that anymore.”

Makovsky blamed the terrorist group Hamas, which he said “really led to the growth of the Israeli right. If people in Israel thought the Palestinian state was Costa Rica, they would line up to sign because they want to end the conflict.. They just want to be safe , but if they think the Palestinian state is a mini-Iran, you can’t find enough people in a phone booth.

In the West Bank, Rachel Braslavi and her family are just five of 700,000 Israeli settlers working to change what she calls “facts on the ground.”

“I wouldn’t leave willingly, because I’m raising my family here and I’ve built my dream home,” she said. “Why does the peace treaty have to be at my expense, to give up my home?”

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Story produced by Sari Aviv. Editor: Ed Givnish.

Seth Doane

Seth Doane has been an award-winning CBS News correspondent based in Rome, Italy since 2016. Doane has covered terrorist attacks and breaking news across Europe, traveled with Pope Francis as part of his Vatican coverage, and covered issues ranging from migration to climate change .