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Quick note: I recorded what I thought was a fantastic episode of Know Your Enemy with the brilliant Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman. It’s long, but it was one of the most comprehensive conversations I’ve ever had on a podcast, covering a huge breadth of my work. Here’s the show description:

This episode begins by noting the proximity of two of the most significant events of the twentieth century, one archaeological, the other political: the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and the founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948. What do they have to do with each other? A lot, it turns out, at least when it comes to archaeology’s role in Israeli nationalism, from justifying their claim to “Judea and Samaria” to using the legal and bureaucratic aspects of protecting “heritage sites” as a way to seize territory to the draw for Christian Zionists of Israel’s supposed stewardship of “the Holy Land.” Throughout the conversation, we draw on our guest Jasper Nathaniel’s years of reporting on these matters, and especially his heroic work documenting the brutality of Israel against Palestinians.

I highly recommend listening to it in full if you want a crash course in what’s happening in the West Bank, and how we got here. Here it is on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

(Cover Image Credit: Zain JAAFAR / AFP via Getty Images)

Last month, I wrote about my stay in the West Bank village of Qusra. I’ve added a few videos and some commentary here that weren’t included in the original post:

I traveled southeast to Qusra, where settlers had recently stolen a Palestinian home on the peak of the highest hill and were using it as a launchpad for attacks on the village. In February, they beat two Israeli activists, including an elderly woman, nearly to death, cracking their skulls with clubs.

In March, they shot a Palestinian man dead and nearly stabbed his father to death. The surviving members of that family, strawberry farmers, have imprisoned themselves inside a cage to keep the settlers out.

I stayed with the shebab in another home on the stolen hill, where they kept a 24/7 watch. The attacks were constant. They went on all night. A pickup truck full of settlers arrived and unloaded a flatbed of large stones on us. They came with clubs and knives.

Eventually, the army arrived. Soldiers chatted with the attacking settlers, smoked cigarettes with them, before coming to the home and throwing four Palestinian men against the wall.

[Side note: I got a kick out of the soldier saying, “You’re a long way from home.” Yeah… you too buddy.]

They were there to investigate the settlers’ claims that the Palestinians had thrown rocks at them. They had no answer when I asked why the settlers were allowed to live in a stolen home and attack locals from it—but the stones allegedly thrown in response were treated as a matter of grave concern.

[In case you missed it, the soldier responds to my hypothetical about stealing a Palestinian’s home by saying, “If you’re Jewish, you can go and move wherever you want.”]

Nobody was abducted, fortunately, perhaps because an American journalist was sticking a camera in their faces. But the settlers returned minutes after the soldiers left, cutting the electricity, blacking out the home—including the security camera system—and attacking again, nearly scaling the wall and making it inside. Fortunately, we had an amateur electrician inside who MacGyvered a new power source.

The next day, we watched a settler grazing sheep just outside the home. “Those are my sheep,” one of the guys told me. The settler had stolen them. “That’s my land, my crops. And he’s living in my uncle’s home.” That night, settlers broke into another home on the hill and stole the doors and windows right out of the frames.

[Apropos of nothing, I love this video, taken the morning after the attack, which shows that, even through all this, boys will be boys:]

That was in early July. On Sunday, August 9, a huge mob of settlers surrounded the hillside home I’d been staying in, along with two neighboring ones, and began setting up an outpost, trapping the Palestinians inside. This video is taken from inside the home as the settlers gathered around it:

On Monday, my friend Andrey X, a journalist and activist, tried to reach the besieged homes. He was blocked by a combination of settlers and soldiers, who also blocked an ambulance trying to reach one of the homes to take a sick child to the hospital. Rather than describe his experience, you should just watch the two videos he published about it:

As it turns out, the main besieged home—the one I stayed in—belongs to an American citizen. While his family was trapped inside, he watched live security-camera footage from Ohio, 6,000 miles away.

By Wednesday, as the story started to break through, the IDF responded directly to one of Andrey’s posts to say that it was on top of the situation:

As did Ambassador Mike Huckabee:

In reality, the IDF completely failed to evacuate the settlers. Perhaps because they’re on the same team?

Here’s Elisha Yered, the settler activist who can always be counted on to expose the liberal Zionist fiction that the Israeli state takes the threat of settler violence seriously—and who, on the rare occasions when soldiers fail to move in lockstep with the settlers’ territorial ambitions, is the first to throw a very public tantrum:

So who’s telling the truth? Watch these videos of the soldiers and settlers together at the outpost and decide for yourself:

Praying for a peaceful resolution, I’m sure:

As the story began making international headlines, the White House leaked that it was “fuming” and that Trump was “shocked.” (Yawn. How many times did we hear that Biden was “fuming” at Netanyahu before shipping him another cargo load of 2,000-pound bombs?)

On Thursday, the IDF launched a massive military operation in Qusra, ostensibly to evacuate the settlers. Funny enough, the operation began by evicting several Palestinian families from their homes in the village itself—not on the besieged hill—and occupying those homes:

From there, soldiers evicted Palestinians from two of the three hillside homes—including the one I stayed in—and occupied those as well.

You might be thinking: ‘Great! The IDF has turned the village of Qusra into a base for its mission of evacuating the invading settlers. If this military excels at anything, it’s targeting civilians and forcing people from their homes. This shouldn’t take long at all.’

And yet. Here are settlers playing soccer outside one of the stolen homes while the IDF soldiers carry out their urgent mission to evacuate them by standing around and doing nothing:

By the way, if you need any more evidence that the IDF was acting—and emphasis on the word choice, acting—only because of the international media attention, look no further than Jalud, three kilometers south of Qusra. There, last month, settlers surrounded and laid siege to a Palestinian home just as they had in Qusra. This time, without the international media watching, the IDF and the settlers worked together to successfully expel the Palestinians from their home.

Anyway, with the IDF clearly having the Qusra situation under control, Ambassador Mike Huckabee returned to his primary job of running PR for Israel and its settler movement:

Here’s what Yisrael Ganz, the real settler invoked by Huckabee, had to say about the situation in Qusra:

“There is no place for individuals to take matters into their own hands and establish an outpost in someone’s backyard, even when dealing with an illegal home or an attempt to seize control of the land… We are leading, and will continue to lead, the Jewish communities… throughout Judea and Samaria with determination and responsibility, through an orderly and proper process. At the same time, I call on the Israeli government to cancel the Oslo Accords.”

So what exactly is “illegal” about the stolen Palestinian homes in Qusra? According to Ganz—who, during a December trip to D.C., said that “Israel has all the rights to do whatever we want to do in Judea and Samaria”—it seems to be the very fact that a Palestinian is living in the West Bank at all. But still, the “attempt to seize control of the land,” he says, should be carried out through an “orderly and proper process.”

You couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the Good Settler, Bad Settler dynamic: the feral, violent settlers attacking Palestinian communities and the settlers in suits lobbying in the Knesset all working toward the same end. Ganz would never get his hands dirty, but you can be sure that if the settlers remain on the hill in Qusra after the media attention fades, he’ll be leading the charge to authorize the outpost as a formal settlement. The violent settlers are, after all, the tip of the spear of the state-backed annexation process—emptying the land of Palestinians before the state comes in to absorb it.

Okay, forget Huckabee and the settlers for a moment. What are the actually reasonable leaders in Israel saying? Gadi Eisenkot, the nation’s great liberal hope for wresting the government back from the far-right extremists, made sure to identify the true victim: the IDF.

In particular, Eisenkot is referring to Avi Bluth, the head of Central Command who oversees the IDF in the West Bank. The poor commander has been “abandoned” by the government “to fight the battle alone.” For some strange reason, though, Eisenkot forgot to mention that Bluth is himself a settler, and has explicitly embraced some of the most violent settlers in the West Bank. In fact, he loves them:

But, of course, Eisenkot knows this. He, like Bluth, is aligned with the violent settlers. As I wrote in my last post, in April, he visited an infamously violent settler outpost—a clear gesture to its lawless leaders that, if the government changes hands and he takes power, they’ll still have his support.

And then there is Bluth’s boss, Defense Minister Israel Katz, who was busy last week lobbying to free Tal Yinon Dardik—the settler who allegedly attacked a Palestinian village, stripped a man naked, zip-tied his penis, and paraded him around in front of his family—after 38 whole days in custody.

Katz’s contribution to the Qusra affair has been to try to wash his hands of it by preparing to transfer civilian law-enforcement duties in the West Bank from the military to the Israeli police. Never mind that this would further erode the distinction between Israel and the occupied territories, pushing Israel another step toward dismantling the legal framework of the occupation. Or that it conveniently avoids the awkwardness of soldiers being asked to confront members of their own settler-military alliance.

There is also the small matter of who runs the police: National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, perhaps the most openly sadistic settler in the Israeli government. Brilliant.

In other words, the violent settlers who have occupied the Qusra hilltop—and much of the West Bank—have the explicit or tacit support of the IDF brass and political leaders across the Israeli spectrum. Surely the paper of record would cover this indisputable fact. Alas.

Reading this article, you’d have no idea that the “chaos” is actually carefully organized state violence with the express purpose of clearing Palestinians from the land—or that the army isn’t merely “struggling to curtail settler violence,” but is directly complicit in it at the highest levels.

The article provides a perfect illustration of my problem with the New York Times’s West Bank coverage: It does an adequate enough job of reporting the basic events of the incident, but its framing is as good as disinformation. “General [Avi] Bluth’s visit to Qusra on Wednesday appeared to signal a new resolve to address the situation,” it says. Framing Bluth as a potential savior while failing to mention that, less than a month earlier, he was praising outposts just like the one in Qusra—even calling them part of the IDF’s “security doctrine”—is straightforward journalistic malpractice. It’s a shame Times readers will never know that the IDF’s “struggle to curtail the violence” may have something to do with the fact that its supposedly benevolent commander in the West Bank is himself deeply compromised.

To be blunt, this article functions as propaganda for the Israeli state, which relies on good liberals around the world believing that it takes settler violence seriously. The Times—like Yisrael Ganz and Mike Huckabee, who occasionally condemn settler violence to release pressure from the system—is running interference for Israel’s state project of ethnically cleansing the West Bank.

The truth about the West Bank, as that soldier told me in Qusra, is that “If you’re Jewish, you can go and move wherever you want.” What happens to the Palestinians already living there is simply beside the point.

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But all of my reporting is self-funded, and it cannot continue without your support. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank.

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By now, you’ve probably heard about the latest escalation of violence in the West Bank. Not the escalation that I documented during the month I spent there, but the escalation of that escalation that kicked off right after I returned home.

On Friday, July 24, a mob of armed settlers set out from the Havat Gilad outpost—illegal under both international and Israeli law—for a “hike” through Nablus-adjacent Palestinian villages in Areas A and B, where, under Israeli law, they are forbidden from entering. Days earlier, Havat Gilad was badly burned by fires that Israeli authorities believe were started by a discarded cigarette, but which settlers blamed on Palestinian “terrorists”—a baseless accusation they used as justification for a spree of “revenge” attacks on nearby villages. Despite assessing that the fire was started unintentionally, the Israeli police arrested two Palestinians to placate the aggrieved settlers.

The hikers entered Tal, a Palestinian village that had, just a week earlier, seen one of its homes burned by settlers. So perhaps the residents weren’t so thrilled to see these uninvited guests. The machine guns may have had something to do with it, too. When locals came out to confront them, the settlers began beating them, aiming their weapons at them, and firing into the air. One of the Palestinians, Sheikh Farouk Ramadan, wrestled a gun away from a settler “security coordinator,” Benayahu Melet, and shot him dead as Melet reached for his pistol.

Ramadan then laid down the gun, and sometime later—at least an hour, according to this settler—a settler ordered an Israeli soldier to execute him, which he did. Three of Ramadan’s cousins, who were unarmed and lying on the ground, were then summarily executed one after another.

At some point during all this, an Israeli soldier was also killed—the settlers quickly blamed the Palestinians, but Israeli media is reporting he was killed by friendly fire.

Here’s a +972 investigation detailing the exact sequence of events in which the four members of the Ramadan family were killed:

In the video, Ramadan is seen getting up and starting to walk — slowly and unarmed — toward the soldiers stationed on a dirt path at the bottom of the hill. At the 4-second mark, the person filming or someone next to him shouts, “Shoot them already, kill them — do you want us to die?”

At the 14-second mark, it is clear that Ramadan is not holding a weapon in his right hand; a second later, it is evident that he is not holding a weapon in his left hand either.

We also know Ramadan was not armed at this point because the army had to search the area after the incident before finding the weapon. In another short video filmed after the incident, a settler urges the army to bring in D-9 bulldozers to raze the entire village so that the Palestinians “will hand over the weapon,” implying that they knew the weapon was missing rather than with Ramadan.

At the 29-second mark in the fourth video, Ramadan is seen crouching down on the ground. No shots can be heard at this point.

At the 42-second mark, someone off-camera shouts, “What are you waiting for? Shoot them already.” Five seconds later, a single gunshot can be heard. At the 50-second mark, a settler behind the camera says to someone next to him, “They’re shooting because I’m shouting,” before again yelling out “Shoot at anyone who comes close!”

At the 53-second mark, the wounded settler in black (seen struggling with a Palestinian on the ground in the third video) points at Ramadan and tells an armed Israeli man in civilian clothing, “Kill him!” Half a second later, the Israeli man fires two shots toward Ramadan.

Despite the plain fact that the killings occurred in a Palestinian village where Israelis are forbidden from entering—and that the dead included four defenseless Palestinians—Israeli leaders across the political spectrum wasted no time condemning the “severe terror attack” against the Israelis and calling for a massive military response.

From the Netanyahus and Ben-Gvirs of Israeli politics, this wasn’t the least bit surprising, of course. But if you’ve been following the mainstream coverage of Israel’s upcoming election, you might have been surprised to hear the same rhetoric coming from the country’s supposed liberal saviors, Gadi Eisenkot and Yair Golan.

If nothing else, it was a useful reminder of what the Israeli center-left actually looks like these days. For context, Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s former IDF chief, developed the Dahiya Doctrine, which calls for the large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure to pressure hostile governments. Like his political adversaries Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir, he refers to the West Bank by the messianic settler term “Judea and Samaria.” In April, he visited an infamously violent settler outpost—a clear gesture to its lawless leaders that, if the government changes hands and he takes power, they’ll still have his support. And, like every serious contender for the Israeli premiership, he is adamantly opposed to Palestinian statehood.

And so, in the immediate aftermath of the massacre in Tal, every plausible candidate to become Israel’s next prime minister converged on a narrative that effectively amounted to this: A group of Jewish settlers was innocently hiking through a Palestinian village when a local terrorist snatched a machine gun from one of them and murdered him in cold blood.

When trying to make sense of events like these, it’s helpful to listen to the settlers themselves, who often explain the euphemisms outright, unlike the cynical politicians who hide behind them. Here’s a prominent settler describing a “hike,” from a piece I wrote in March, The Most Predictable Place on Earth:

Just look at this group of settlers and reservist soldiers that took a field trip to a Palestinian village north of Hebron for target practice:

They’re having fun! And had somebody been shot and killed, you can bet the settlers would have claimed self-defense.

As this video made the rounds on X, the settler activist Elisha Yered shared a response: “A video in which any reasonable viewer can discern that it involves a group of hikers who were guarding the skies, hiking in a place that, according to the antisemitic Arabs… Jews are forbidden from entering, and therefore they were attacked by Arabs.”

What kind of a person goes on a “hike” like this? Well, at the funeral for Benayahu Melet, the settler killed in Tal, a eulogizer said that he “pushed relentlessly to conquer the area… fighting over every last dunam.”

More on settler “hiking”:

[Yered] explained that settler violence in any form is fundamentally an act of self-defense.

“There’s an enemy here who is waiting for the day it can murder me, and I’m not willing to be Kfar Azza,” he said, invoking a kibbutz attacked on October 7. “I will do everything I can to expel it, to hurt it.”

“There’s obvious self-defense,” he continued, but also: “the best defense is offense.”

…Yered goes further than the language of preemptive defense. Like most settlers—and much of the Israeli government—he believes Jews have an inherent right to the entirety of the West Bank, or “Judea and Samaria.” Settler incursions into Palestinian communities, he says, are designed to provoke violence that can then be met with overwhelming state force and eventual depopulation.

“Without question, we are initiating friction,” he said. “And we’re proud of that.”

Two weeks after I published that piece, a young settler out on a “land patrol,” Yehuda Sherman, was killed after his ATV collided with a Palestinian truck in the village of Beit Imrin. Despite all available evidence that the collision was an accident—and that the local Palestinians attempted to rescue the wounded settlers—it was immediately characterized as a terror attack and used to justify a wave of pogroms and land theft.

In A Young Settler Sacrificed for the Land, I wrote:

The extremist leaders of the settlement movement got exactly what they were looking for…

On a crowdfunding page for Shuva Yisrael Farms, the illegal outpost where Yehuda lived, its mission is described as being “the spearhead for activities throughout northern Samaria with the goal of seizing the lands and leaving them in Jewish hands.” At the funeral, a fellow hilltop settler described Yehuda’s work as part of a “strategic mission” to expel Palestinians from the West Bank and advance Jewish settlement in the territory…

Anyone who has spent time in Palestinian villages in the West Bank is familiar with the type of “land patrol” that Yehuda was conducting before his death. The settlers often arrive on state-gifted ATVs, circling village perimeters, chasing shepherds off their own farmland, sometimes brandishing weapons. At times they dismount, entering the villages themselves, even homes, getting in the faces of residents and activists, playing a high-stakes version of the child’s game I’m not touching you. In some cases, they are children, as young as ten or eleven. Some, like Yehuda, are born into long-established settler families—his grandfather made aliyah from Cleveland in 1973. Others are at-risk youth from within Israel, adopted by outpost communities, some of which are formally recognized as foster institutions, and conscripted as child soldiers in a war against their neighbors. In either case, when they show up in Palestinian communities, they are fishing for an opportunity to escalate—to (literally) call in the big guns…

In other words, “land patrols”—like the raison d’être of Yehuda’s outpost and the broader hilltop movement—are not meant to maintain stability, but to intimidate Palestinians into leaving, or provoke a response that can then be used to justify overwhelming force and, ultimately, expulsion.

And so, Yehuda’s corpse immediately became grist for the mill—a “sacrifice,” as his own father called him—as settlers fanned out and established five new outposts in a matter of days, exceeding his father’s goal of three. Three of them were in PA-controlled Area A, effectively heeding Smotrich’s call to erase Oslo’s lines.

Back to the Tal massacre. Melet’s wife, eulogizing him, acknowledged that before he violated Israeli law by entering Tal, he was busy violating Israeli law by building illegal outposts—and that several more would be illegally built in his honor: “Just this morning you were working on establishing two new settlement outposts, and from there you were called to the incident… At the site of the murder there will be Jewish communities, flourishing and thriving.”

Melet’s father said, “We are not interested in Areas A, B and C… it is not our language, it is not our world. We want settlement throughout all of the Land of Israel. And the Land of Israel does not end only with the State of Israel, but also includes the Gaza Strip and parts liberated from Lebanon — these are parts of the precious and beloved Land of Israel.”

And here his brother—who, I chillingly discovered, is Amishav Melet, the infamously violent settler leader in Turmus’ayya who attacked me last October—responding to a video of the IDF demolishing Ramadan’s home: “Free us from these shows. Give the widow and orphans the homes. Give the released soldiers free plots on the ruins of this murderers’ village. Give us a real victory - conquest, expulsion, and settlement!”

Within hours of the shooting, the Israeli military was launching raids across the West Bank, tightening its siege on vulnerable communities, demolishing homes, and brutalizing and arresting hundreds of Palestinians. With the explicit backing of the government, settlers launched their own wave of terror across the West Bank.

By Monday, settlers and soldiers had raided some 30 villages, wounded dozens, and detained hundreds, including over 100 people from Tal alone. Soldiers pulled Farouk Ramadan’s wounded brother straight out of his hospital bed to arrest him, and a pregnant woman delivered a stillborn after Israeli forces held her ambulance at a checkpoint.

Here is Netanyahu, giving the whole game away:

The whole process, as I’ve written many times, is entirely predictable:

1. The army partners with settler leaders to plan and approve new outposts—mapping sites, coordinating with commanders, and issuing orders for how they will be secured.

2. Settlers then establish the outposts themselves—planting flags and caravans on Palestinian land and cutting access roads.

3. The state provides them with military protection; some are gifted guns, drones, ATVs, other military-grade gear, money, and infrastructure.

4. The settlers fan out from their new outposts [often on “hikes” or “land patrols”] terrorizing neighboring villages, often with soldiers either standing alongside them or clearing the way, emptying the land of Palestinians—more than 70 rural communities have been violently expelled since October 7. [Occasionally—like in Tal—settlers provoke a violent response from Palestinians, which is then used as justification for further violent ethnic cleansing.]

5. When the footage gets bad enough, Israeli leaders issue condemnations and, on rare occasions, arrest a settler foot soldier but never the architects.

