Was Othniel Assis asking too much? All he wanted was to grow some cherry tomatoes for his wife’s salad and to milk his goat.

          In the heart of the West Bank, he discovers a hilltop with a small field, shifts a large container there, acquires a generator, and establishes a non-profit association.

          A path is constructed to the hilltop, and one winter night five trailers are unloaded near the farm. When the local army commander arrives at the site, tempers flare. The Israeli Civil Administration for the occupied territories claims that there is no permit to install the trailers, but there is no permit to remove them either.

          Thus the outpost Maale Hermesh C is established.

          Years go by and the hilltop blossoms: more trailers, a playground, organic fields, and a synagogue; families and singles, farmers and teachers, religious and secular, a hot-headed cosmetician, and two brothers, former kibbutz members.

          One day an American journalist happens by, and his report leads to an international crisis: how will the Defense Minister get the American pressure off his back? How will Captain Omer, who receives conflicting messages from his superiors and who is driven mad by the settlers, react? Will the born-again-Jew, Gabriel Nehushtan, find some solace for his wounded soul? What has the economic meltdown in the United States got to do with the illegal outpost? And what are the mysterious Japanese looking for in the neighboring Palestinian village?

     The Hilltop is a sprawling, daring novel, which dismantles the extreme and absurd reality in the Israeli-occupied West Bank: Catch 22 meets 21st century Israel. Violence, greed, lust for power and the blurring of values, but also a burning ideological passion.

          As always, Gavron charts a path between styles and genres, between realism and satire, between being earnest and wildly funny.

          Gavron wrote parts of The Hilltop in a cabin in a settlement in the West Bank.