6. Then, quietly, the state incorporates the gains—retroactively legalizing the outposts, paving the roads, and absorbing the stolen land into the ever-expanding settlement project.

Earlier this month, Avi Bluth—the highest-ranking IDF officer in the West Bank—just came right out and said that establishing settler outposts is part of the IDF’s doctrine:

Drop Site’s Zena Tahhan confirmed the pattern held exactly as expected: within three days of the killings in Tal, settlers and soldiers had established at least six new outposts on Palestinian land—including one at the site of the shooting, after uprooting hundreds of olive trees. Without a doubt, some of these outposts will eventually be retroactively authorized as legal settlements, just as Netanyahu promised.

In the days and weeks before this latest massacre, I’d been writing and speaking about the excruciating decisions Palestinians face when confronting settler attacks—a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario in which fighting back can mean death and destruction, and not fighting back might mean the same. With Tal, we saw what happens when a Palestinian fights back.

Among the villages attacked in the revenge spree was Qusra, where a mosque was burned and vandalized with graffiti reading, “WE WILL DECORATE THE LAND OF ISRAEL WITH BLOOD - REVENGE.” Here’s what I wrote about my time in Qusra last month:

I traveled southeast to Qusra, where settlers had recently stolen a Palestinian home on the peak of the highest hill and were using it as a launchpad for attacks on the village. In February, they beat two Israeli activists, including an elderly woman, nearly to death, cracking their skulls with clubs. In March, they shot a Palestinian man dead and nearly stabbed his father to death. The surviving members of that family, strawberry farmers, have imprisoned themselves inside a cage to keep the settlers out.

I stayed with the shebab in another home on the stolen hill, where they kept a 24/7 watch. The attacks were constant. They went on all night. A pickup truck full of settlers arrived and unloaded a flatbed of large stones on us. They came with clubs and knives. Eventually, the army arrived. Soldiers chatted with the attacking settlers, smoked cigarettes with them, before coming to the home and throwing four Palestinian men against the wall. They were there to investigate the settlers’ claims that the Palestinians had thrown rocks at them. They had no answer when I asked why the settlers were allowed to live in a stolen home and attack locals from it—but the stones allegedly thrown in response were treated as a matter of grave concern.

Is there a reasonable person on earth who could watch this exchange and conclude that the soldiers were in the right? I don’t think so. And that’s why I believe it is, in fact, possible to change the mainstream discourse around the Palestinian right to resist. The media and political establishment have completely normalized the idea that a Palestinian with a gun—or, in many cases, a stone—is inherently a terrorist, even if that gun is wrestled from an attacker, or the stone is being used to fend off an attack. That assumption is essential to Israel’s ability to violently ethnically cleanse the land from the river to the sea without meaningful international intervention. But when you discard that assumption and look at the reality of what’s happening on the ground, it becomes remarkably simple: Of course Palestinians have the right to defend themselves. There is no other place in the world where a people would be expected to respond nonviolently to this kind of relentless, state-backed terror.

In the meantime, the IDF’s chief concern, rather than disarming the violent settlers, is ensuring that their Palestinian victims remain unable to defend themselves. From the Times of Israel:

In response to the violence, there are signs that Palestinians are organizing themselves to fend off attacks.

In recent weeks, the Israeli army has identified increasing activity by watch groups made up of village volunteers who patrol their communities and warn residents of approaching settlers.

In towns with patrols, volunteers gather nightly, using flashlights to scan the area for settlers. When someone spots a group of settlers, they alert others by phone, mobilizing additional residents to the area to confront and push the settlers back…

Palestinians have been unwilling to discuss the groups with the media, but a senior Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Times of Israel that some 70 of these watch groups currently exist.

“As of now, they are not armed,” the officer said. However, the IDF is concerned that some of these groups could eventually arm themselves, raising fears that future confrontations between settlers and Palestinians could become significantly more violent.

“This is one of our focus areas, to ensure that an incident of this kind does not happen,” the officer said.

This past Friday, one week after the Tal massacre, more than 100 settlers, many of them armed, returned to the village for a “memorial hike,” raiding a building and vandalizing a cemetery.

The settlers then provoked another confrontation with villagers, and the IDF responded by shooting another Palestinian.

I’d like to give the settlers the final word.

Last week, the BBC’s Lucy Williamson was able to get inside the Havat Gilad outpost and speak to Yehuda Shimon, “a lawyer with an organisation that represents Israelis arrested for violence against Palestinians.” Shimon defended the wave of settler attacks that followed the Tal massacre, saying, “I think now, after they killed one Israeli, we need to kill all the people in Tal and Sarra, even Jit and Farata.” When Williamson pointed out that he was equating one Jewish life with hundreds or thousands of Palestinian lives, he replied: “No… millions. One Jewish life, it’s 10 million [Palestinians].” Asked whether that view was racist, he answered simply: “Yes, I know. But this is the truth, because God chose us,” before dismissing international law on the grounds that the Bible grants Jews the right to the land.

Later in the interview, Shimon said Palestinians in the West Bank have three choices: accept Israeli rule, leave, or be killed. “If you don’t want to make peace with us, and you don’t want to get out,” he said, “I don’t have a choice: I must kill you, and I kill you all.”

All of this is not some fringe settler fantasy. It is, more or less, official Israeli policy.

If you’ve spent any time with settlers, you’ve likely heard these three choices before. They are drawn almost verbatim from Smotrich’s 2017 “Decisive Plan”—the canonical settler blueprint for creating a decisive moment, perhaps even a holy war, that would secure final Jewish control over what they call Judea and Samaria.

The question is: Do the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves in such a war? Or should they just lay down and die?

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A few recent media hits in case you missed them:

• Chapo Trap House: The Hills Have Eyes 2. Here’s one clip, in which I argue that two-state solution liberals must come to the table with a plan to go to war with Israel:

• American Prestige livestream. Among other things, we take a deeper dive into Israeli politics, and how it relates to what’s happening in the West Bank.

• Breaking Points: On “liberal Zionism” and Trump’s meeting with Netanyahu

• BreakThrough News with Rania Khalek: Terror, Pogroms & Land Theft: Inside Israel’s Final Push to Take the West Bank

• Bad Hasbara: Sledgehammer Time

But all of my reporting is self-funded, and it cannot continue without your support. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank.

Get 20% off for 1 year

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Each time I return to the West Bank, I tell myself—against all available evidence and my better judgment—“Maybe it’ll be calmer this time.” Never have I been proven wrong so thoroughly as I was this past month. I’m back home in New York now, and as ever, I have more material than I know what to do with.

The story, at the most basic level, is that the settlers have seized more land. With the full support of the government, they have just about finished their takeover of Area C and have moved on to Areas A and B—ostensibly under Palestinian Authority control and off limits to Israelis—something that would’ve been unthinkable just a few years ago. Villages that had never seen a settler before are now finding themselves encircled by outposts, facing daily attacks.

I’ve had countless settler encounters over the past several years, but never have I seen them come out swinging the way they are now—showing up in a village and wasting no time before physically assaulting people. Of course it’s because they know that they are far more likely to be rewarded than punished; they are, after all, doing the state’s bidding.

There are stories I want to tell about the courage of Palestinians—men, women, and even children—whom I watched fend off settler attacks, resisting the occupation with whatever they could find. They are brave because they have no choice. But I can’t tell those stories without risking their lives. This is a riddle about writing on Palestine I haven’t yet solved.

In my first dispatch from the West Bank in January 2024—You Don’t Understand How Bad It Is Here—I wrote:

So there is my next obstacle: the struggle to convey the utter pervasiveness of the occupation’s cruelty. I worry that each story I share undermines this essential aspect by implying a start and stop when the reality is more like a poison coursing through every inch of soil, emitting noxious fumes into schools, museums, hospitals, and homes, causing constant pain and suffering and degradation and, on occasion, a seizure or toxic shock or explosion of blood and death. I am convinced that no reasonable person could spend even a week here and come away believing the occupation is morally defensible under any circumstances; the trouble is that most will neither come nor even look too closely.

I haven’t solved that problem either, but I’ve committed to several larger projects that will let me dive more deeply into individual communities. Those will take time, so the pace of my posts here may slow for a bit.

For now, here’s a brief “travelogue”—written in a jetlagged haze shortly after returning home—that I hope conveys something of what it feels like on the ground in the West Bank right now.

In Bethlehem, I met Fahed Abu Haikal, whose seven-month-old son Sam was shot dead by an Israeli soldier weeks earlier while sitting in his mother’s lap inside the family car. Fahed remembers everything. He remembers the soldier’s nonchalant expression as he raised his weapon toward the car’s windshield. He remembers slamming on the brakes, then watching the soldier pull the trigger—the first bullet shattering the windshield, passing through his hand, into his baby’s face, out the back of his tiny head, and then into his wife’s face and chest. He remembers pulling Sam from the car and trying to plug the hole in his head as thick, hot blood poured out, before realizing he was holding his dead child. The car seat is still stained a dry, crusty brown. When Fahed got home from the hospital, the first thing he did was disassemble the crib and hide the parts, along with Sam’s box of toys—including the rattle he was holding when he was shot in the face—so his wife wouldn’t have to see them when she returned home.

Fahed believes they will get justice because the footage of the shooting so clearly shows a cold-blooded murder. He believes his baby’s killer will go to jail. I do not.

Just beyond Bethlehem, in Beit Sahour, settlers took over an abandoned Jordanian military base late last year, chased Palestinian farmers off the surrounding agricultural land, and installed a handful of mobile homes. Months later, the Israeli government retroactively authorized it as a legal settlement and allocated it more than 100 dunums of Palestinian land, including a public park belonging to the town of Beit Sahour. In other words, the settlers’ land grab—illegal even under Israeli law—was rewarded with post-facto legalization and even more land. That’s the whole game: violent settlers are the tip of the spear in Israel’s project of annexing the West Bank. So it goes. That night, Beit Sahour’s semi-pro basketball team beat Qalandia Refugee Camp 66–62. It was the talk of the town.

I returned to Turmus’ayya, where a group of Palestinian farmers and I were attacked by settlers last October. After footage of that attack went viral, Israeli authorities arrested the man who nearly clubbed a grandmother to death. I told them that their arrest would mean virtually nothing if they didn’t dismantle the settler terror network in the olive fields. You arrested a grunt, I told them, good for you. Now do something to actually stop the violence. You have a playbook for this sort of thing, I reminded them, you do it to Palestinians every day. Arrest their leader, Amishav Melet, the notoriously violent armed settler who established the illegal outpost. Demolish their structures. Tear gas them if they try to return. They told me they would—that they were serious about cracking down on settler violence. I told them I didn’t believe them. They said they’d prove me wrong.

The outpost has tripled in size since then. When I arrived at the lookout point, a cement truck, escorted by the IDF, was pouring the foundation for a large new structure. The large Palestinian home visible in the background of the October attack video is now occupied by settlers and off-limits to its owner, a businessman who lives primarily in Chicago. Amishav Melet is still menacing any Palestinian who dares approach their farmland. While I was there, he stole a man’s ATV at gunpoint. The settlers have taken the entire field, and the battle line has moved to the village itself. Settlers now routinely march through Turmus’ayya carrying machine guns, terrorizing residents. They want the homes. They want the whole village, of course. Maybe they’ll get it.

In neighboring al-Mughayyir, I visited the site of a school shooting in April, walking the grounds of Al Mughayyir Secondary School with its principal, Bassam Abuassaf. He showed me where a settler with a rifle crouched on a hill, peered through the scope, and took aim at panicked students trying to evacuate. Where 14-year-old Aws Hamdi Al-Nassan was shot in the back of the head and killed as he frantically searched for his little brother. The whole town is traumatized. Of course it is. That’s what happens after a school shooting. But in this case, the shooter roams free, and the entire village remains under constant attack.

After the shooting, Bassam told me, Israeli authorities never even reached out to take a statement. A school shooting—and the police couldn’t be bothered to speak with the principal! But he was determined to get his students back in the classroom, and he did the following week. He found he could no longer focus on education or administration. Instead, he became consumed with protecting his nearly 500 students and staff, pacing the school’s perimeter from the first bell until dismissal. “I just thank God we made it through the school year,” he said.

I met the father of Jihad Abu Naim, the 32-year-old good Samaritan who was shot in the chest while rushing to the school to help. He showed me a photo of Jihad’s infant daughter—his new granddaughter—who was born weeks after her father was killed. Then he showed me a photo of his son’s corpse. This is a common occurrence in the West Bank: someone showing you a picture of their dead child.

As he scrolled through his camera roll, he landed on video of Israeli forces uprooting his olive trees, perhaps as punishment for having a dead son. He showed me a map, and I saw how the people of al-Mughayyir have been boxed into a fraction of their village, encircled by settler outposts and cut off from their farmland. The local economy, which relies almost entirely on agriculture, has collapsed. Military gates seal off the community for days or weeks at a time.

While I was in town, I met a friendly local who took me to see his home, which is, in fact, a pile of crushed stone and mangled rebar. The Israelis demolished it. He never found out why. Next door to his would-be home stood a house under construction, now indefinitely stalled because its owner was killed by settlers. I visited Um Saleh, the woman whose near-fatal clubbing in Turmus’ayya I documented last year. She cannot hold heavy objects with her right hand and still feels pain when walking downhill, but otherwise she is much improved. It was wonderful to see her laugh. A fundraiser after the attack helped her family buy a small flock of sheep, which now produces enough milk to support them, with virtually all other work in the area gone.

Almost in passing, she mentioned that two months earlier, soldiers had entered her home, beaten her son in front of her and his own child, slapped his wife, and stolen all the money from his wallet before leaving. She didn’t know why. They rarely do.

Last week, armed settler militias began a new round of daily, violent raids on al-Mughayyir. Another student at Al Mughayyir Secondary School, 17-year-old Fadi Al-Nassan, was shot. Months earlier, he had been filmed sprinting toward his cousin, 14-year-old Aws Hamdi Al-Nassan, after Aws was killed in the school shooting.

Fadi, who had just finished 11th grade, had his leg amputated. He was supposed to play on the national soccer team next year, and his family dreaded the moment he’d wake up and realize his leg, and his dream, were gone. Then, on Friday, he died.

In Taybeh, I visited a tiny Bedouin community—Naif—that is perhaps in the process of being run off its land. A settler arrived on a donkey with a herd of camels. Camels serve no real purpose for the settlers, I learned, except to eat Palestinians’ crops—which is, in fact, the opposite of no purpose for a group whose raison d’être is tormenting their indigenous neighbors. The camels fed from Naif’s olive trees for more than an hour as the settler rode increasingly tight circles on his donkey around a small shed, throwing the occasional stone to frighten the children playing inside.

I followed him for as long as I could, trying to keep myself between him and the home, but at a certain point I realized he was laughing at me—wearing me down so that he could later cut their water pipes with less interference. A few nights later, settlers burned down a small home there.

Khallat al-Sidra, a Bedouin village on the outskirts of Mukhmas that I visited last year, had already met the fate that may await Naif: ethnically cleansed from the land, like more than 60 other communities since October 7. It once served as an incidental buffer for the village of Mukhmas itself, absorbing the worst of the settler violence. But after settlers burned it to the ground for the third time, the Israeli military finally intervened—not by protecting the community, but by expelling the people from their land.

And so the settlers pushed the frontier once again, now setting their sights on Mukhmas, where they shot an American teenager dead in February. Nasrallah Abu Siyam may be gone, but he is everywhere in the village. A ghost. Like so many Palestinian villages, the martyr is painted on walls, displayed in restaurants, dangling from rear-view mirrors. Nasrallah was the point of reference for everyone I met in Mukhmas—Nasrallah’s aunt, his cousin, his very best friend.

I visited his father, Mohammed, who was building a house for his son when he was killed. He was a wreck. Regret was eating him alive: he’d asked Nasrallah to stay and help with the farm when he’d considered moving to America. He could barely speak. He couldn’t understand why it had happened. What had they ever done to deserve any of this? Why couldn’t it have been him instead of his son? Nasrallah’s horse, a dapple gray mare named Shams, is still out back, but Mohammed can’t bear to ride her. So Nasrallah’s friends come every day to care for Shams—to clean her pen, feed her, and take her out for rides.

I hung out with the shebab—the young men of the village who have been forced into the role of its protectors. A farmer, a student, a car mechanic.

What can you say? The man loves cars. When it was quiet, we went for drives into the mountains. Tested the boundaries—the outposts were always in view. We smoked cigarettes and talked shit. I rode on the back of a motorcycle. We went to a local honeybee farm, but the beekeeping suits left something to be desired. Like, say, full-body coverage. Like a true seal. Between the four of us, we were stung maybe a dozen times. Let me tell you, it was pure chaos. I don’t remember the last time I laughed like that. The honeycomb was warm and chewy, and I’ve never tasted anything so sweet.

I love the shebab of Mukhmas. Fearless—minus the bee thing. I joined their night watch, guarding against settlers who come from all sides, on ATVs and in trucks, smashing windows, pouring kerosene, and setting buildings on fire. Menacing with their guns. You become fast friends after nights like this.

Days after I left, a car full of Haredi settler kids being chased by Israeli police—probably on account of the clown-car number of people packed inside—drove into Mukhmas at 4 a.m. The police car turned around and left as soon as they entered the village, leaving the kids to joyride through its streets and wake its residents before they crashed straight into a wall and ran screaming for the hills. Nobody in Mukhmas ever saw them—only the car tearing through their narrow streets—but the kids reportedly called the army and pleaded for help. And so the army came in force: dozens of jeeps, drones, even helicopters. Soldiers kicked down doors, dragged people from their beds, zip-tied them, and beat them senseless. “We didn’t ask for any of this,” my friend later said. By 8 a.m., Israeli media was reporting that the Haredi boys had been “rescued” from Mukhmas and were safe. But that didn’t stop the raid from continuing until 3 p.m. Fifteen boys and men were arrested that day in Mukhmas. It appears soldiers chose their targets after stealing someone’s phone and searching a group chat for people who had warned about the settler and soldier incursion. Incriminating texts like, “Be careful.” They broke the mechanic’s jaw in four places, along with his shoulder and a rib. He said it all happened in his bedroom, seconds after he woke up. The soldier pulled him out of bed then teed off on him with haymakers and jackboot kicks before he'd even registered what was happening. Today, two young men remain in jail. Nobody knows what they’re even being held for.

I left Mukhmas for Tamoun in the Jordan Valley, where I stayed with the family of Aymen Ghreyab, a local activist and journalist who has been in jail since November over his social media posts about state and settler violence. He was taken away just weeks after his daughter’s first birthday. His wife knows what happens inside those jails—the torture, the sexual assault, the starvation. She hasn’t heard a word from him. She cries all the time, but she has young children to raise.

I visited farmland being severed in half by Project “Crimson Thread”—Israel’s plan to build a wall across the entire Jordan Valley, from the occupied Golan Heights all the way to the Red Sea. The Jordan Valley is the most fertile land in the region, the “breadbasket of the West Bank,” so it’s only natural that Israel would try to take it. The plan would annex everything east of the wall, roughly 22 percent of the West Bank. Communities there would be expelled. Everything in the wall’s path would be demolished, and a buffer zone west of the wall would make tens of thousands more dunams of land inaccessible to farmers.

From Tamoun, I traveled north to Jenin, stopping just outside the city, next to a Palestinian amusement park, to see Israeli forces rebuilding the settlement of Ganim, which was evacuated in 2005 as part of the disengagement. It’s one of four settlements they’re rebuilding in the north. Israelis resettling the northern West Bank is one of the most underreported stories in the region right now, and you can see it in the widespread construction, multiplying outposts, and attacks in Areas A and B becoming increasingly routine.

The plan had been to venture into the Jenin refugee camp, whose more than 20,000 residents were forcibly evacuated in February 2025. The Israeli military has occupied the camp ever since, leveling entire neighborhoods, leaving parts of it looking more like Rafah than anywhere else in the West Bank. From the outside, you could see buildings speckled with bullet holes, gaping craters left by drone strikes, homes turned to rubble. The IDF is currently building a military base inside the camp, the first base in Area A since the Oslo Accords.

In the end, locals warned us not to go into the camp. They insisted, in fact. May have stopped me by force—for my own safety. Too many Israeli snipers hiding inside. It’s where they killed Shireen Abu Akleh, after all. We drank coffee and ate cookies instead. I thought about the familiar online taunt: “Go to Jenin as a Jew and see how they treat you.”

We raced to Zabouba, just outside Jenin, where the earthy smell of freshly uprooted trees hung in the air after IDF bulldozers destroyed an olive field. Kids danced and played among felled trees, but the landowner walked solemnly, cursing the destruction of the land that had sustained his family for generations.

From Jenin, I drove southwest to Tulkarm, where two more refugee camps—Tulkarm and Nur Shams—remained destroyed and abandoned after the same military operation that cleared out the Jenin camp. I met Fadwa, 55, who stayed in Tulkarm Camp for nine months after the mandatory evacuation, hunkering down in her home with her cat, Koshkosh, and her dog, Jean Valjean. She had enough food and all of her books, her own private library, so she saw no reason to leave—until her health deteriorated to the point that she had no choice. I met a young man who was expelled from Nur Shams and later watched from a nearby hilltop as his home was demolished. During the demolition, Israeli soldiers shot at his feet to force him away.

I made it into the Nur Shams camp with a few other independent journalists in press vests. The word is apocalyptic. So much destruction, but so much evidence of recent life still there.

When we exited, a neighbor of the camp warned us that an IDF jeep was racing out behind us. We ran for our lives. Later that night, I got this message from a friend I made in Tulkarm:

I traveled southeast to Qusra, where settlers had recently stolen a Palestinian home on the peak of the highest hill and were using it as a launchpad for attacks on the village. In February, they beat two Israeli activists, including an elderly woman, nearly to death, cracking their skulls with clubs. In March, they shot a Palestinian man dead and nearly stabbed his father to death. The surviving members of that family, strawberry farmers, have imprisoned themselves inside a cage to keep the settlers out.

I stayed with the shebab in another home on the stolen hill, where they kept a 24/7 watch. The attacks were constant. They went on all night. A pickup truck full of settlers arrived and unloaded a flatbed of large stones on us. They came with clubs and knives. Eventually, the army arrived. Soldiers chatted with the attacking settlers, smoked cigarettes with them, before coming to the home and throwing four Palestinian men against the wall. They were there to investigate the settlers’ claims that the Palestinians had thrown rocks at them. They had no answer when I asked why the settlers were allowed to live in a stolen home and attack locals from it—but the stones allegedly thrown in response were treated as a matter of grave concern.

Nobody was abducted, fortunately, perhaps because an American journalist was sticking a camera in their faces. But the settlers returned minutes after the soldiers left, cutting the electricity, blacking out the home—including the security camera system—and attacking again, nearly scaling the wall and making it inside. Fortunately, we had an amateur electrician inside who MacGyvered a new power source.

The next day, we watched a settler grazing sheep just outside the home. “Those are my sheep,” one of the guys told me. The settler had stolen them. “That’s my land, my crops. And he’s living in my uncle’s home.” That night, settlers broke into another home on the hill and stole the doors and windows right out of the frames.

I went from Qusra to Sebastia, where the town’s beautiful archaeological sites were teeming with Israeli workers. I’ve been reporting on this town for years, but I have never seen so much occupation activity. The day before, they had stolen a newly excavated Roman column, lifting it with a bulldozer onto a truck and driving away with it. Looting the town’s treasures—exactly what they accuse the Palestinians of doing to justify their takeover of heritage sites. At a wedding, I bumped into Ayman Schaer, who was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier with a butterfly bullet during one of my visits in 2024. I saw him last October, and he was still undergoing surgeries, still unsure if he would ever walk again. He was grimacing in pain, sweating just from sitting up to talk. At the wedding, he was on his feet and smiling—the first time I’d ever seen him like that. Outside, soldiers were raiding Sebastia again, kicking in the municipality’s door.

In Masudiya, next door to Sebastia, settlers had stolen the historic Ottoman-era railroad station, where families from across the region once gathered for festivals. It’s the same story, over and over: Settlers showed up one day and planted a flag. Then they built a fence. Then their flocks were grazing there. Then local farmers were beaten and tear-gassed for trying to reach their own land. It had only been a few months, but settlers had already taken over 4,000 dunams of land—everything in Area C—and were now pushing into Areas A and B. I met a young woman who had just graduated from Birzeit University and returned home to Masudiya. Already, she wants to leave again. “I can’t even leave the house by myself anymore,” she told me.

In Burqa, settlers had stolen a natural spring that supplied water for the village and many neighboring ones. Imagine stealing a spring. They’d cut all the pipes, built a swimming pool for settlers, and rerouted the flowing water into the nearby outpost.

Next to a wall commemorating the town’s 72 martyrs since 1936, soldiers spent the night with an electric saw, cutting down a thick metal statue of Handala, the Palestinian cartoon icon. Only its two feet remained.

I drove all the way south to Masafer Yatta in the South Hebron Hills, staying in Umm al-Khair, where a settler murdered Awdah Hathaleen less than one year earlier. I’d planned to spend a week visiting different villages in the hills, but the situation in Umm al-Khair was so bad that I wasn’t able to leave for more than a short day trip. The outpost had grown exponentially since I was there in October. Israeli flags were everywhere, including covering the sign welcoming visitors to the small hamlet. A new gate was installed and closed at will by soldiers and settlers alike, blocking the only road in and out of the village. One indication that a settler attack was coming was that they’d locked the gate. A close friend of mine there told me he’d been diagnosed with depression. “I just see no hope,” he told me. “It’s all so dark.” Another told me he’d quit activism. “What’s the point?” he said. “It accomplishes nothing.” Before Portugal vs. Spain, he’d told me, “All I have left is Ronaldo.” We watched together. “If Ronaldo played for Israel, I’d have no choice but to cheer for them,” he said. He spit out his soda laughing. After Portugal lost, I barely saw him again.

The settlers’ latest gambit was attempting to steal an entire home. Salim’s home. They had been showing up in his backyard, ripping out his fence, and planting Israeli flags. They had kicked a woman out of a bathroom. On my first night there, they attacked, trying to push through the backyard and reach the house. The Palestinians and international activists formed a defensive line to try to stop them. Many of them were beaten. The settlers threw chairs and razor wire. A settler with a pistol swept my legs out from under me with a metal rod, then three men jumped on me, one of them swinging at my head. The soldiers came and arrested three activists. They declared Salim’s home a closed military zone—a classic technique to clear the area of activists—which did not stop the settlers from returning the next morning to drink coffee in his yard. Salim had not been able to reach his livestock in nearly a week. They had no food or water.

I spent time with Hanady, Awdah’s wife, and her three small children. She has been baking a lot because it is the only thing she enjoys. She discovered that I would eat anything she made. Her kids are afraid. She doesn’t know what to do. She wants to leave, but she has nowhere else to go. More than anything, she misses her husband. “Our love story was so rare,” she told me. “There’s no one else like him.”

One morning, two bulldozers drove into neighboring Deirat, accompanied by dozens of soldiers. We followed them and watched as families in every home along the demolition crew’s path scrambled to salvage their belongings. When the bulldozers stopped in front of their targets, soldiers began firing sound grenades and dragging people out with zip-tied hands. The smell of a demolished home is acrid. It burns your eyes and throat. A soldier took a video, panning from the home being demolished to the weeping women and children watching it happen. Maybe for TikTok. A young girl screamed. Her father was in jail, and now they took her home. The homes they destroyed had been beautiful.

Congressman Ro Khanna came to visit Umm al-Khair. The locals took him in, showed him how the state was erasing their lives. Shortly after he left, I got frantic texts from one of his staffers saying that their bus had been hijacked by machine-gun-wielding settlers. When soldiers showed up, they sided with the settlers. Days later, when the story made international headlines, Israel’s allies would claim it was embellished or entirely fabricated. Obviously, it was not. There is nothing remarkable about what happened there. In fact, they got off easy.

I didn’t respond to the staffer’s texts right away because I was busy being attacked myself. Shimon Attaia, the sadistic settler who established the outpost in Umm al-Khair, showed up with a mob of his vicious young disciples. They were trying to steal another tract of land. First they went for the men. I was hit more times than I could count. Kicked repeatedly in the inside of my kneecap. Punched in the gut. Jabbed in the throat. You cannot fight back, because they’ll take revenge on the community itself. It’s just what they want, and when we wouldn’t give it to them, they turned on the women and elderly. Hanady’s mother was thrown to the ground. She had to be hospitalized. Attaia kneed an old man in the groin. But it still wasn’t enough. Attaia threw a tantrum and flipped a dumpster. He called his friend, who showed up with an assault rifle that got tangled in his dog leash. Attaia called the army and stamped his feet, pointing at who he wanted arrested. I was one of the chosen ones. They detained me for thirty minutes, demanded I unlock my phone and give it to them. When I told them I was calling my lawyer, they left without a word.

(More videos from the attack can be found in this thread.)

Khanna would go home and talk about what happened to anyone who would listen. It was great exposure, I thought. You can read his account here. He said he’d never experienced racial profiling like he did in the West Bank. Then he started getting pressed on his policy positions. No to broad economic sanctions on the state. No to a full arms embargo. No to blocking the sale of Iron Dome parts. Israel had a right to defend itself, he said, but Palestinians should focus on nonviolent resistance. I found it inexplicable.

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My last stop was al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya. This is where Mohammed Ibrahim, the 16-year-old Palestinian American kid who was abducted by soldiers and held in military prison for nearly ten months, is from. And also his first cousin Sayfollah Musallet, who was beaten to death by settlers there on July 11, 2025. I went there for the anniversary. To accompany his father, Kamel, to the site where his son was killed. Settlers had occupied the land since last April. Anyone who went near was attacked, including me, when I tried last October. The mayor of neighboring Sinjil warned us that a settler with an M16 lived on the mountain and shot from afar. We knew it was dangerous. Kamel traveled in an armored SUV with a CNN crew. I followed behind in a rental Kia with a few other independent journalists. Of course, we were attacked.

(You can watch the Democracy Now! segment about the attack here.)

I talked to an Israeli soldier after. I informed him that the settlers who attacked us were living in a Palestinian home in Area A. “Are you sure?” he said. “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.” He told me he’d visited the home and was pretty sure it belonged to the settlers. Of course I wasn’t wrong.

CNN aired the footage of the attack. Millions of people saw it. It was another PR disaster for Israel, and so they went out and arrested four settlers. It was just like Turmus’ayya—they arrested a few grunts to quiet the critics, but unless the settlers were removed from the land they had stolen, it would be meaningless. The settlers told a judge they had been sent down to detain us by the leader of the outpost. They said there was a “gun attack threat.” Ha ha. One of them was 14 years old—a child soldier. How about going after the leader?

It was a terrible week of press for Israel when it came to settler violence. First Ro Khanna, then the CNN attack. Here’s the part that didn’t make headlines in the US: that same week, Israel approved dozens of new settlements in the West Bank—including the retroactive legalization of violent outposts—committed more than a billion shekels to building them, and announced plans for new access roads to connect them. In the Jordan Valley, the government distributed drones and other military equipment to settlers living in illegal outposts. The IDF’s West Bank chief then appeared at a conference for settlers living in illegal farming outposts, many of which have been linked to violence and the displacement of Palestinian communities, where he told residents that they “greatly strengthen security.” “I love you,” he said. “I appreciate you, and I appreciate what you do.” How nice.

Five days after the anniversary of Sayf’s death, settlers came down from the same olive fields where they’d attacked us to assault Sinjil with fire and guns. Apparently those four arrests didn’t make the problem go away.

With CNN cameras gone, the military responded by tightening the siege on Sinjil, a community already trapped inside a cage. As I write this, the attacks by both settlers and soldiers are ongoing. The West Bank is the most predictable place on earth.

I’m back in the Occupied West Bank, where I’ll be reporting from the ground for the foreseeable future. If all goes to plan—and, to be fair, it never does—I’ll be spending time from the Jordan Valley to the South Hebron Hills, from the Ramallah region to villages under siege in the north, and into the decimated refugee camps of Jenin and Tulkarm. I’ll be following up directly on my past reporting—the pogroms in Turmus’ayya, the school shooting in al-Mughayyir, the killing of an infant in Hebron, the archaeological takeover of Sebastia—as well as chasing down stories unfolding in real time.

As ever, I’ll be going where the settlers go, documenting their state-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing—a campaign that somehow continues to escalate through a historic killing spree and unprecedented land theft, particularly now that Israel is feeling increasingly hamstrung by fading support for its wars on Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza. That violent energy needs to be redirected somewhere, and it often goes straight to the West Bank, where mainstream media coverage suddenly drops off a cliff.

I know better than to promise a consistent publishing schedule while I’m here, but I’ll be writing short dispatches whenever I can and collecting material for future pieces and larger projects. In the meantime, most of my live reporting will be on Instagram.

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Thanks all—more soon.

Jasper

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On Sunday, May 31, as Israel unleashed relentless airstrikes across Lebanon, New Yorkers took to Fifth Avenue to celebrate the annual Israel Day Parade. In the days leading up to it, the big local controversy was that Mayor Zohran Mamdani, unlike all of his predecessors, did not plan to attend; his NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, would cheerfully go in his place. Many of the usual suspects excoriated Mamdani for the decision while simultaneously insisting he wouldn’t have been welcome anyway—a pretty good reflection of Israel’s posture towards its critics.

The ADL, for its own part, argued that the Israel Day Parade is not really about Israel, per se, but is “nothing more than a peaceful and positive celebration of the existence of the only Jewish state in the world” and the city’s “largest Jewish celebration,” thus making Mamdani’s refusal to attend ipso facto antisemitic.

It’s tiresome to keep pointing this out, but this conflation of Israel and Judaism fits squarely within the ADL’s own definition of antisemitism.

And then, a funny thing happened: Israel’s leaders showed up to New York’s Israel Day Parade big Jewish celebration. Not as random attendees, but as members of the State of Israel’s official delegation, organized by Israel’s consulate general in New York. Who could possibly have seen this coming?

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—currently overseeing the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank—was there. So was Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, who once suggested nuking Gaza and bombing humanitarian aid sites. Minister of the Negev, the Galilee, and National Resilience Yitzhak Wasserlauf attended too; while giving a pep talk to soldiers heading into Gaza, Wasserlauf offered “a blessing on the one who seizes babies and dashes them against the rocks.” And then there was MK Ariel Kellner, who previously declared, “One goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.”

Next came the predictable condemnations from all the good liberal Zionists in New York who had attended the parade. Here’s the “progressive” candidate in the NY-12 race, alarmed that one of the most influential and outspoken leaders of Israel appeared at its parade:

New York’s governor condemned Smotrich’s attendance while insisting the parade was really about Jewish pride, community, and unity—not, somehow, the state explicitly named in the title of the event:

NYC’s attorney general reduced Smotrich’s genocidal politics to “Islamophobia”:

My own congressman—who ignored me when I pleaded for protection from raging settlers—expressed shock and disgust that Smotrich had attended:

The NYPD commissioner seemed confused about what exactly she had been celebrating, while the House minority leader confirmed, once again, that he remains incapable of change:

Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, lamented that the Israeli consulate general in New York tricked them, telling the New York Times, “There was a complete lack of transparency here. They did not share any information about these attendees coming to the parade. We certainly asked, and they did not share these names.”

Imagine the Israeli consulate bringing members of the Israeli government to the Israel Day Parade!

To be fair, these aggrieved paraders often find themselves confused. They are the same people who cannot seem to explain how a state in an Arab region can maintain a Jewish majority while remaining democratic. The ones who denounce National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric then react with incredulous denial when confronted with his impact. (ICYMI: Ben-Gvir’s latest proposal is for the IDF to take women and children hostage in Lebanon.) These are the people who accused protesters outside the Greater Israel Real Estate Fair at Park East Synagogue of antisemitism, insisting the event had nothing to do with the settlement movement, while illegal settlement real estate was being openly marketed inside.

Here is journalist Will Bredderman of Jewish Insider, whose beat largely consists of digging up old tweets from Mamdani staffers and presenting them as evidence of antisemitism:

I genuinely wonder whether Bredderman is naïve enough to believe this was a “thoughtless” move rather than a deliberate act of disciplining. Smotrich capped off the parade weekend by visiting Park East Synagogue himself—proving all of the protesters right—and declaring that “We’re done apologizing.” This wasn’t a message to Israel’s adversaries. It was a message to those who continue to defend a version of Israel that doesn’t exist. The whole parade weekend was a humiliation ritual for liberal Zionists, a reminder that the real Israel will not cooperate with their fantasy.

With that, a few updates on what the real Israel is up to in the West Bank while the world’s attention—such as it can still follow Israel’s every belligerent move—is on Iran and Lebanon:

Last week, the Knesset passed a bill by Religious Zionism MK Tzvi Succot—last seen attempting to break into an Arab Israeli school with an electric saw—granting tax benefits to residents in 58 settlements. The criteria for the benefits are based in part on “security,” meaning the deeper settlers push into Palestinian territory, the more handsomely they’ll be rewarded.

This week, Haaretz revealed that Israel is fast-tracking more than a billion shekels for the establishment and expansion of 69 illegal settlement outposts across the West Bank, including deep inside Areas A and B, ostensibly under Palestinian Authority administrative control. The government quietly approved an emergency allocation to begin planning and legalizing the outposts, many of which do not even fully exist yet. Another billion-plus shekels is expected to follow for roads, infrastructure, mobile homes, public buildings, and “temporary sites” that will function as settlements long before formal legalization is complete. “According to the developing decision,” Haaretz writes, “hundreds of millions of shekels will be allocated for 15 mobile homes for each outpost, in addition to two prefab structures designated for public institutions.” (As regular readers of this blog know, the sudden appearance of mobile homes near a Palestinian village is often the first sign of a new outpost—and the first step toward settler attacks on that community, something I’ve documented in Turmus’ayya, Umm al-Khair, and many other places.) This comes on top of Smotrich’s decision in May to approve more than a billion shekels for paving roads to new settlements, even as Israel’s 2026 budget is expected to implode and defense expenditures continue to soar.

So, to state it plainly: these are direct investments in settler violence, made by the same government that claims to be fighting it—and just the latest evidence that the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is among the state’s most central projects.

Here’s what I wrote in March about the state’s strategic approach to settlement expansion:

1. The army partners with settler leaders to plan and approve new outposts—mapping sites, coordinating with commanders, and issuing orders for how they will be secured.

2. Settlers then establish the outposts themselves—planting flags and caravans on Palestinian land and cutting access roads.

3. The state provides them with military protection; some are gifted guns, drones, ATVs, other military-grade gear, money, and infrastructure.

4. The settlers fan out from their new outposts, terrorizing neighboring villages, often with soldiers either standing alongside them or clearing the way, emptying the land of Palestinians—more than 70 rural communities have been violently expelled since October 7.

5. When the footage gets bad enough, Israeli leaders issue condemnations and, on rare occasions, arrest a settler foot soldier but never the architects.

6. Then, quietly, the state incorporates the gains—retroactively legalizing the outposts, paving the roads, and absorbing the stolen land into the ever-expanding settlement project.

This folds into an even broader strategic approach, which is to move beyond the old settlement heartlands in Area C, encircle Palestinian towns in Areas A and B, choke off access to farmland and grazing areas, and sever the roads that connect them. Smotrich laid this out plainly in September when he introduced his “sovereignty plan,” which would place roughly 82% of the West Bank under full Israeli control while confining Palestinians to a handful of dense, isolated population centers. From there, Israel could annex most of the territory under the principle of maximum land, minimum demographic change—sidestepping the thorny question of citizenship that full annexation would entail.

As government and security officials, soldiers, settlers, and every Israeli journalist know, there is simply no way to carry out this scale of settlement expansion without violence.

All this came to mind when I had the misfortune of stumbling across this passage from a recent essay by Sam Harris, titled “Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel”:

It’s too bad Sam Harris won’t debate critics of Israel, because I’d like for someone to ask him how he squares this claim with the undeniable fact that the most defenseless Palestinian communities in the West Bank—Bedouin shepherding villages—are being systematically chased off their land by armed settlers backed by the Israeli military and government. The idea that these communities are “building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom” is nearly as laughable as the suggestion that the powers-that-be in Israel are interested in a “diverse, tolerant” society. You have to wonder if Harris has bothered to listen to the words these people actually say out loud.

Or what about seven-month-old Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, shot in the head and chest by IDF soldiers while in her mother’s arms on Friday—is Palestinian culture responsible for her death, too? Is the fact that soldiers refused to provide medical aid to the bullet-riddled infant—or that nobody will face consequences for murdering her—a reflection of Israel’s culture of peace and love? Harris has always been a raging Islamophobe, but his detachment from reality is reaching new heights.

Before I sign off, some good news. Last month, I wrote about what I called the biggest Israel-Palestine story you haven’t heard about: a sweeping bill that would have transferred authority over archaeology and heritage sites in the West Bank—and potentially Gaza—from the military to a new civilian body aligned with the settler movement. The bill was framed as a narrow antiquities measure, helping it to elude global attention, but was in reality a major step toward annexation, granting Israeli civilians expanded power over land seizures, zoning, and security deep inside occupied Palestinian territory.

Last week, Haaretz reported that Netanyahu effectively killed the bill, halting discussions after intense opposition from both the Israeli military and legal establishment. Army officials warned that the legislation would create major operational problems and strengthen accusations of “creeping annexation.” Legal advisers argued that transferring authority over Palestinian land to Israel’s Heritage Ministry would represent a dramatic break from the existing military occupation framework, which is nominally based on international law. In other words, the problem with the bill is largely framed in terms of poor optics and potential diplomatic blowback.

But another group also played a central role in torpedoing the legislation: the Israeli archaeological establishment. As I wrote in The Drift, these mainstream archaeologists opposed the bill not on moral principle but out of concern for their own professional interests:

The anti-occupation archaeologist Alon Arad “said his establishment colleagues understand that erasing ‘the separation between legitimate archaeology in Israel and non-legitimate archaeology in the West Bank’ would mean international organizations’ ‘boycotting the Israeli Antiquities Authority.’ Funding could dry up, and even Israeli archaeologists unwilling to cross the Green Line might be barred from attending conferences and publishing in scientific journals.”

For decades, mainstream Israeli archaeologists have allowed the far-right to use their discipline as a weapon for chipping away at the brittle veneer of laws protecting Palestinians. It’s a familiar story in Israel: a powerful group of cynical actors aggressively seeks to oppress and displace Palestinians; a left-wing minority belatedly emerges to protest in vain; meanwhile, the majority of the population carries on as if nothing is wrong. And by the time they recognize the threat they’ve nurtured within their society, it’s too late to stop it.

Here’s part of a letter from the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities to Netanyahu:

The enactment of a special law establishing a statutory corporation with authority over enforcement and archaeological and heritage research in Judea and Samaria, under the auspices of the Ministry of Heritage, will be perceived in the political and academic worlds as an act of annexation in the Judea and Samaria areas. This will undoubtedly lead to an immediate deterioration in Israel’s international relations in the field of archaeology, and it will also affect other areas of science and research.

We therefore call upon the government and the Committee to refrain from advancing the proposed legislation and to leave the field of archaeology in Judea and Samaria in the hands of the Staff Officer for Archaeology Unit, which operates within the framework of the [IDF’s] Civil Administration in close cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority.

There is a very clear lesson here. Boycotts—or in this case, even the threat of boycotts—work.

One of the standard criticisms of the BDS movement is that it unfairly punishes Israelis who play no direct role in the state’s violence. Putting aside Israeli civil society’s complicity in the state’s crimes, this notion also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of one of the mechanisms of boycotts: once these “innocent bystanders” feel their own interests are threatened, they begin pressuring their government to change course. In this case, it seems to have worked.

This is the great irony of the liberal Zionist posture of claiming to support Israel while opposing its current government: If they were actually interested in changing the country, they would be all-in on hitting it where it hurts. Instead, they have spent years demonizing BDS as antisemitic. By contrast, narrow measures, like the newly announced sanctions by six European countries on a handful of Israeli settler groups—while they certainly don’t hurt—do little to change the political dynamics inside Israel that incentivize settlers to keep expanding. They may even harden them: Yisrael Ganz, head of the powerful Yesha Council, responded to the sanctions by calling on the Knesset to retaliate by “dismantling the Palestinian Authority, ending the artificial division of Judea and Samaria into Areas A, B, and C, and strengthening Israel’s presence and sovereignty throughout the region.”

The liberal Zionist position is a fundamentally contradictory one. I do not envy it. But, if I’m being completely honest, I am so grateful they keep holding parades to show the rest of us exactly what they represent. Can’t wait for next year’s!

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Note: apologies for the slower cadence of newsletters recently. I’m in the middle of a few larger projects, along with some upcoming travel, all tied to these same themes—so more on that soon. In the meantime, thank you for your patience.

But all of my reporting is self-funded, and it cannot continue without your support. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank.

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There’s a vote with massive implications for both the West Bank and Gaza coming up in Israel that has received virtually no mainstream coverage in the U.S. In part, that’s because the bill in question is framed as narrow legislation about archaeology. More broadly, it reflects a sustained failure of the press to tell the story of Israel’s annexation drive over the past three years. But this is what annexation actually looks like in practice—and understanding it is essential to understanding the central Israeli project of land theft and ethnic cleansing.

So before I get into the vote—and a surprise appearance by none other than Bari Weiss—I want to offer a brief refresher on how we got here.

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Nick Kristof, the veteran New York Times opinion columnist who has covered sexual violence in conflict zones for decades, published an extraordinary piece on Monday, The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians, in which he reports out the UN’s claim that Israeli leaders “have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become one of Israel’s ‘standard operating procedures.’”

For my purposes here, I’m going to set aside the fact that Kristof felt compelled to open with two paragraphs of throat-clearing—both-sidesing the horrific testimonials of what’s being done to Palestinians right now against the alleged sexual assaults by Hamas on October 7, 2023, many of whose details have since unraveled under scrutiny.

Below, I’m going to quote from the piece at some length to give you a sense of the graphic sexual violence Kristof reported. Please consider this to be a major trigger warning. (If you’ve already read the Kristof piece, you can skip down to the next section beginning with “Predictably.”)

Here’s an account from Sami al-Sai, a 46-year-old freelance journalist arrested in 2024:

“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners.

“They were trying to force it into my rectum, and I was bracing myself to prevent it, but I couldn’t. It was so painful.” The guards were laughing at him, he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots,’” he recalled, adding that they then used a carrot. “It was extremely painful,” he said. “I was praying for death.”

…One of the guards was a woman who, he said, grabbed him by the penis and testicles, and joked, “these are mine,” and then squeezed until he screamed from pain…

After he was dumped into his cell, he concluded that the spot where he had been raped had been used before, for he found other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth crushed into his skin.

From a Euro-Med report, which says “Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees”:

It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence…

Hand-held metal detectors were used to probe between men’s naked legs and then smashed into their private parts; some men had to have their testicles amputated by doctors after beatings, according to the Euro-Med monitor.

On sexual violence against children:

Save the Children commissioned a survey last year of children ages 12 to 17 who had been in Israeli detention; more than half reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence. Save the Children said that the true figure was probably higher because stigma left some unwilling to acknowledge what had happened to them…

I located and interviewed three boys who had been detained, and all described being sexually abused.

One, a shy boy in a Hilfiger shirt who was 15 years old at the time of his arrest, declined to say whether he had also witnessed actual rapes. But he said threats were routine: “They’d say, ‘Do this or we’ll put this stick up your butt.’”

The other boys told very similar stories of sexual violence as part of beatings and noted that the threats of rape were directed not only at them but also at their mothers and siblings.

On the threats that follow:

A half-dozen guards immobilized him by holding his arms and legs while pulling down his pants and underwear and inserting a metal baton into his anus. The rapists were laughing and cheering, he said.

Several hours later, he said, he fainted and was taken to the prison clinic. After he woke up, he said, he was raped once more, again with the metal baton.

“I was bleeding,” he recalled. “I broke down completely. I was crying.”

After being returned to his cell, he said, he asked a guard for pen and paper to write a complaint about the assaults. The request was denied. And that evening, a group of guards came to the cell.

“Who is the one who wants to file a complaint?” one guard jeered, he said, and another guard pointed him out. “The beating started immediately,” he recalled. And then they raped him with the baton for a third time that day, he said.

He recalled one saying, “Now you have even more to put in your complaint.”

A few days after I interviewed him, the farmer called to say that he didn’t want his name used after all. He had just been visited by Shin Bet and warned not to cause trouble.

On the 2024 leaked video showing nine guards sodomizing a shackled prisoner, which led to riots in support of the rapists:

One Palestinian prisoner from Gaza reportedly was hospitalized in July 2024 with a tear in his rectum, cracked ribs and a punctured lung. Investigators obtained a prison video purportedly showing the abuse. The authorities detained nine reservist soldiers — but Israel’s right-wingers erupted in outrage, with a mob of furious protesters, including politicians, breaking into the prison to show support for the guards. The last charges against the soldiers were dropped in March, and last month the military approved the soldiers’ return to duty.

Netanyahu hailed the dropping of charges as the end of a “blood libel.” “The State of Israel must hunt down its enemies — not its heroic fighters,” he said…

That prisoner, who afterward reportedly required a stoma bag to collect his waste, was returned to Gaza, and an acquaintance of his said that he spent months in a hospital recovering from his internal injuries.

On the use of dogs:

On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.

On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.

“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.

On sexual violence by settlers against Palestinians:

Israeli settlers are not an official arm of the state in the same way that the prison system is, but the Israel Defense Forces increasingly protect settlers as they attack Palestinian villagers and use sexual violence to drive Palestinians to flee. “Sexualized violence is used to pressure communities” to leave their land…

The consortium surveyed Palestinian farmers and found that more than 70 percent of households that had been displaced reported that threats to women and children, particularly of sexual violence, were the decisive reason for leaving. “Sexual violence,” said Allegra Pacheco of the coalition, “is one of the mechanisms driving people from their land.”

In a remote Jordan Valley hamlet of Bedouin farmers, I met a 29-year-old farmer, Suhaib Abualkebash, who recounted how a gang of about 20 settlers rampaged through the homes of his family, beating adults and children alike, stealing jewelry and 400 sheep — and also cut off his clothes with a hunting knife and then tightly zip-tied his penis and yanked.

“I was afraid they would cut off my penis,” Abualkebash told me. “I thought this was the end for me.”

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert weighs in:

To try to make sense of what I found, I called up Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009. Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard.

“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”

On Israel’s response:

Israel welcomed a United Nations report documenting sexual assaults against Israeli women by Palestinians but rejected the report’s call to investigate Israeli assaults against Palestinians.

Predictably, after the piece was published, Israel and its defenders lined up to accuse the Times of printing lies, blood libel, and—you guessed it—Hamas propaganda.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry asserted that the prison guards filmed sodomizing a shackled Palestinian are the real victims here:

The WSJ op-ed below was written by the head of “Honest Reporting,” an Israeli propaganda outlet masquerading as a media watchdog that has published, among other things, numerous denials of famine in Gaza.

Bari Weiss, who recently allowed Netanyahu to pick his own 60 Minutes interviewer, wasn’t going to sit this one out. In addition to the article below, Weiss’s Free Press published a piece on the mechanics of dog rape.

As it turns out, all of the sources are “anti-Israel” on account of being raped by Israelis:

Here’s a remarkable thing to say about any army, let alone one occupying a people for far longer than this man has been alive:

Some pioneering rape-deniers even took to review-bombing “Kristof Farms”:

So, yes, the usual hasbarists and right-wing zealots were out in force—but I was particularly interested in the reactions of many so-called liberal Zionists.

Like Hen Mazzig, a hipster-coded Senior Fellow at The Tel Aviv Institute who has become ubiquitous online for fiercely defending Israel—and, more recently, for calling on the Israeli government to crack down on the radical settlers while conveniently omitting the fact of their open alliance:

This week, Mazzig suddenly became a media expert, firing off multiple tweets and Substack posts accusing Kristof of shoddy reporting.

Here he is suggesting that Kristof’s father, who died over fifteen years ago, may have been some sort of Nazi who influenced the article from the grave. Maybe you can decode the allegation, but I certainly couldn’t:

In fairness, this is far from Mazzig’s first foray into conspiracy theory—in October 2023, he asserted that a photo of a dead Palestinian baby was actually a “Pallywood doll.”

And then there’s Deborah Lipstadt, President Biden’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, who amplified a call for Nick Kristof to be executed:

What’s interesting about Mazzig, Lipstadt, and their peers is that they’ve built their reputations as liberal Zionists in part by being willing to denounce Israel’s far-right extremists. Controlled opposition, if you will. In these circles, it’s become fashionable to condemn, in particular, the cartoonishly evil National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, framing him as a fringe figure who doesn’t represent Israel.

Here is Mazzig saying it is his “ultimate fantasy” to see Ben-Gvir removed from office:

In 2019, Lipstadt publicly cut ties with her synagogue after it supported Netanyahu’s alliance with Ben-Gvir’s far-right political party, Otzma Yehudit:

The article reports:

“This is a party that has racist views,” [Lipstadt] said. “This is a party that condones murder. This is a party that condones the man who committed the largest mass murder in Israel by a Jew. Those are all things that I find despicable, and to say it’s just politics is really bad.”

All this leaves me wondering: What exactly do Hen Mazzig, Deborah Lipstadt, and their liberal Zionist friends think Ben-Gvir has been up to during his tenure as National Security Minister—a role that, among other things, has him overseeing the Israel Prison Service?

Did they think his noose lapel pin was just a fashion statement?

That he popped champagne after the passage of the apartheid death penalty law as a gag?

That he had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in 1994, hanging on his wall because he thought it tied the room together?

Do they think he’s joking when he boasts about starving Palestinian prisoners—“They come in fat and leave thin”—or when he proudly rebuffed the Israeli Supreme Court’s ruling that the state was failing to provide enough nutrition to ensure even “a basic level of existence” and had to remedy it?

Are they actually surprised that the minister who celebrated his birthday with a noose-themed cake oversees a prison regime of torture and humiliation targeting the people he is desperately trying to execute?

In short, I find it rather bizarre that many liberal Zionists will concede that Ben-Gvir is evil, yet react with complete outrage and incredulity the moment the evil he has brought to bear is exposed.

The only way to hold these contradictory beliefs is to remain in complete denial about the extent to which Israel’s state apparatus has been captured by figures whom even they would regard as sadistic—and about the degree to which those figures, rather than being fringe, reflect the spirit of Israel itself, including the soldiers, prison guards, police officers, and settlers who carry out their orders.

Sde Teiman, for reference, is the Israeli prison where guards were filmed sodomizing a shackled Palestinian detainee.

Once you’ve spent enough time around settlers and soldiers in the West Bank, you begin to understand that they humiliate Palestinians as a matter of course. A soldier swiping a tray of fresh cookies off the counter of a Hebron cafe; pistol-whipping an elderly shepherd for complaining that a settler had stolen his sheep; strip-searching a woman in a hijab at a checkpoint. These little indignities unfold everywhere you look.

And the impulse to defile has been on full display since October 7. How many IDF soldiers filmed themselves dancing in the underwear of Palestinian women whose homes they’d occupied? What do you think these men would’ve done if those women were around?

Kristof writes that “decades of covering conflict” has taught him that “a combination of dehumanization and impunity” can lead to the type of savagery that often includes sexual violence. So it should come as no surprise that some of the worst abuses are taking place inside Israeli prisons, which effectively became black sites after October 7 when the state barred the Red Cross from visiting “security prisoners” indefinitely, in open defiance of international law.

To be clear, Israeli prisons were never a summer camp. And Israeli forces—whether in Gaza, the West Bank, Arab towns in ‘48, or the prison system—have never been a benevolent force. But under this government, they’ve channeled the id of a racist state more nakedly than ever before, effectively handed carte blanche by political leadership to humiliate and brutalize their “human animal” subjects.

Watch the video below and then ask yourself: Where exactly do you think this man draws the line?

To quote an Israeli MK in defense of raping Palestinian prisoners: “Everything is legitimate.”

On Thursday, Netanyahu announced that he’d instructed his “legal advisers to consider the harshest legal action against the New York Times and Nicholas Kristof”:

One way to fight these supposed “lies” in the court of public opinion would be to abide by international law and allow the Red Cross into the prisons. One has to assume that hasn’t happened for the same reason international journalists are still barred from entering Gaza.

I’ve said for a long time that one of the great failures of the press since October 7 has been its near-total silence on the 10,000+ Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, many without charge, in what Israeli human rights groups have called a “network of torture camps.” This has been the case precisely because the prison system is a perfect distillation of what Zionism looks like in practice: a state apparatus organized around domination, humiliation, and dehumanization. Today, confronting that reality unravels the liberal Zionist fantasy that Israel’s extremists are somehow cordoned off from the rest of society and devoid of significant material influence. Now that a mainstream outlet has finally exposed what’s happening inside these prisons, the country’s defenders are understandably treating it as a grave threat.1

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Two additional stories from the past week illustrate how the cruelty of settlers and soldiers that even liberal Zionists can occasionally muster the courage to criticize are not aberrations at all, but expressions of Israeli policy.

Last Friday, a video went viral showing settlers in the occupied West Bank forcing Palestinians at gunpoint to exhume the body of a village elder who had died and been buried earlier that day. In response to the outrage, the IDF released a statement condemning “any attempt to act in a manner that harms public order, the rule of law, and the dignity of the living and the deceased.”

But the settlers, who were accompanied by soldiers, weren’t acting out of random malice. They had come down from Sa-Nur, one of the newly minted northern West Bank settlements, formally reestablished by the government last month, just over twenty years after its evacuation.

In an interview with the Times of Israel, Meir Goldmintz, a “heavily bearded yeshiva teacher,” looked out at the neighboring Palestinian villages from his new home in Sa-Nur and said, “I don’t know why they are here. This is Jewish land.”

According to the government that illegally handed the settlers that land, Goldmintz is exactly right. Who can really blame him for not wanting a cemetery in his new backyard?

Just south of Sa-Nur, near the tiny secular settlement of Shaked, the Israeli Civil Administration—the bureaucratic arm of the occupation now effectively controlled by Bezalel Smotrich—uprooted 3,000 “illegal” Palestinian olive trees to clear space for settlement expansion. (The concept of “illegal trees” is difficult to wrap your head around.) You cannot overstate the cruelty of this—many olive trees in the West Bank are hundreds of years old, with families harvesting them for generations.

But again, it wasn’t random; according to the Times of Israel, “Smotrich said the trees were planted within the boundaries of the zoning masterplan for Shahak [an industrial park near the Shaked settlement] and that removing them would enable the further expansion of the industrial park together with the establishment of a new settlement, in accordance with policies the government has already approved.”

In other words, this move, like the reestablishment of Sa-Nur, is part of the Israeli government’s broader effort to repopulate and entrench Israeli control over the northern occupied West Bank. It’s the same project that was on display last week at the settler real-estate fair held inside Park East Synagogue, where developers marketed homes in Karnei Shomron, another growing settlement in the north. Protesting that, of course, was deemed antisemitic.

Zionism is filled with contradictions, which means that liberal Zionism requires a staggering amount of cognitive dissonance to hold in one’s head. The same mental gymnastics that allow people to condemn Itamar Ben-Gvir while denying his actual influence allow them to divorce these daily acts of cruelty—the exhuming of bodies, the uprooting of trees—from the reality that they’re advancing the central state project of ethnic cleansing, one materially supported in synagogues across the United States.

One final note. Israel’s i24 News reported on Tuesday that the IDF is expected to close the case against the undercover agents who shot and killed four members of the Odeh family—a mother, father, and two of their children, aged seven and five—as they drove home from a Ramadan shopping trip.

The agents who fired the shots were never even questioned.

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Infinite Jaz exists because I believe reporting on Israel-Palestine, and the systems of power that shape it, should not be filtered through the priorities of billionaires and politically biased, risk-averse institutions.

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Last Tuesday, just after noon, a Jewish settler took up position on a hillside overlooking the Al-Mughayyir Boys’ Secondary School in the central occupied West Bank, searched for a clear line of sight, crouched, aimed his assault rifle at a group of children, and opened fire. In footage from the scene, children can be heard screaming as the shooter pauses, advances several steps down the hill, scans the area, and resumes firing. At one point, he drops to a knee, steadies his aim, and fires more.

As Zeteo reported, inside the school, “students were throwing themselves behind desks, pressing against walls, or freezing where they stood. Teachers moved fast, locking doors, pulling children away from windows, turning classrooms into holding rooms where the only lesson was staying still and quiet.”

Minutes earlier, the shooter and his armed companions—a mix of settlers and Israeli soldiers—had been spotted by teachers, who made split-second decisions to attempt to hide or evacuate the children. Fourteen-year-old Aws Hamdi Al-Nassan was part of the latter group. He was shot in the back of the head. By the time teachers ran through a hail of gunfire and reached him, he was dead. (Seven years earlier, Aws’s father was killed by settlers, too, shot in the back.)

As word spread through the small village, parents rushed to the school to retrieve their children, and neighbors ran toward the scene to help. One of them, 32-year-old Jihad Abu Naim—the younger brother of an English teacher at the school—was shot in the chest. He bled out on the school grounds, leaving behind a wife who was eight months pregnant with their first child. Four others were wounded by gunfire as well, including two more kids.1

Here in America, and in most places in the world, we have a straightforward label for incidents like this: school shooting. Every visceral detail—from the cold, composed gunman hunting children like prey, to students hiding under desks, to adults killed while trying to shield the youth from bullets—feels grimly familiar.

But there are key differences. When there’s a school shooting here in the States, invariably, one of only three things happens to the shooter: they are killed by police, they take their own life at the scene, or they are arrested and spend the rest of their life in prison. Escape is completely unheard of. Last December, when it briefly appeared that a shooter had gotten away after killing two at Brown University, a massive manhunt kicked into gear, ending days later when his body was found in a storage container, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. (During the search, a defamatory conspiracy theory spread online, falsely accusing a Palestinian student who had nothing to do with it.)

This is not to suggest that the Al-Mughayyir school shooter escaped, per se. That would imply there was someone chasing him. Instead, soldiers stood by as the rampage unfolded over approximately twenty minutes. That inaction wasn’t a case of fear or paralysis, the kind sometimes cited after school security forces fail to confront active shooters. The gunman was an IDF reservist himself, moving through the village alongside other soldiers who allowed him to hunt undisturbed.

In America, the names of towns where school shootings take place become shorthand for the horror—Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde—etched into the national consciousness. But how many people outside the West Bank have even heard of Al-Mughayyir, let alone know that a school there was shot up last Tuesday?

In the U.S., politicians descend on these towns to mourn with families and perform solidarity. In Al-Mughayyir, the Israeli military marked the tragedy by raiding the village, firing tear gas and stun grenades as the locals buried their dead.

And what about the motive? In America, police look for manifestos, and online sleuths pore over social media histories to search for clues. In the West Bank, there’s no need to even speculate. The settler who shot up a school in the West Bank did so as part of a racist, nationalist campaign of terror, determined to chase Palestinians off their own land. Duh!

This is a tired game, I know, but it’s worth running back from time to time: What would happen if this occurred the other way around? If Palestinian militants from the West Bank broke into Israel or a Jewish settlement and shot up a school, killing a child and an adult and wounding four others? Is there any doubt that this would be breaking news in every major outlet of the Western world? No, there is no doubt—it would be an enormous story, as it should be! We should never become numb to children being gunned down. And yet, here we are. The powers-that-be in the “civilized” world have long since accepted that this is who Israel is.

The story barely registered. The Western outlets that did cover it framed it as another incident of “settler violence,” obfuscating the reality of what was an ideologically driven school shooting and an act of terror.

Nearly two weeks later, the gunman has not been arrested. The IDF’s explanation, provided to the New York Times and other outlets, is that “rocks [were] being thrown at an Israeli vehicle carrying several people, including a reserve soldier… [the reservist] exited the vehicle and opened fire at suspects in the area.” Putting aside the fact that this Israeli vehicle was driving through a Palestinian village where it had no business being, the account is still directly contradicted by video footage: the shooter was at least 200 meters from the road, calmly taking aim and opening fire at the school. But the Times has not bothered to follow up on the story with this minor detail.

This past Tuesday, a week after the shooting, the children of Al-Mughayyir were back in class—traumatized and utterly defenseless—while the man who fired an assault rifle into their school and killed one of their peers roams free, unburdened by any fear of consequences, welcome to return to the scene of his crime as murderous settlers so often do.

Two days after the shooting, IDF soldiers shot a 15-year-old Palestinian dead during a raid on Nablus. In a statement, the IDF said that “during operational activity by security forces in Nablus… a terrorist threw stones at the forces.”

Despite following the occupation closely for over a decade and reporting on it for more than two years, I’m still not used to the fact that the IDF’s media-approved language calls a fifteen-year-old with a rock a “terrorist” when he’s facing armored soldiers and tanks. I don’t know what I find more upsetting—the hubris required to believe this will be deemed acceptable by the civilized world, or the fact that they’re largely right.

Sorry, I must play this game one more time: What would the reaction be if Palestinian gunmen shot settler children dead every time they threw a stone? Let me tell you, that would be a lot of dead Jewish kids.

On Sunday, a new report revealed that IDF Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, who oversees military operations in the West Bank, acknowledged in a closed forum that the military permits the use of live fire against Palestinian stone-throwers, but not Israeli ones. As the Times of Israel reports, “Bluth said he does not support opening fire on Israeli stone-throwers despite the similar danger they pose, acknowledging that ‘there is some discrimination’ in enforcement. He warned that such incidents carry broader societal implications, saying, ‘I’m not sure that opening fire on every Israeli stone-thrower… would help; I think it would do the exact opposite.’”

The “societal implications” of shooting Palestinians is more useful, in his mind—he referred to maimed Palestinians as “limping monuments,” an effective form of deterrence.

Alongside these admissions—and the routine labeling of Palestinian stone-throwers as “terrorists”—it’s worth remembering that the Israelis have always had an “expansive” definition of terrorism, to put it mildly. Bluth acknowledged that the IDF in the West Bank is “killing as we have not killed since 1967,” while warning that rising settler violence could spark a Palestinian uprising, advising “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet that, although overall Palestinian terror levels are low, tensions are building beneath the surface… point[ing] to a direct link between settler attacks and Palestinian violence.”

In other words, a Palestinian uprising in response to Israeli violence would be deemed terrorism.

Ex-Mossad chief Tamir Pardo added to the definition this week while touring Palestinian villages in the West Bank and discussing settler violence:

“My mother is a Holocaust survivor,” Pardo said. “What I saw here today reminded me of events that happened in the last century in a very developed country – the same phenomena directed there against Jews. And I feel ashamed to be a Jew here today.”

The authorities, he added, “know what is happening here and choose to ignore it.” By doing so – and by supporting the violent settlers both politically and financially – he declared that the Israeli government “is planting the seeds for the next October 7.”

The October 7 Hamas attack, he acknowledges, was a direct response to Israeli brutality, akin to Jews fighting back against their Nazi jailers during the Third Reich. (His comparison, not mine—and one that would be classified as antisemitism according to the IHRA definition.)

Still, I have no doubt that even Tamir Pardo, this enlightened Israeli, would call October 7 an act of terror. It is simply taken as fact by the Israeli state, even the “liberals,” that whatever is done to Palestinians—schools shot up, livestock stolen, homes demolished, families driven off their land—any violent response, even throwing a rock, is labeled terrorism ipso facto, punishable by death.

The Guardian reported that,

A few hours after Aws was killed outside his school, settlers attacked and demolished a British- and European-funded school for Palestinian children in a village 25 miles to the north.

In Hammamat al-Maleh, in the northern Jordan valley, settlers used bulldozers to raze four classrooms, school toilets and the two playground areas into a heap of twisted metal and crumpled plastic, scattered with ruined books…

In the south Hebron Hills, on 13 April Israeli settlers put razor-wire across the road to the school attended by Palestinian children from Umm al-Khair village, blocking students from crossing since then.

Here’s another school in the occupied West Bank—this one featured in a Facebook video posted last week by a well-known Jewish settler:

What you’re looking at, to be clear, is a terrorist training camp for Jewish children and young men. The irony is rich, given that Israel has accused the Palestinian Authority for years of teaching terrorism and hate in its schools, demanding reform.

If you’ve witnessed a coordinated attack by settlers in the West Bank, the existence of these camps should come as no surprise. Does this look like someone who picked up a stick on a whim in Turmus’ayya?

Of course not. This is a trained militant.

For years, the Israeli press has been reporting on these training camps—and on settler outposts that groom troubled Israeli youth into child soldiers. Here is Haaretz last year:

Even more worrying, there is active recruitment of youth-at-risk to join the ranks in the hilltops, with West Bank farms officially recognized by welfare services as foster institutions.

The very communities and families charged with protecting their safety are instead enlisting them into vigilante combat.

The long chain of neglect reaches deep into the religious Zionist community…

If you’re wondering how deep support for these Jewish terror schools goes, it reaches directly into countless synagogues in America. Last week, the Jewish National Fund, which fundraises within synagogues all across the U.S., announced it would cut “funding of programs in settler outpost farms in the West Bank… Regretfully, under the guise of education, it turned out we were supporting activities aimed at bringing youth at risk to the settlements to help dispossess Palestinians from their land,” JNF’s chairman said.

The JNF funds were handed over to several groups which, under the guise of educational and vocational activities, recruited school dropouts to these outposts. Although participants were meant to return to their homes after completing their training programs, many stayed on and became involved in activities targeting Palestinians. As a result, the JNF, through its program, inadvertently helped transform many at-risk youth into "hilltop youth" – a phrase often used to describe the young extremist settlers who launch violent attacks against Palestinians from illegal outposts in the West Bank.

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe for a second that this was “inadvertent”: as I’ve written many times before, settler violence is the vanguard of the entire settlement project. How else do they think more land keeps magically opening up to be settled?

But even if you take the JNF at its word that this was all an accident, you’re still left with the plain fact that synagogues across the U.S. have been raising money for programs that transform young, troubled Jews into terrorists.

Outside those same synagogues, protesters are smeared as terror supporters—while inside, literal material support for terror is provided without consequence. Will this inconvenient fact be mentioned the next time a protest outside a synagogue settlement fair shocks the nation? (Not for nothing, it’s the exact accusation hurled at countless mosques after 9/11.)

I’ve long said that “redeeming” Judaism, whatever that means, is not a priority as long as the genocide of Palestinians goes on. But it’s worth pointing out, from time to time, that we, as Jews, are in quite a bit of trouble ourselves if our institutions continue aligning themselves so directly—and materially—with Israeli terror.

Until that changes, we’re on the side of the school shooters.

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So I wanted to talk to him directly and ask: Hasan, why is this happening? What do these people actually want from you? What does it feel like to suddenly be treated as a political issue on par with healthcare or affordability? What did you do in a past life to deserve this? Are you okay?

We get into the mechanics of the smear campaign against him, including a breakdown of Olivia Reingold’s now-infamous fabrication in The Free Press, before widening out to other questions: coalition politics vs. leftist purity; whether there’s a place for “recovering liberal Zionists” in the pro-Palestine movement; what actual antisemitism looks like right now; and what to make of figures like Tucker Carlson positioning themselves as anti-Israel voices.

Finally, we turn to the West Bank, where the violence is constant and largely invisible—including a school shooting this past week—and discuss what it would take to make people here actually pay attention.

Infinite Jaz exists because I believe reporting on Israel-Palestine, and the systems of power that shape it, should not be filtered through the priorities of billionaires and politically biased, risk-averse institutions.

But all of my reporting is self-funded, and it cannot continue without your support. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank. A one-year subscription comes out to just over a dollar a week.

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This is a regular feature for paid subscribers where I share what’s on my mind, react to the news, and offer suggested reading, listening, watching, and more. The goal is to add nuance to the noise around Israel-Palestine and to leave you better equipped to understand what’s happening beneath the headlines.

This week, I’m writing about Israel’s new apartheid death penalty law, the shifting political consensus on the Iron Dome, updates from the ground in the West Bank, revealing headlines in Israeli papers, and the re-education of Ezra Klein.

Infinite Jaz exists because I believe reporting on Israel-Palestine, and the systems of power that shape it, should not be filtered through the priorities of billionaires and politically biased, risk-averse institutions.

But it cannot continue without your support. If my work has mattered to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank.

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Infinite Jaz exists because I believe reporting on Israel-Palestine, and the systems of power that shape it, should not be filtered through the priorities of billionaires and politically biased, risk-averse institutions.

But it cannot continue without your support. If my work has mattered to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank.

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A very funny and ridiculous but also not-funny and ominous thing happened on the internet this past week. Olivia Reingold of The Free Press—owned by CBS’s Bari Weiss—covered a much-talked-about political rally, in which Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed stumped with the popular left-wing streamer Hasan Piker. The announcement of the event had already generated a three-week news cycle, in which Piker—a proud anti-Zionist who is doing more than anyone to combat the real antisemitism festering in dark corners of the internet—was smeared as antisemitic. As Trump threatened to end a 3,000-year-old civilization, prominent pundits and Democrats lined up to criticize El-Sayed for sharing a stage with Hasan Piker.

During the actual event, footage of an exchange between Reingold and El-Sayed—coming after he had already fielded a barrage of hostile questions from her—went viral.

The internet, which has recently caught on to the fact that the question of whether “a state has a right to exist” doesn’t actually mean anything, was quick to point out that Reingold froze when asked to define what she herself had asked.

Here is how Reingold characterized the interaction the following day (the same language was used in her Free Press article, Michigan Gets Its Own Mamdani):

You may have noticed that Reingold, who is Jewish1, misquoted El-Sayed, something that The Free Press later corrected:

But there’s another, more telling detail they failed to correct. To see it, you have to set aside, for a moment, the awful prose of “he retorted, narrowing his eyes”—young writers, please note that “he said” was right there—and focus instead on its accuracy:

Do you see any narrowing of his eyes? Of course not. If anything, El-Sayed’s expression is extraordinarily warm, given the rhetorical game he’s being subjected to—and the constant defamations he’s forced to respond to. In my culture, we’d say that he’s acting here like a mensch.

After I pointed this out on X, many people had fun with it. A few of my favorites:

One more, since I really couldn’t help myself:

Okay, now that the jokes are out of the way, it’s worth being precise about what exactly happened here: Olivia Reingold, a star reporter for what is effectively a CBS-affiliate, fabricated a detail in her story from whole cloth to portray El-Sayed as a nefarious, antisemitic Muslim. For actual reporters, this is not trivial. It is, in fact, a very big deal: lying to advance your narrative is a cardinal sin in our field. These are the details that make stories come to life, and Reingold’s lie that El-Sayed “narrowed his eyes” is a perfect one to go alongside the relentless Islamophobic characterization of men with names like Hasan Piker and Abdul El-Sayed.

I’ve had many true details cut from stories by editors on the grounds that I couldn’t prove without a shadow of a doubt that they actually happened—through visual evidence, corroborating witnesses, or confirmation from the subject themselves—even though the editors believed me. Serious publications observe an abundance of caution to avoid having to issue corrections.

Reingold, for her part, attended Columbia Journalism School, where she presumably learned the same cautionary tales I did at NYU, about reporters like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, whose careers ended in disgrace after they were exposed as serial fabulists. This is apparently not a concern when working at The Free Press. The fact that the publication left this fabrication in—despite a viral video that readily disproves it—suggests that Bari Weiss, who has rapidly become one of the most powerful figures in American media, is willing to sideline the truth when it conflicts with a prefab narrative.

The irony is hard to miss coming from a reporter and outlet that accused the media of lying about the Gaza famine by profiling starving children with preexisting conditions.

The episode is a good microcosm of the broader antisemitism hysteria since October 7. On the journalism front, Adam Johnson made a good point about how writers like Reingold have boxed themselves into a corner with their own delusional narratives, leaving them reliant on imagined details that inevitably read as flowery and unreal.

But I am being optimistic—the general news-following public is not reading lines like this and immediately recognizing them as unreal, but instead taking them at face value. Such distortions have flourished for decades in the mainstream media, calcifying racist narratives into conventional wisdom.

Which leads me to the even graver issue—and please bear with me through this moderate leap—of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and the way it is routinely obscured through toothless condemnations of settler violence.

For years, I’ve written about how ritual condemnations of settler violence serve as a pressure release valve for Israel’s broader project of ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank. When footage grows bad enough and international outrage builds, Israeli officials and their allies step out to placate their critics—Yes, we agree with you, this is bad, but they’re just a few bad apples!—quarantining the supposed “fringe youth” who commit the violent acts. The more “liberal” among the tsk-tskers, like NYC Congressmen Dan Goldman and Richie Torres, call on the Israeli government to prosecute the violent settlers, obscuring the basic fact that this is the same government that funds, arms, and protects them. The call, in other words, is for the foxes to get serious about henhouse security.

The violence has been so bad over the past month that even some settler leaders joined in on the condemnations:

The event was called, “Yes to the Land of Israel. No to Violence,” begging the question: How do they propose to take over the ‘Land of Israel,’ where three million Palestinians live, without violence?

Well, they can’t, and that’s where the Israeli government comes in: as the condemnations calm the outrage and attention fades, the cabinet quietly rewards the settlers by authorizing their illegal gains, approving new settlements on the land they’ve violently emptied of Palestinians. This is why the settlers are known to their supporters as “Jewish pioneers,” pushing the frontiers of the Land of Israel—and why settler leaders roll their eyes and accuse their pro-Israel critics of hypocrisy, knowing they’re simply doing the state’s dirty work when they terrorize defenseless Palestinians.

Well, here it is playing out in plain sight. Amid the explosion of settler violence during the war on Iran and the ensuing wave of condemnations, the Israeli cabinet quietly approved a record-breaking number of new settlements, including many that began as bases of settler terror in the northern West Bank, the epicenter of the past few weeks’ pogroms. These 34 new settlements will now be fast-tracked for state support, with access to funding, public utilities, municipal services, building permits, and more. It’s the largest batch ever authorized at one time, bringing the total under the current government to 103. By contrast, in the three decades between the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the new government in late 2022, six new settlements were formally approved.

At a ceremony for one of the new settlements, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich congratulated the “twelve core families of pioneers,” a reference to the settlers who broke Israeli law to establish an illegal outpost and waited out the clock for the government’s rubber stamp, which had finally come. He also promised that the settlement movement would push into Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.

Elisha Yered, the Hilltop Youth settler leader accused of murder (whom I write about often), celebrated the announcement as a “historic” breakthrough—not just for the number of settlements approved, but for their strategic placement deep in the northern West Bank, the same region where he’s led a campaign of terror in recent weeks. He described it as evidence that the government recognizes that the settlers are nearing completion of the takeover of Area C, and are now preparing the ground for the next phase: pushing settlements into Areas A and B. Yes to the Land of Israel!

“The order of the hour is to storm the next goal of the settlement,” Yered wrote. “To abolish the Oslo Accords with your feet!”

On Thursday, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, concurred, visiting an infamously violent outpost deep in Area B and declaring that it was “time to wean off” the Oslo Accords. (I think I can speak for Jews across the diaspora in saying: thank you, sir, for combating antisemitism.)

And Haaretz reported that the new chief of the Shin Bet—the agency ostensibly responsible for cracking down on settler violence—does not refer to attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank as “Jewish terror,” but rather as “cases of friction” between Jews and Palestinians. Notably, he’s using the exact same euphemism as Elisha Yered, who has openly described their violent incursions into Palestinian villages as attempts to “generate friction.”

So my question is this: Will Dan Goldman, Richie Torres, and even those “respected settler leaders” clamoring for a “peaceful takeover” of the Land of Israel—all of whom condemned settler violence last month—acknowledge that the Israeli government, rather than heed their calls to crack down on the perpetrators, has responded by rewarding them for their acts of terror? Doubtful!

YNet reported that “According to two officials familiar with the matter, the approval of the new settlements was kept under wraps during the war at the request of the United States.” This is, of course, the reason Israel is undertaking a de facto annexation in the first place: Jewish control of the West Bank continues expanding unabated without crossing the “red line” of formal annexation set by the U.S., Europe, and several Gulf states. The hollow condemnations can be swatted away with no fear of material consequences.

I want to revisit the viral CNN moment from last month, which has become a neat case study in how all this works. First, a refresher:

1. In the middle of the night on March 26, settlers stormed the Palestinian village of Tayasir, beating 75-year-old Abdullah Daraghmeh while he slept, breaking his skull and several bones in his face, and knocking several of his teeth out. By morning, the settlers had set up a new outpost.

2. The following day, as CNN’s Jeremy Diamond visited Tayasir to report on the attack, he and his cameraman were accosted by IDF soldiers. The soldiers told him, in no uncertain terms, that they were seeking revenge for the death of a young settler, that they believed Jews are entitled to the whole West Bank, and that they were working to help turn the illegal outpost into a legal settlement—the exact process I have just described that culminates in a formal government authorization.

3. After the footage went viral, the IDF quickly condemned the comments, saying they do not represent the IDF, and announced the suspension of the battalion. They also said that the outpost had been evacuated.

Here’s what happened when the cameras stopped rolling:

4. The next day, settlers returned to the evacuated outpost to rebuild it and terrorize Tayasir once again, wounding four Palestinians and torching homes and cars. Soldiers were nowhere to be found—except days later, when they joined the settlers in their outpost rebuilding efforts.

5. Attacks on Tayasir continued. On April 7, during a settler incursion backed by the IDF, a soldier shot and killed a young man, Alaa Khaled Sbiah, who had come out to defend his village.

6. Step six has not happened yet, but a question for the future: If (and when) this outpost is formally authorized as a settlement, will the media connect it to its history of violence?

Centrist and right-wing media in Israel were quick to label the murder near Tayasir as a foiled terror attack—quite a way to describe a response to an armed invasion. But, again, this is precisely the point of these settler incursions or “land patrols”: to “generate friction.” To Israeli authorities, the Palestinian response to this “friction” is known as “terrorism,” which then serves as justification for additional state and military resources. IDF chief Eyal Zamir admitted as much during the meeting in which 34 new settlements were approved, reportedly telling the cabinet that “he was ‘raising 10 red flags’ over the IDF’s manpower levels, arguing that the military would need additional personnel to meet its expanding operational demands, including those stemming from settlement expansion.”

From my piece, Good Settler, Bad Settler, in November:

Just this week, the Knesset advanced a bill granting major new tax breaks to West Bank settlements deemed “under threat,” a designation made by the IDF Central Command, inseparable from the dynamics of encroachment that produce those threats: The deeper a settlement pushes into Palestinian land, the more “dangerous” its surroundings become, manufacturing the “insecurity” that then entitles it to further state support.

The irony here—and what Zamir may be hinting at—is that many people believe the devastating effectiveness of the October 7 attack was, in part, a consequence of the IDF being stretched thin protecting West Bank settlements rather than stationed along the Gaza border. And October 7, of course, led to the annihilation of Gaza, which has quietly transitioned into a process of resettling it. That is to say, October 7 has proven to be a boon for the settlement movement across the Land of Israel.

“But Jasper,” you might ask, suspiciously, “do you really think that all of this—the provocations, the violence, the condemnations—is meant to expand the settlement project?”

“At the end of the day,” I retort, narrowing my eyes, “all roads in Israel lead to settling.”

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1

More specifically, Reingold decided to be Jewish on October 8, 2023, and it has certainly paid off for her career.

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I sat down with my friend Séamus Malekafzali—co-host of the Turbulence podcast and one of the sharpest analysts I know on the Middle East—to make sense of the war on Iran and what it reveals about the U.S.-Israel relationship.

We recorded this on April 9th, at the start of a “ceasefire” that didn’t seem to exist on paper and a bombardment of Beirut that was still ongoing. In addition to providing a sweeping overview of the state of things, Séamus offers a crucial intervention in the debate over whether the “tail is wagging the dog” or the “dog is wagging the tail,” laying out, instead, a feedback loop between the U.S. and Israel that generates a “collaborative impunity,” decades in the making.

We also get into the psychoanalytic dimension of Zionist expansionism and what it means that America seems to be importing the same ideological structure without any of the scaffolding holding it up.

Finally, Séamus reveals what comes after American hegemony…

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The book is, in large part, a reckoning with failure. Malley and Agha describe a process that continually reinforced a terrible status quo, never imposed meaningful consequences on Israel, and ultimately set the stage for October 7 and the genocide that followed. The last 2.5 years have not been a rupture, they argue, but a return to the conflict’s more “primitive form,” now stripped of “the pretense of a hollow peace process.”

The interview is long, but we cover a tremendous amount of ground. I highly recommend listening in full if you want to cut through the myths and false narratives that pervade the discourse and hear from someone who was actually in the room.

Infinite Jaz exists because I believe reporting on Israel-Palestine, and the systems of power that shape it, should not be filtered through the priorities of billionaires and politically biased, risk-averse institutions.

But all of my reporting is self-funded, and it cannot continue without your support. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank. A one-year subscription comes out to just over a dollar a week.

Subscribe now

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We start with the foundational mismatch between the political objectives of the peace process and actual Palestinian aspirations, unpacking how it benefited elites on all sides, regardless of the outcome. We deconstruct the two-state solution—a foreign concept with little connection to realities on the ground—and how it became a convenient shield for American politicians to feign concern for Palestinians without ever acting on their behalf.

We talk about the U.S.’s role more broadly, of which he writes: “Far from improving the situation, its involvement in Israeli-Palestinian affairs and stranglehold on the peace process often made things worse… It is worth pondering where things would stand if the United States had not bothered with the conflict at all.”

Malley provides a firsthand account of the Oslo Accords, whose failure “may be the least surprising thing about it, given the deceit on which it was built.” We go deep on Camp David and how the summit has been mythologized, including by both Bill and Hillary Clinton in viral clips over the last several years, claiming the Palestinians squandered a once-in-a-lifetime peace opportunity.

We examine the Palestinian Authority as a mechanism for depoliticizing Palestinian nationalism—transforming the PA into a security subcontractor for Israel and a “giant ATM” for a class of functionaries dependent on Western money. We discuss the fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement and the 2006 election of Hamas, which many have used to assign collective blame to Palestinians for October 7, and imagine the alternate history in which Hamas is diplomatically engaged.

We cover the déjà vu of the Biden administration’s post-October 7 failures—“criticizing with one hand Israeli policies it enabled with the other”—as well as his sudden invocation of the two-state solution, as though the conditions for it had somehow emerged from genocidal violence.

We discuss Trump—hopelessly ignorant, corrupt, and cruel, but at least a relief from “America’s moral vanity, feckless expressions of empathy, and convictions devoid of courage. If you are not going to lift a finger for the Palestinians, have the decency not to pretend to care.”

And we close on what new frameworks might actually be useful for thinking about what comes next: “The days that lie ahead will be more instinctive and raw than cerebral or logical. They will be inhospitable to ready-made grand solutions. This is not a world built by or for Americans. They will be at sea.”

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Last Saturday afternoon in the northern occupied West Bank, three young settlers from Shuva Yisrael Farms—an illegal hilltop outpost outside of Nablus—set out on their ATV for a “land patrol” of Palestinian villages in PA-controlled Area A. It ended in a collision with a truck driven by a Palestinian that left one of them, 18-year-old Yehuda Sherman, dead. What followed was a series of settler pogroms that, even by today’s standards, were shocking in their ferocity and scale.

There are two different versions of what led to Yehuda Sherman’s death. In one, it was a traffic accident on a dangerous road. In the other, it was a terrorist car-ramming attack by a Palestinian driver.

At first, Israeli police said they were investigating it as an accident. The Palestinian driver, who turned himself in after being released from the hospital, maintained that it was just that. As have local witnesses.

But almost immediately, Yehuda’s older brother Daniel—the leader of the outpost who was with him on the ATV—was telling reporters from his hospital bed that the truck had deliberately accelerated into them, sending the ATV careening into a ravine, after which they were surrounded by local “Arabs” who threw stones and cursed at them for forty minutes before Israeli security forces rescued them.

The terrorist car-ramming claim was quickly amplified by settler leaders, politicians, and right-wing media, who wasted no time in calling for revenge:

Within hours of Sherman’s death, hundreds of settlers were descending on small villages across the northern West Bank in coordinated raids—moving in successive waves between communities, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, setting homes and cars ablaze, and beating residents. Israeli troops and police were present in multiple locations but did nothing to stop the attacks. Dozens of Palestinians were injured, and residents described widespread terror as violence spread to roughly twenty locations in a single night.

On Sunday, new footage emerged from the aftermath of the wreck, showing Palestinian residents and Red Crescent workers evacuating and treating the wounded settlers, directly contradicting Daniel Sherman’s account, and calling into question his characterization of the collision itself.

But the die had already been cast.

That same day, Yehuda Sherman’s funeral was held. His father described him as a sacrifice offered up by the Jewish people in the struggle to establish Jewish settlements across the West Bank and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. In a later interview, he recalled 11-year-old Yehuda “walking on Sabbaths to remote hills to reinforce them.” He called on the government to abolish the Oslo Accords and vowed to establish three new illegal outposts in his son’s name.

Finance Minister and de facto West Bank Governor Bezalel Smotrich spoke too, promising that, in Yehuda’s memory, they would “erase the lines, the definitions and the letters, and settle our land in all its parts”—the lines and letters a reference to Oslo’s Areas A, B, and C—and “collapse the authority of evil and terror called the Palestinian Authority.”

Together, the speeches served as a rallying cry for vigilante support for policies the Israeli government has been implementing for years.

As the funeral was underway, messages circulated in settler WhatsApp groups urging supporters to once again gather at junctions across the northern West Bank to seek “revenge and the expulsion of the enemy.”

The spate of pogroms entered its second night. In the village of Deir al-Khatib near Nablus, settlers set fire to buildings and vehicles, threw stones at homes, and shot at residents, wounding at least ten Palestinians, including one man hit in the leg. In Deir Sharaf, several cars were torched. Near Qaryut, tires were burned and Israeli flags were raised. In the Jordan Valley, settlers beat an activist badly enough to require emergency medical treatment. In the nearby village of Burqa, settlers torched a vehicle and a local tourist agency and attempted to set fire to a clinic. In Hawara, settlers broke into a Palestinian high school, removed the rooftop Palestinian flag and raised an Israeli one in its place, spray-painting revenge slogans, including “A good Arab is a dead Arab.”

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On Thursday, as the pogroms entered their sixth day—or, perhaps, as a new baseline of violence took hold in the West Bank, who’s to say?—the Shin Bet announced that the Palestinian driver had “admitted to the acts attributed to him,” though they did not specify what acts. His interrogation took place without the presence of a lawyer, a setting in which purported confessions by Palestinians should hardly be taken at face value. The Shin Bet also reported that “suspicion is growing” that the crash was deliberate, an unusually ambiguous framing in the context of a supposed confession.

Despite these reasons for doubt, plus my own hard-earned distrust of Israeli authorities, it is not implausible to me that this was, in fact, a deliberate car-ramming. During the Second Intifada, attacks on settlers were fairly common, and having dealt with many settlers myself, I understand just a fraction of the restraint required of Palestinians in the West Bank, and am often surprised it does not break more often. So, even though I’ve seen no evidence to support it, I’ll assume for the sake of argument that this is what happened.

In that case, the extremist leaders of the settlement movement got exactly what they were looking for. For decades, its most ideological wing has been explicit about its goal: a decisive, even messianic confrontation to settle the land dispute once and for all. A holy war, if you will.

On a crowdfunding page for Shuva Yisrael Farms, the illegal outpost where Yehuda lived, its mission is described as being “the spearhead for activities throughout northern Samaria with the goal of seizing the lands and leaving them in Jewish hands.” At the funeral, a fellow hilltop settler described Yehuda’s work as part of a “strategic mission” to expel Palestinians from the West Bank and advance Jewish settlement in the territory. The settler leader Elisha Yered, whose call for “Jews, revenge!” preceded the pogroms, said earlier this month on a podcast, referring to incursions into Palestinian villages, “Without question, we are initiating friction. And we’re proud of that.”

Anyone who has spent time in Palestinian villages in the West Bank is familiar with the type of “land patrol” that Yehuda was conducting before his death. The settlers often arrive on state-gifted ATVs, circling village perimeters, chasing shepherds off their own farmland, sometimes brandishing weapons. At times they dismount, entering the villages themselves, even homes, getting in the faces of residents and activists, playing a high-stakes version of the child’s game I’m not touching you. In some cases, they are children, as young as ten or eleven. Some, like Yehuda, are born into long-established settler families—his grandfather made aliya from Cleveland in 1973. Others are at-risk youth from within Israel, adopted by outpost communities, some of which are formally recognized as foster institutions, and conscripted as child soldiers in a war against their neighbors. In either case, when they show up in Palestinian communities, they are fishing for an opportunity to escalate—to (literally) call in the big guns.

Here’s a clip I filmed in October of a “land patrol” in a tiny Bedouin community east of Duma:

After this video, the same young settler returned three more times to take pictures before sending a drone to hover just above us.

As I wrote last week,

In the months since my visit, the harassment intensified: electricity lines cut, homes vandalized and filled with pepper spray, and residents repeatedly forced to flee. Eventually, the IDF declared the village a “Closed Military Zone,” barring activists from entering—a familiar tactic that creates the appearance of restoring order while leaving Palestinians more exposed to settler violence. The assaults intensified immediately, and the remaining residents understood that if they stayed, they might be killed.

Soon, the village was abandoned.

In other words, “land patrols”—like the raison d’être of Yehuda’s outpost and the broader hilltop movement—are not meant to maintain stability, but to intimidate Palestinians into leaving, or provoke a response that can then be used to justify overwhelming force and, ultimately, expulsion.

And so, Yehuda’s corpse immediately became grist for the mill—a “sacrifice,” as his own father called him—as settlers fanned out and established five new outposts in a matter of days, exceeding his father’s goal of three. Three of them were in PA-controlled Area A, effectively heeding Smotrich’s call to erase Oslo’s lines.

This is a tradition in the West Bank, settler funerals doubling as political rallies meant to channel grief into territorial expansion. Leaders like Smotrich attend to announce retaliatory “new” settlement drives that, in reality, have been planned for months or years—a “Zionist response,” as they call it. Sitting shiva is accompanied by organized violence.

On Thursday, as settlers were reconstructing a previously evacuated outpost, they opened fire on a group of Palestinians who confronted them, killing one and wounding several others—direct casualties of the incitement from Smotrich, Yehuda’s father, and countless others.

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As videos of settler violence swept across social media last week, pro-Israel Democratic politicians, some backed by AIPAC, lined up to condemn it, frame the violent settlers as a radical fringe, and call for the Israeli government to prosecute them.

Dan Goldman, my own representative who ignored me when I was attacked by settlers in October, has not used any of his own leverage—namely, conditioning U.S. military aid on compliance with human rights law—to pressure Israel to act, instead pushing for Trump to reinstate sanctions on a handful of settlers.

Even AIPAC itself got in the mix:

Many people speculated that the condemnations were coordinated, but I’m not convinced. For years, ritual condemnations of settler violence have functioned as a release valve for Israel’s supporters when the pressure becomes untenable. In this case, the videos were undeniably awful, and there was just no way to spin them. Rather than defend the indefensible or pretend they don’t exist when millions had seen the footage, they understood that the better approach was to frame the violent settlers as an unfortunate aberration. Even some settler leaders, who tend to reflexively defend violent settlers as acting in self-defense, sought to distance the perpetrators from the broader movement. I’d put AIPAC in that same category.

But beyond that, settlers have long been a thorn in the side of “liberal Zionists,” who require the possibility of a two-state solution as a political and rhetorical device to justify their support for Israel. It allows them to imagine Israel as a state that is both Jewish and democratic, because Palestinians would be partitioned off into their own state. Without that partition, the remaining possibilities are (1) ethnic cleansing, (2) apartheid, or (3) recognizing West Bank Palestinians as citizens of Israel, chipping away at its Jewish majority. The first two are the present reality, but cannot be openly endorsed by any good liberal; the third would mean relinquishing the idea of a Jewish state. So the illusion of a two-state solution must be maintained.

But the settlers are clear, in both word and deed: there will be no two-state solution; the liberal Zionists can say what they want, but they’ll be creating facts on the ground until “Judea and Samaria” is controlled entirely by Jews.

In that sense, I believe many of these lawmakers do, in fact, dislike the wayward settlers who create political problems for them—but their condemnations are entirely toothless, calling on the Israeli government to crack down as though the problem were simply a lapse in enforcement. To be sure, impunity is part of the story: as the Guardian just reported, no settler or soldier has been indicted for killing a Palestinian in the West Bank since 2019 (!!!). But that framing obscures the more important fact that the Israeli government and military are not bystanders to settler violence, but active participants in and direct beneficiaries of it.

This week, as even Israeli government and military officials condemned the surge in settler violence, the government approved some $16 million in new funding for illegal outposts—money earmarked for the infrastructure that makes territorial expansion possible: ATVs, drones, night-vision gear, cameras, generators, floodlights, and access roads. And on Wednesday, ministers reportedly approved the retroactive legalization of 30 more wildcat outposts across the West Bank, exactly the kind of illegal sites that serve as launching pads for violent attacks—“the spearhead for activities with the goal of seizing the lands and leaving them in Jewish hands,” as Yehuda’s outpost boasts.

As this obscene hypocrisy unfolded, a YNet article quoted a senior Israeli security official blaming Smotrich’s funeral speech for inciting violence before adding, “There is no problem with the growth of settlements, but it requires a different, broader strategic approach.”

This security official surely knows that settler violence is a central component of the “broader strategic approach” to settlement growth, which has been thoroughly documented in the Israeli press:

1. The army partners with settler leaders to plan and approve new outposts—mapping sites, coordinating with commanders, and issuing orders for how they will be secured.

2. Settlers then establish the outposts themselves—planting flags and caravans on Palestinian land and cutting access roads.

3. The state provides them with military protection; some are gifted guns, drones, ATVs, other military-grade gear, money, and infrastructure.

4. The settlers fan out from their new outposts, terrorizing neighboring villages, often with soldiers either standing alongside them or clearing the way, emptying the land of Palestinians—more than 70 rural communities have been violently expelled since October 7.

5. When the footage gets bad enough, Israeli leaders issue condemnations and, on rare occasions, arrest a settler foot soldier but never the architects.

6. Then, quietly, the state incorporates the gains—retroactively legalizing the outposts, paving the roads, and absorbing the stolen land into the ever-expanding settlement project.

This folds into an even broader strategic approach, which is to move beyond the old settlement heartlands in Area C, encircle Palestinian towns in Areas A and B, choke off access to farmland and grazing areas, and sever the roads that connect them. Smotrich laid this out plainly in September when he introduced his “sovereignty plan,” which would place roughly 82% of the West Bank under full Israeli control while confining Palestinians to a handful of dense, isolated population centers. From there, Israel could annex most of the territory under the principle of maximum land, minimum demographic change—sidestepping the thorny question of citizenship that full annexation would entail.

As government and security officials, soldiers, settlers, and every Israeli journalist know, there is simply no way to carry out this scale of settlement expansion without violence. A remarkable new clip from CNN’s Jeremy Diamond, filmed as he reported on a brutal settler attack that left an elderly man with a fractured skull, captures the settler-soldier collaboration at the heart of this process.

In the footage, soldiers assault his cameraman, then openly admit they are seeking revenge for Yehuda Sherman’s death—“If the state doesn’t address what they did … what do you expect us to do?” They go on to say they believe the entire West Bank belongs to the Jews, and that they are proud to help transform illegal outposts into legal settlements: “Of course … I help my people.”1

But settlers had been attacking Tayasir with military backup long before Yehuda Sherman died on a road 25 kilometers away—this is simply the latest pretense for the fundamentally violent process of building a new outpost.

For the settler movement, everything that happens in the West Bank is teleological—engineered or rapidly retrofitted to work toward that same end. Such is the nature of “settling”: pushing past the boundary, provoking a response, and then using that response, whatever it may be, to justify further violence and expansion. If there is no response, all the better—the land is theirs for the taking.

It happens at every level. On Wednesday, settlers erected an impromptu barricade on a Palestinian road near Umm al-Khair. When a convoy of workers veered off-road to bypass it, Israeli settlers and soldiers opened fire, killing one and wounding seven others, later accusing them of being “Arab smugglers” and pushing to make the roadblock permanent.

Last month, a cabinet decision authorized Israeli enforcement bodies to carry out demolitions and halt Palestinian development in Areas A and B under the pretext of protecting archaeology, heritage, water, and the environment. But the occupation routinely degrades basic municipal functions, producing the very neglect it then uses to justify intervention—another self-fulfilling prophecy within the larger biblical prophecy of Greater Israel.

Today, even Israel’s “liberal opposition leader,” Yair Lapid, openly frames Israel’s mandate over the land as biblical. Asked about Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s claim that Israel has a right to the territory between the Nile and the Euphrates, Lapid concurred: “Zionism is based on the Bible. Our mandate over the land of Israel is biblical… the biblical borders of the land of Israel are clear. Therefore, the borders are the borders of the Bible.” He added that “security and policy considerations” prevent Israel from taking it all, but those constraints are clearly not fixed—in the month since, the situation already seems to have changed in Lebanon, with Israel announcing plans to occupy the country from its southern border to the Litani River.

“The train on which the pioneering settlement is riding on the way to the complete Land of Israel can no longer be stopped,” settler leader Elisha Yered wrote Friday on X. “The choice is in the hands of every Jew—whether to join it or to try to throw sticks in its wheels and miss the history.”

The choice is also in the hands of Israel’s “liberal” backers outside its borders—the Dan Goldmans and Richie Torreses of the world. Respectfully, I believe it’s time for them to get with the program.

Instead of continuing to support an Israel that doesn’t exist, they can be like the author of this piece, Aliza Pilichowski—a Cali native who moved to the West Bank and became the mayor of a settlement—championing a nation in which “the mere suggestion of a two-state solution – or any solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – is laughed off as naive and unrealistic.”

They can heed her advice and “join the ‘winning team’ of growth in Judea and Samaria by aligning with the mainstream Israeli electorate, which views settlements as essential to national resilience.”

They can accept that “the settlements are the clear, unstoppable future of the Jewish state”—and that our tax dollars they vote to send to Israel are going directly to this cause.

They can embrace today’s Israel in all its glory: a state that drops charges against prison guards caught on camera sodomizing a Palestinian prisoner; that admits to starving a 17-year-old to death in prison but closes the case anyway; that doesn’t even bother questioning soldiers who gunned down a young family on a shopping trip near Jenin.

They can take a step back and look at what Israel is today—a state controlled by right-wing fanatics that has thrown its full weight behind a campaign of ethnic cleansing and never-ending war—and decide for themselves: Is this a project that deserves their support?

Until they reckon with that question in good faith, they can keep their condemnations to themselves.

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For more on the latest explosion in settler violence, I spoke with the Breaking Points crew on Friday:

1

After the CNN clip went viral, the IDF’s International Spokesperson issued a statement:

This is nearly identical to what Shoshani said in response to soldiers leading me into a settler ambush in October.

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When I was ambushed by a mob of settlers in the Turmus’ayya olive fields last October, I predicted that Israeli authorities would respond with a token arrest designed to absorb international outrage over the viral footage, while leaving the terror network itself, led by the notorious settler Amishav Melet, intact.

That is exactly what happened. Three weeks after the attack, Israeli authorities arrested a single settler, Ariel Dahari, charging him in connection with the brutal clubbing of a Palestinian grandmother.

Meanwhile, Melet’s outpost—the operational hub of the regular attacks on Turmus’ayya—has only expanded. In footage from that day, you can see a large, beautiful house perched above the olive groves. Look on the left-hand side of the below video. (For new readers: that is me in the black shirt, running from a lynch mob of settlers.)

This past week, the daughter of the Palestinian-American who owns that house reached out to tell me that settlers had officially moved in. Here they are, making themselves at home:

To spell it out: Israeli authorities responded to a widely publicized act of settler violence by allowing the perpetrators’ base to expand. As part of that expansion, settlers have now stolen and occupied the home of an American citizen. The U.S. Embassy has declined to offer the family any assistance.

Frankly, it’s not hard to predict what will happen in the West Bank if you’re paying attention. In November, I wrote about a dangerous road cutting through Umm al-Khair, the Bedouin village where Awdah Hathaleen was shot dead by a settler months earlier:

The Carmel settlement sits at the top of a hill in South Hebron, with several roads leading to it. Lately, settlers favor the one that cuts directly through the tiny Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair—the scenic route, if you will. The road splits the homes from the community spaces, so children often play in the street. In the US, there would be speed bumps, stop signs, warnings that children are at play. Here, the Palestinians know if they put these up, the Israelis would tear them down. I watched a mother drive a minivan full of children at least 50 miles per hour through the village, honking at the Palestinian kids to scatter like they were sheep in the road.

Everyone in the village knew it was only a matter of time before a child was hit by a car here. On Friday, it happened:

The five-year-old girl was hospitalized, but is okay.

I don’t know whether the driver meant to hit her. Israeli authorities called it a traffic accident. What’s the difference? What is the point of denying a street busy with children a speed bump if not to make an “accident” inevitable?

The young Jewish American activist who documented the incident is in the process of being deported by Israel. Next time, they hope, no one will be there to document it.

Settlers have ensured that every aspect of life in Umm al-Khair is tenuous. Pairing this with routine, overt violence, they hope that families will eventually pick up and leave—something more than sixty communities have done since October 7.

For settlers, this is a form of recreation. Again, from my piece about Umm al-Khair:

Another time, two settlers on an ATV slowed down and called out, “How do you like your new neighbors?”

The “new neighbors” are the settlers, led by the infamously violent Shimon Attia, who broke off from Carmel in August to plant an outpost just meters from the village community center. The land isn’t any richer than up on the settlement. The view is no better. There’s no practical reason to move in—except to torment the Palestinians next door. In settler logic, this is as good as beachfront property.

Just look at this group of settlers and reservist soldiers that took a field trip to a Palestinian village north of Hebron for target practice:

They’re having fun! And had somebody been shot and killed, you can bet the settlers would have claimed self-defense.

As this video made the rounds on X, the settler activist Elisha Yered shared a response: “A video in which any reasonable viewer can discern that it involves a group of hikers who were guarding the skies, hiking in a place that, according to the antisemitic Arabs… Jews are forbidden from entering, and therefore they were attacked by Arabs.”

Just a group of hikers guarding the skies! It would almost be funny if they weren’t killing Palestinians at a historic rate.

Here is Yered again, describing an incident on March 7 in Susya, a tiny village in Masafer Yatta left exposed after the army declared it a “Closed Military Zone,” barring activists while allowing settlers free access:

“A serious terror attack took place this Shabbat against a Jewish shepherd in the Hebron Hills:

Initial details indicate that about ten armed Arab rioters wielding clubs attacked a Jewish shepherd in the grazing areas adjacent to the Susya settlement in the Hebron Hills at midday on Shabbat.

An IDF soldier who rushed to the scene carried out a suspect apprehension procedure toward the rioters and saved the shepherd’s life, according to Yesha Rescue Without Borders.

Later, the Arabs reported that one of the rioters was killed by the gunfire during the attack and his companion was seriously injured. The shepherd was miraculously only lightly injured and was evacuated to Soroka Hospital.

Police forces that arrived at the scene located evidence left behind by the fleeing rioters, including several of the clubs used in the attack.”

Now, here is what actually happened:

Settlers, some in army fatigues, brought their livestock onto Palestinian farmland in Susya and attempted to drive the animals into villagers’ homes. The residents—or “rioters,” in Yered’s telling—tried to push them back, and were beaten with clubs. One settler opened fire. Amir Shanaran, 28, was shot in the neck and killed. His brother Khaled was shot in the abdomen and survived. Several others were injured. A woman was run over by a settler on an ATV, breaking her leg.

Here is one of the settlers who “miraculously” survived:

Days later, settlers stormed the home of the man they killed and terrorized his grieving family.

On a podcast last week, Yered—who was once detained over the fatal shooting of a Palestinian teenager; is an open theorist of coordinated settler-state land seizures; was present during last month’s pogrom that killed a Palestinian American; and was recently feted at a Knesset tribute to the settlement movement—explained that settler violence in any form is fundamentally an act of self-defense.

“There’s an enemy here who is waiting for the day it can murder me, and I’m not willing to be Kfar Azza,” he said, invoking a kibbutz attacked on October 7. “I will do everything I can to expel it, to hurt it.”

“There’s obvious self-defense,” he continued, but also: “the best defense is offense.”

Yered’s claim reminded me of something I heard from a settler in 2024, who, in justifying the brutal IDF raids in the otherwise quiet village of Sebastia, compared them to the U.S. invading Iraq before Saddam Hussein had a chance to use WMDs against us, apparently unaware of how that turned out. (Thank God, at the very least, the U.S. has learned its lesson.)

Yered goes further than the language of preemptive defense. Like most settlers—and much of the Israeli government—he believes Jews have an inherent right to the entirety of the West Bank, or “Judea and Samaria.” Settler incursions into Palestinian communities, he says, are designed to provoke violence that can then be met with overwhelming state force and eventual depopulation.

“Without question, we are initiating friction,” he said. “And we’re proud of that.”

He also dismissed Netanyahu’s characterization of settler violence as the work of a marginal fringe—“about 70 kids,” as the prime minister once put it. “It’s really not 70 or 700,” Yered said. “It’s much more.” When arrests do occur, he noted, they often involve the sons of prominent rabbis and members of established settler families.

In the first week of the Israel-U.S. war on Iran, settlers and soldiers killed at least six Palestinians across the West Bank and injured more than fifteen. In addition to the March 7 killing, settlers shot and killed two brothers on March 2 after invading their land in Qaryut. On March 8, masked settlers stormed the village of Abu Falah around 2 a.m., wielding clubs and setting olive trees on fire. When residents came out to defend their homes, dozens more settlers arrived. Two men—Thaer Farouq Hamayel, 24, and Farea Jawdat Hamayel, 57—were shot in the head and killed. When Israeli soldiers arrived, they fired tear gas into the village. Another man, Muhammad Hassan Murra, 55, went into cardiac arrest after inhaling it and died.

Elsewhere, in the northern Jordan Valley, dozens of settlers carried out a prolonged night raid on the hamlet of Khirbet Humsa, one of the last remaining communities in the area. Masked attackers handcuffed family members—including children—and foreign activists, dragging them into a tent. The children were forced to watch as adults were beaten, doused with water, and humiliated. Witnesses described a sexual assault on one Palestinian man, as well as theft and the release of livestock from their pens. Several victims required hospitalization. One international activist later said she believed they were about to be raped or burned alive. A resident recalled the attackers warning: “Today we will take your sheep, but the next time we come here we will burn the houses, kill the children and rape the women.”

Many observers have suggested that the latest wave of settler attacks is unfolding “under the cover of the war with Iran.” There may be some truth to this, but settlers were already operating with unprecedented confidence before the first bombs fell on Tehran. The machinery of violent displacement had been accelerating for months. Now it is simply running more smoothly and with less need for disguise.

Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, who oversees the IDF in the West Bank, called the spike in violence “unacceptable,” adding that there would be “zero tolerance for civilians who take the law into their own hands.”

Put aside, for a moment, that Bluth presides over a command structure that has systematized the establishment of outposts from which many of these attacks originate—overseeing a formalized pipeline in which illegal “farms” are planned, approved, and secured in coordination with regional military units, complete with allocated forces and logistical support. What is particularly useful about his comment is the tacit acknowledgment that terrorizing, displacing, and killing Palestinians is, in fact, the law—and the job of the Israeli military.

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Last week, a tiny Bedouin community east of Duma was violently emptied by settlers with an assist from the IDF. For months, settlers had waged daily and nightly pogroms against the encampment, and the residents had come to depend on the presence of activists to survive.

I spent time there in October, staying up late into the night with two young men, Raed and Mohammed. By then, all the women and children had already fled, and a small group of men remained to maintain a fragile foothold on the land.

This video is one of my favorites from my time in the West Bank—not because I beat Mohammed in an arm wrestle (handily, tbh), but because it reminds me that even amid the constant horrors Palestinians here face, there are still moments when guys can just Hang Out. More than anything, it’s the laughter in the video that gets me. This scene could’ve unfolded at a bar in Brooklyn.

Settlers drove along the outskirts of the encampment after dark, revving their engines and shining floodlights into our exposed sleeping quarters. In the morning, they crossed the gate they had already smashed and filmed us in the camp itself. The community is pinned against a steep valley by a growing outpost; in the event of a full-scale attack, there is nowhere to run. Last year, as the outpost was being built, a settler shot and killed a local Palestinian here.

In the months since my visit, the harassment intensified: electricity lines cut, homes vandalized and filled with pepper spray, and residents repeatedly forced to flee. Eventually, the IDF declared the village a “Closed Military Zone,” barring activists from entering—a familiar tactic that creates the appearance of restoring order while leaving Palestinians more exposed to settler violence. The assaults intensified immediately, and the remaining residents understood that if they stayed, they might be killed.

Now, the Palestinians are gone, and the settlers are sure to move in soon. Who could’ve seen it coming?

The Israeli government’s response to this mounting violence has made its priorities increasingly clear. After a late-February video went viral showing an activist being brutally assaulted while begging for her life— shouting “Help!” “No!” “Please, no!”—authorities quickly announced three arrests. A week and a half later, the charges against the masked terrorists in the video below were quietly dropped.1

The ATV the settlers climbed out of is a Polaris Ranger—one of many such $20K+ vehicles gifted to outposts by the Israeli state.

In Jerusalem, meanwhile, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir dramatically expanded eligibility for civilian firearms licenses, extending blanket access to hundreds of thousands of additional Jewish residents.

It’s important to understand that there are no meaningful obstacles standing in the way of the spiraling violence in the West Bank. On the contrary, settlers are being rewarded for these attacks with guns, ATVs, funding, and state authorization that converts their violent gains into formally recognized Israeli land, while the cabinet continues to expand the legal routes through which such dispossession can proceed.

I predict that things will only get worse.

A few stray thoughts before I sign off.

Thirty-one senators signed onto Chris Van Hollen’s letter demanding a U.S. investigation into the killing of Philadelphia native Nasrallah Abu Siyam by settlers in the West Bank. Among those who inexplicably declined to sign were both Pennsylvania senators—John Fetterman and Dave McCormick—as well as New York’s Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. In my eyes, this is as good as a cover-up; I really cannot fathom the moral depravity that could explain their refusal to demand even the most basic accountability for the killing of an American citizen.

Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was killed in the Parkland school shooting and who later became an activist, said on X that Gavin Newsom “crossed the line” by referring to Israel as an apartheid state. I found this to be a striking display of selective empathy, given that I know dozens of parents in the West Bank who are grieving just like him but will never see their child’s killer brought to justice, as he did, because of Israel’s two-tiered justice system—one of the clearest examples of Israeli apartheid.

This photo of Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, a third-grade student killed in the U.S. double-tap strike on a primary school in Minab, Iran, has haunted me. There are millions or even billions of people in this world who, like Fred Guttenberg, fundamentally do not understand that children everywhere are the same. This precious child, the tens of thousands dead in Gaza—people don’t connect them to the idea of their own child being violently killed. If they did, I do not think Israel's and the U.S.’s relentless atrocities would be tolerated.

A useful thought experiment is to imagine what would happen if a foreign military bombed a school in the United States—say, one near you—and killed more than 150 people, most of them children. My feeling is that the responsible country might not exist for much longer.

In Lebanon, over 100 children have been killed by the Israeli military in the past week. Has this even registered for the people who support Israel’s ever-expanding wars? Do they even know? The deaths are completely negligible.

To some, they are not. On Thursday, an armed man rammed a truck into a synagogue in Michigan. Reports quickly surfaced that he had lost relatives, including children, in a recent Israeli strike on Lebanon:

Here is ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt after the attack, lamenting that Jewish people and the Jewish State—interchangeable to him, as made clear in this clip—are being blamed for the “war in the Middle East”:

Has anybody done more than Greenblatt to ensure that the actions of Israel are experienced as inseparable from Jewish identity?

Days before, he characterized protests against the war on Iran as a form of hate that traffics in antisemitism. Here is the photo the group used to illustrate the point:

The blowback of Israel’s relentless aggression has officially arrived. Greenblatt—and every Jewish institution that has refused to show any daylight with Israel—has put all of us at risk.

On the subject of blowback, here is one final passage from my piece about Umm al-Khair:

“The soundscape of Umm al-Khair is otherwise ordinary for a farming community—sheep, roosters, children at play—but here, there is also Hebrew chanting. For three days, I heard it constantly. The children of Umm al-Khair peeked over the fence, where just meters away, men in kippahs with machine guns slung over their shoulders danced and sang. I recognized many of the songs and prayers from my own childhood going to synagogue. Hearing them in this context was disturbing in a way I cannot put into words. What it must do to a child’s understanding of Jews doesn’t need spelling out.”

And a video from Qusra this week (make sure to watch with the sound on):

Again, settlers arrived in a state-gifted Polaris Ranger ATV. One day later—yesterday—they returned to Qusra, shot a man dead, and stabbed his father.

If this child grows up seeking revenge, you can be sure of one thing: he’ll be labeled a terrorist.

Postscript:

As I was preparing to send this out, reports emerged that four members of a single family had been shot dead by Israeli forces in Tamoun—Mohammed, 5; Othman, 7, who was blind and had special needs; and their parents, Waad, 35, and Ali, 37—all reportedly struck in the head and face as they drove home from a Ramadan shopping trip. Two children survived. One later said that soldiers pulled him from the vehicle and beat him, shouting, “We killed dogs.”

Israeli authorities said without evidence that troops opened fire after “perceiving an immediate threat” when the vehicle accelerated. There is no reason to believe this is true.

Elisha Yered, the government-supported settler activist again, wasted no time in responding to the incident on X:

“This is about a terrorist family that was nearly completely eliminated.
A father, mother, and two children aged 5 and 7.
I'm glad to see that the IDF backs its fighters who eliminated those who needed to be eliminated when they felt in danger, without regard to the identity of the eliminated - apparent non-combatants or whoever they may be.”

Here are the two surviving children:

The most pressing question, in my mind: What sort of a life awaits them?

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Congressman Ro Khanna has been making a lot of noise lately—pushing for the release of the Epstein files, challenging the administration over war powers in the escalating conflict with Iran, and positioning himself on the front lines of the Democratic Party’s internal debate over Israel and Palestine. Plenty of people suspect he’s trying to carve out a lane for a presidential run. On Israel-Palestine, that lane is clearly to the left of most national Democrats: sharply critical of Israel, willing to call Gaza a genocide, and increasingly explicit about the occupation.

In January, his team reached out to me for input as they worked on a House resolution on the West Bank, and I agreed to share what I considered the most urgent issues. I was clear with them that the core problem was a Zionist project with ever-expanding territorial aims, not just a few bad ministers or a temporary policy deviation. Any real change, I told them, would require a much more radical rethinking of the U.S.-Israel relationship than most Democrats have been willing to entertain.

That same week, with the distinction between rhetoric and action—and between band-aids and cures—very much in mind, I noticed Khanna had voted for a spending bill that included billions more for Israeli security and cut UNRWA funding. I called him out publicly, and he responded quickly, saying the Israel provisions had been folded into a broader appropriations bill and had been “snuck in” by Republicans; when I asked directly whether he had known those provisions were in the bill when he voted for it, he replied, “I genuinely did not.” When the bill later came back amended, he reached out privately to tell me he’d be voting no. It was clear that he wanted to prove his mettle on the issue, and he agreed to an interview once the House resolution came out.

Khanna introduced House Resolution 1092 this week, condemning Israeli settlement expansion, settler violence, and human rights abuses in the West Bank while calling for accountability and specific U.S. policy responses. In our conversation, he was quick to admit that it will not produce immediate material change; rather, it is meant to establish a clear Democratic policy framework and build pressure for future administrations to act.

With that in mind, I wanted to use my conversation with Khanna to press him on the harder questions that Democratic presidential hopefuls will increasingly have to answer if they want to occupy the left flank of this issue. In other words, the places where the rubber actually meets the road.

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Two days after the attack, I spoke with eight young men who had been there, several of them injured, some among those who carried Nasrallah to a car and drove him toward the hospital. Teenagers and men in their early twenties. At least one of them had braces—Nasrallah had them, too. Not hardened fighters; students, farmers, and shepherds. They looked exhausted. A few had fresh wounds on their faces. They startled at sudden noises, repeatedly springing up to peer out the window. I am protecting their identities, as retaliation in cases like these is common.

In all likelihood, no one will be held accountable for this killing, but it is important to bear witness and to leave a record of what happened. What follows is a reconstruction based on the account of these eight witnesses. To be clear, I did not obtain the settlers’ version of events, though if I had their contact information, I certainly would have tried. The IDF did not respond to my request for comment. The testimony presented here is consistent with reporting in major Israeli and Palestinian outlets, available video evidence, the patterns of state and settler violence in the West Bank, and my own experience there over the past several years.

Before turning to their account, I want to situate what happened within the broader system that produced it. Late last year, I wrote two pieces unpacking Israel’s machinery of annexation in its current form, based in part on an op-ed from a settler leader, Elisha Yered, and unusually candid testimony from within the Israeli military. The picture that emerged was of a system in which settler leaders and military officers work in close collaboration to map target areas for land seizure and establish illegal outposts under army protection, from which settlers launch pogroms on vulnerable Palestinian communities, often with military escorts, in an effort to terrorize them into leaving.

Sometimes that pressure alone is enough—over 80 rural Palestinian communities have been abandoned since October 7. Other times, the military declares a “closed military zone,” clearing Palestinians from their land under the pretense of preventing further violence. In some cases, settlers provoke a confrontation that is then used to justify further military action. One way or another, the relentless settler attacks function as the spearhead of a state policy of ethnic cleansing, with the government managing the aftermath and absorbing the gains. Through this process, vast stretches of Area C—where Israel exercises full control—have been emptied of Palestinians, while settler incursions are increasingly pushing into Areas B and even A, nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

The broader vision, articulated openly by settler leaders and their allies in government, is to force Palestinians to emigrate, and to concentrate those who remain into a handful of urban enclaves—Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus, Ramallah, Jericho, and Hebron—while annexing the rest of the territory. “The principle of sovereignty is maximum land and minimum population,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said while outlining the plan.

There is another angle to this story—that yet another American citizen has been killed by Israelis, with no expectation that anyone will be held accountable—but I’m going to leave that for another time. For now, I will say only that I learned of the killing from Kamel Musallet, the father of Sayfollah Musallet, who was beaten to death by settlers in July.

For generations, a Bedouin encampment known as Khallat al-Sidra—a cluster of tents, cinderblock shelters, and animal pens—sat on the edge of Mukhmas. The land belonged to the village, but a mayor many decades earlier had invited the Bedouins to settle there, to plant olive trees and graze their livestock. Over the years, the community also served as an incidental buffer between the village of Mukhmas and the most violent settlers descending from the hills. While Mukhmas residents were regularly attacked in their fields, they were typically safe in the village itself, as Khallat al-Sidra absorbed the worst of the attacks. In part, this was a matter of basic geography. But the Bedouin encampment and surrounding farmland also lay in Area C, making them far more vulnerable to settler violence than the built-up village of Mukhmas, which sits in Area B.

When settlers raided Khallat al-Sidra, Mukhmas residents often came down to help protect them, but after October 7, that became nearly impossible. A new ring of outposts went up around the area, and the settlers’ proximity allowed them to strike fast, often in the dead of night, launching attacks before the village could even be roused.

In a period of just over three months between late October and late January, settlers descended on Khallat al-Sidra and torched homes on three separate occasions. Each time, the community rebuilt, only to see it burned again. I was present the morning after one of these pogroms, and toured the charred structures with men and their traumatized children as settlers circled us on their ATVs, many with machine guns slung over their shoulders. Two activists had been sent to the hospital.

In a January attack on Khallat al-Sidra captured on video, the settlers split into groups, moving methodically from structure to structure, burning the whole village to the ground in minutes. Settlers blocked a man and a woman from escaping from their burning home, beating them when they finally escaped. Videos circulating on far-right social media celebrated the pogrom, set to the beloved settler anthem, May Your Village Burn.

After the most recent attack in late January, the Israeli military, rather than arrest the settlers responsible and evacuate their outposts, declared the area a closed military zone and forcibly expelled the Bedouin community. This was, of course, a tragedy in its own right. It also meant the frontier shifted overnight—from Khallat al-Sidra in Area C to Mukhmas in Area B—exposing the village to the same tactics used to clear the surrounding hills.

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On Wednesday at 2:35 pm, a shepherd from Mukhmas, grazing his sheep and goats in the village’s farmland, was surrounded by armed settlers who harassed him and attempted to steal his livestock. Among them was Elisha Yered, the prominent hilltop activist whose recent op-ed openly described a coordinated campaign to seize land and push deeper into Palestinian areas—and who has previously been suspected in the killing of a Palestinian during a village raid.

The shepherd managed to escape with his flock and ran back toward the village, just outside the girls’ school, where a group of local men gathered to form a defensive barrier. Many of the settlers wore masks, but the villagers recognized several from previous attacks. Among them was a settler named Amir, a security guard for one of the nearby outposts. He claimed he was there to help, firing his M16 into the air and ordering Mukhmas’s residents to retreat, promising he would escort the settlers away without incident. The villagers knew that if they withdrew, their livestock would be taken.

Minutes later, more settlers arrived, accompanied by soldiers—the same platoon, villagers said, that routinely appears during these incursions, likely assigned to this particular settler gang by the IDF’s Central Command. Now there were roughly 30 settlers and five soldiers at the edge of Mukhmas. The troops joined Amir in ordering the Palestinian men back into the village, assuring them the animals would not be touched. But as soon as the villagers began to withdraw, settlers opened the enclosure and started driving the livestock out.

At 3:27 pm, the first physical violence broke out as several Palestinian men moved to retrieve their livestock and were beaten back by settlers and soldiers. Troops fired tear gas and stun grenades into the village; an elderly man was badly burned by a canister. In footage from the incident, women and children can be heard screaming from inside their homes. Settlers pushed deeper into the residential area in the chaos, opening additional enclosures and driving off more sheep and goats.

A group of villagers broke off and took a back route, hoping to intercept the settlers driving off their animals—their primary livelihood. One of the men was seized and surrounded, settlers beating him with metal rods as he lay unconscious on the ground. Others rushed forward to attempt to pull him free. The settlers hurled stones to drive them back, and the villagers threw stones in return.

At 3:48 pm, a settler raised his M16 and began firing into the crowd rushing toward their wounded fellow villager. Four or five others followed suit, gunning down the Palestinians on their own land. At least three men were hit, including the brother of the wounded man. Nasrallah was shot in the thigh, the bullet severing his main artery. Settlers crowded around him after he fell, striking him with rods. At least one of the gunmen dropped to a knee in a military firing position, taking deliberate aim at those carrying the injured to safety. As the shooting unfolded, the army, just down the hill, continued gassing the village.

When the shooting ended, the army did not stick around to provide medical assistance to the men lying wounded with gunshot injuries. Instead, they withdrew from Mukhmas alongside the settlers, who walked off with more than 300 of the village’s sheep and goats—a crippling economic blow to three shepherding families.

The villagers called an ambulance, but it couldn’t get past a nearby army checkpoint, so they loaded the wounded into several cars and began driving toward the hospital in Ramallah. Traffic was gridlocked near the checkpoint, and as word spread, other drivers tried to clear a path, waving vehicles aside and shouting for space. Nasrallah was bleeding heavily in the back seat, his pulse fading. When the cars could move no further, the men lifted him out and carried him on foot toward a waiting ambulance on the other side. By the time he reached the hospital at 5:30 pm, nearly two hours had passed since he was shot.

For four and a half hours, doctors attempted to save his life. But he had lost too much blood. At 10 pm, 19-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam was pronounced dead.

Later that night, settlers returned to Mukhmas, revving their engines and shining lights into homes. The men came out again to protect their village, this time in even larger numbers, and the settlers left without incident.

When I returned home from the West Bank after last year’s olive harvest, I found it difficult to articulate the feeling of sheer terror in Palestinian villages subjected to regular settler attacks, where I spent many sleepless nights. There is nothing quite like the real fear of physical danger, knowing it can arrive at any moment, and that you are completely defenseless. (In communities across the West Bank, residents know that if they take up arms to defend themselves, their village may be wiped from the map—as has happened in Jenin and Tulkarm, long associated with militant activity.) I, of course, could leave whenever I chose; for the Palestinians, this is daily life.

I can only imagine it as something like the atmosphere Black families described in parts of the Jim Crow South, where the Ku Klux Klan rode at night, the law on their side, delivering warnings in fire and blood. Lynchings were staged to strike maximum fear into the hearts of entire communities—to enforce racial hierarchy, crush political participation, and drive families from land and livelihoods they had built. You have no protection here, the message went, and whatever you have can be taken.

Today, in the West Bank, giant Stars of David jut from the ground, lit at night like flaming crosses. The assailants often arrive with military-grade assault rifles capable of ending a life in an instant. Again, I am lost for words trying to describe the feeling of a belligerent teenager aiming one of these death machines right at you. While the KKK operated with tacit protection from the law, the settlers have the open backing of soldiers and a state apparatus whose purpose, in practice and in stated policy, is to assert dominance over every aspect of daily life.

Many of the most violent settlers and their leaders are well known to local Palestinians, activists, journalists, and Israeli authorities alike. Several participants in the Mukhmas attack have already been identified by activists, and I have previously written about the settler leader Amishav Melet, whom I believe orchestrated the Turmus’ayya assault I documented in October. If major news organizations devoted to this historic campaign of violence the same investigative resources they apply to other conflicts, I have no doubt they could map the settler terror infrastructure and chain of command much as they do clandestine militant groups elsewhere. Israeli authorities almost certainly possess such intelligence already, but the pattern suggests it is used to manage and protect these networks rather than dismantle them.

In other words, the Israeli reign of terror in the West Bank is not an inevitable force of nature. It can be stopped. Allowing it to continue is a series of choices. By the Israeli government, by its backers in Washington, and, more tacitly, by a mainstream media ecosystem that treats it as a peripheral regional conflict, worthy of coverage only when it becomes too politically destabilizing to ignore.

On Saturday, the U.S. State Department broke its silence, failing to condemn the killing or mention the assailants: “We can confirm the death of a U.S. citizen in the West Bank on February 18. We extend our deepest condolences to the family and expect a full, thorough, and transparent investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death. U.S. Embassy Jerusalem has been in direct contact with the family to provide assistance.”

Ambassador Mike Huckabee, for his own part, has been in crisis mode—though for different reasons—firing off 31 tweets in two days defending his calamitous interview with Tucker Carlson, during which he asserted Israel’s biblical right to claim all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates, triggering a diplomatic crisis.

Nasrallah Abu Siyam is at least the seventh American killed by Israeli settlers or soldiers in the West Bank since October 7. No one has been arrested in any of the cases. No one has been held accountable.

If you’d like to support farmers in the West Bank, consider donating to Roots of Resilience.

The New York Times noted that “with international attention largely focused [on Gaza], Israel has undertaken an unbridled expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which is under Israeli military rule. Military operations also have resulted in the biggest displacement of Palestinian civilians there since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.”

I found this framing just a bit ironic, given that few institutions wield more influence over where international attention is directed than the Times itself.

In a parallel universe, where international attention had managed to multitask over the past three years—tracking not only the genocide in Gaza but also Israel’s unprecedented land grab in the West Bank—it might have noticed that Smotrich has telegraphed his every move. Over that period, he has quietly engineered a bureaucratic coup: transferring key authorities from the military to civilian ministries under his control, rewriting land registration and planning rules, and using administrative fiat to normalize what amounts to permanent Israeli sovereignty without a formal declaration. His project of de facto annexation maps strikingly closely onto his 2017 Decisive Plan, a canonical settler text that lays out three options for the “Arabs of Judea and Samaria”: (1) subjugation, (2) “voluntary” (or paid) emigration, or (3) defeat by force.

While Israel’s West Bank policies have long made subjugation and force routine, the new cabinet decisions shift the emphasis toward the second option: engineering the conditions under which emigration becomes the “choice,” and smoothing the path for it.

Here’s a brief summary of the cabinet decisions:

• Opening the West Bank as a settler real estate market:
  The cabinet removed key legal barriers that had restricted Israeli land purchases in the West Bank. Settlers will now be allowed to buy land directly from Palestinians without registering a local company and without obtaining a transaction permit—a safeguard that had been used to vet ownership claims, crack down on forged or coerced sales (a common feature of land purchases in occupied territory), and allow the Defense Ministry to block acquisitions in politically or militarily sensitive locations. At the same time, the cabinet instructed the military commander to open West Bank land registries to public inspection—records long kept classified—making it far easier for would-be purchasers to identify and track down owners.

  The effect is to hand enormous leverage to well-financed settlement groups, who can now acquire property deep inside Palestinian population centers and force the state’s hand after the fact, knowing the military is required to protect Israelis wherever they plant themselves. Settlers already do this by erecting illegal outposts near Palestinian villages and provoking violence that then triggers a military response; this gives them another, more formalized route to the same end.

  As the Israeli journalist Amit Segal—considered by many to be Netanyahu’s stenographer—put it, Israel has “thrown open the doors to the Judean and Samarian real estate markets,” effectively privatizing annexation.

  Yisrael Ganz, who leads the influential Yesha Settlement Council, shared a vision that sounds chillingly similar to the Trump-Kushner plan for Gaza: “The Cabinet decision means anyone can now buy land in Judea and Samaria… We want to develop commercial and industrial zones, health systems and more. It’s a huge opportunity for investors. Now is the time.”

  It is not hard to imagine the next step: Palestinian land far beyond existing settlements, marketed and sold in board rooms and synagogues across the United States.

• Reviving state-backed land purchases:
  Alongside deregulating private settler purchases, the cabinet revived a mechanism allowing the state to buy land from Palestinians through the Custodian of Government Property in the West Bank, enabling direct government acquisition of Palestinian land for settlement use—a system last employed in the 1970s and 1980s.

• Israeli enforcement inside Areas A and B:
  The cabinet authorized Israeli Civil Administration enforcement bodies to operate inside Areas A and B, territory that, under the Oslo II Accords, is meant to fall under Palestinian Authority civilian control. Israeli authorities will now be able to carry out demolitions and halt Palestinian development in these areas under broad justifications related to ostensible concerns around archaeology, heritage, water, and the environment.

  In the West Bank, where the occupation routinely undermines basic Palestinian municipal functions—from waste management to infrastructure maintenance—this policy becomes self-fulfilling. This is precisely what happened in Sebastia, where locals were forbidden from maintaining the archaeological ruins, leading to disrepair that was later used to justify their seizure.

• Stripping Palestinian municipal authority around major religious sites:
  The cabinet approved measures that effectively place major religious sites inside Palestinian cities under permanent Israeli planning and administrative control, enabling rapid settlement expansion. Specifically, it transferred planning and building authority at the Cave of the Patriarchs and in settlement areas within Hebron from the Palestinian municipality to Israel’s Civil Administration, in direct violation of the 1997 Hebron Protocol. It also approved the creation of a dedicated Israeli administration to manage Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, allowing state budgets to flow directly to the site and the adjacent yeshiva.

Taken together, Israel’s broader strategy comes into focus: systematically making life unlivable while smoothing the path out of the West Bank.

“People act from motives of human comfort,” Smotrich wrote in his 2017 plan. “In a reality that allows easy and convenient emigration, and even provides logistical and financial aid to those interested in trying their luck in other countries—emigration will become far more widespread.” This, he insists, is not expulsion but optimization; after all, “Zionism was built based on population exchange.”

“The emigration we are talking about is planned, willing, and based on a desire for a better life.”

With the new cabinet decisions, the message is unmistakable: Your life here is only going to get worse—take the money and run.

Within a day of the headlines breaking, the international condemnations poured in. The UN chief warned that Israel’s new West Bank measures are “eroding” the two-state horizon and reiterated that settlements are illegal; the EU called it another “step in the wrong direction”; and the UK said unilateral demographic/geographic changes are “wholly unacceptable,” urging reversal.

Despite this widespread coverage and outrage, Netanyahu has said nothing publicly about the cabinet decisions. That silence likely reflects his Wednesday meeting at the White House with Donald Trump, which is expected to focus on Iran and Gaza, not the West Bank, a subject Netanyahu would rather avoid. Trump has long treated formal annexation as a red line; in 2020, he balked when the UAE conditioned normalization on freezing annexation, forcing Netanyahu to quietly shelve his plans rather than jeopardize the Abraham Accords—Trump’s signature foreign-policy achievement from his first term.

This time, the alarms may be ringing, but softly enough to be safely ignored. The UAE issued a joint statement with other Arab states condemning Israel’s new moves, though—like the UN and European condemnations—it appears entirely toothless, coming without threats, consequences, or any suggestion of revisiting normalization. With the Accords effectively untouchable, Netanyahu has little to fear—and Trump little incentive to intervene.

That said, if anyone around Trump is actually invested in preserving his “peace plan,” which rested, at least nominally, on keeping the door open to Palestinian statehood, perhaps they will point out to him that this is a direct challenge to it.

For now, that seems unlikely. The White House responded on Monday with a fully boilerplate statement that made no reference to the new policies themselves: “President Trump has clearly stated that he does not support Israel annexing the West Bank. A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.” A day later, Trump told Axios, “I am against annexation. We have enough things to think about now. We don’t need to be dealing with the West Bank.”

Of course, preventing Trump from having to think about it or deal with it is the whole point. Smotrich’s project is engineered to provide plausible deniability against claims of formal annexation—advancing irreversible facts on the ground under the guise of niche policies, sparing Washington the need to acknowledge them. It allows the White House to issue broad statements like these without engaging the substance of what is happening—performative pressure that releases tension from the system while leaving it intact.

Here is Amit Segal again, saying the quiet part out loud:

Why is the plan so gradualist?

Well, for one, it avoids a dramatic confrontation in which Smotrich is caught with the proverbial murder weapon in hand. That makes it harder for international and domestic opposition to coalesce against all of the minor policies…

The approach also allows Smotrich to control the pace. At the moment, the majority in Israel does not support a major debate over annexation, so instead Smotrich can gather enough support for one cut, then another, and another—until annexation of the settlements, at the very least, becomes more of a reality than a risky prospect. All the while, Israel can dance around the international backlash annexation would inevitably cause.

I’m left with a grim premonition: Trump and Netanyahu sitting side by side for a presser after their Wednesday meeting. Trump turns to him and says, “He told me he’s not going to do annexation, isn’t that right?” Netanyahu smiles and nods, smug and delighted as ever, having conceded nothing at all.

In addition to these cabinet decisions, another major development in the West Bank last week went largely unnoticed. In 2024, I wrote that Israel was taking a major step toward de facto annexation of the West Bank by attempting to transfer authority over archaeological sites from the Civil Administration—the military body that nominally governs the territory—to the Antiquities Authority, which oversees heritage sites inside Israel. The goal was to shift another pillar of West Bank governance out of the military framework of occupation and into Israel’s civilian bureaucracy, further erasing the Green Line that separates Israel from its occupied territories.

But the bill stalled in the Knesset after running into opposition from Israeli archaeologists and even the Antiquities Authority itself—institutions that have long turned a blind eye to illegal excavations in occupied territory—who warned that formally tying their work to such illegal excavations could cause international boycotts to spill over onto law-abiding Israeli archaeologists. (As I wrote in 2024, this pattern is familiar in Israeli civil society, as meaningful protest against settler activity often emerges only when it begins to threaten Israelis themselves, rather than the Palestinians who have long borne its consequences.)

Last Tuesday, lawmakers found a workaround, advancing a bill to create the Judea and Samaria Heritage Authority: a parallel archaeological body that would operate only in the West Bank and be directly subordinate to Israel’s Minister of Heritage, Amihai Eliyahu, a close ally of Ben-Gvir’s. Its governing council would be composed entirely of Eliyahu’s political appointees, mirroring Smotrich’s 2023 creation of the Settlement Administration—a shadow civilian government inside the Defense Ministry that helped accelerate settlement construction by stripping away regulatory constraints.

Under the guise of “heritage protection,” the new Authority would be granted sweeping powers: declaring archaeological sites, conducting excavations, purchasing land, and—most critically—expropriating private property. The bill is deliberately vague about whether these powers extend into Areas A and B, but paired with the recent cabinet decisions, it suggests that Palestinian towns located near heritage sites could be forced to obtain Israeli approval to build homes, schools, or roads. With more than 6,000 archaeological sites scattered across the West Bank, such a transfer would not affect isolated ruins but Palestinian land almost everywhere, effectively giving Israel veto power over development and the authority to expropriate land deep into towns, villages, and farmland.

As the Israeli government advances annexation by a million cuts, settlers continue apace on the ground. In Umm al-Khair, where a settler murdered Awdah Hathaleen last year, the Palestinian community recently built a small soccer pitch for their children after years of demolition threats from Israeli soldiers and settlers. Days later, settlers showed up in the middle of the night and decorated it with Israeli flags and menorahs:

A week later—today—Israeli authorities returned with a stop-work order for the soccer field, a routine prelude to demolition:

In the Jordan Valley village of Fasa’il, settlers dumped a truckload of rotting dates outside a Palestinian family’s home and drove their cattle in to eat it and shit all over the yard, while Israeli soldiers and police stood by.

In Hebron, settlers poisoned three dogs belonging to a local Palestinian family:

And here is Elisha Yered—the homicidal settler activist, recently celebrated at the Knesset—explaining why “sheep herding [is] one of the most important weapons in the campaign for the land”:

These daily acts of harassment and intimidation don’t begin to account for actual settler violence against Palestinians, which has escalated so sharply that even Israel’s state press can no longer wave it away. Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported last week that three times more Palestinians than Jewish Israelis were injured in “terror attacks” in the West Bank in January.

The Israeli government, meanwhile, continues to insist it is taking settler violence seriously, while doing everything in its power to facilitate it. On February 3, two headlines told the story. First, Israel’s Shin Bet quietly redefined Jewish nationalist terror, downgrading settler arson attacks on Palestinian homes and vehicles from “terrorism” to “serious incidents,” a bureaucratic shift that materially reduces enforcement resources. That same day, the state was arguing in court that it couldn’t protect a Palestinian village from settler attacks due to an IDF personnel shortage.

One day later, the IDF chief warned that settler violence was “harming Israel,” while, kilometers away, Defense Minister Israel Katz told a settler conference that he and Netanyahu were working to legalize 140 West Bank outposts—quite literally rewarding the most violent settlers by granting state recognition to land seized through violence.

Then, to top it off, Shin Bet—having just cut its own resources for combating settler violence—complained that Israeli police refused to cooperate in fighting “nationalist crime,” reportedly out of fear of Ben Gvir:

For his own part, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, made clear what he sees as the real problem by announcing a new policy barring activists who enter the West Bank to document the violence.

It bears noting that even as all of this unfolds in the West Bank, Israelis once again breached Gaza to lay the groundwork for resettlement.

And then there is the military violence. It’s difficult to convey the routine, ambient cruelty of the occupation to people who haven’t been to the West Bank. In 2024, I was drinking coffee in a café in Hebron when a soldier walked in, knocked a full tray of freshly baked cookies off the counter onto the floor, and walked out. That scene came back to me when I saw this video out of Qalqilya from February 8:

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass reported this week on a 14-year-old boy, Jad Jadallah, who was shot by Israeli paratroopers in the al-Fara refugee camp and left bleeding on the ground for at least 45 minutes. Video footage shows soldiers standing over him as he writhed, reached out for help, and threw his hat toward them in what appeared to be a desperate plea for attention. One soldier kicked the hat back. Another dropped a stone near the dying boy, a familiar step in the process of rewriting what had just happened. He died where he lay, and over two months later, Israel is still holding onto his body.

I want to end with something that happened here in the U.S. In my last post, Kristallnacht in the West Bank on Holocaust Remembrance Day, I wrote about Israel’s embrace of British white nationalist Tommy Robinson—part of a broader alliance with Europe’s far-right against what it insists is the “real” antisemitic threat of radical Islam.

On Thursday, Robinson shared a video on X that he claimed showed a “Christian preacher in America get[ting] beaten by Muslim’s [sic] for handing out bibles and preaching the gospel.”

In reality, Robinson’s clip was selectively edited to show only the response to a grotesque provocation—a common move, for what it’s worth, among settlers in the West Bank.

The video was filmed outside Sayfollah Musallet’s family ice cream shop in Tampa, at a memorial marking six months since settlers beat the 20-year-old Palestinian American to death in the West Bank. A group of “Christian preachers,” led by Christopher Svochak—who has been charged with hate crimes for previous incidents—showed up to the vigil and began shouting that Sayfollah was a “jihadist burning alongside Mohammed in hell.” You can hear all of this plainly in the video Svochak himself shared:

In Robinson’s selectively edited video, the young man seen being held back is Sayfollah’s younger brother, who cradled him for two hours as Sayf drifted in and out of consciousness on his family’s land, his breathing slowing, his skin turning blue. He stayed on the phone with their father, Kamel, begging him to send help. Ambulances arrived quickly, but Israeli soldiers blocked them from reaching the scene for more than two hours—standard operating procedure for the IDF. By the time they were allowed through, Sayfollah was dead.

The killing of a 20-year-old American by Israeli settlers, as you probably know, did not rise to the level of consequence from the U.S. government—or even to sustained attention from the media.

So why would a few tweaks to West Bank real estate policy?

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Hundreds of settlers under the protection of the IDF rampaged through three villages in Masafer Yatta, carrying out a tightly coordinated pogrom. They stole 150 head of livestock, uprooted 500 olive trees, torched homes and cars, and beat men, women, and children with clubs.

In Al-Tuban, settlers tried to burn a family alive inside a locked shed, piling wood and straw against the door and setting it on fire; one child was left wheezing from smoke inhalation. In Al-Fakhit, masked settlers clubbed 49-year-old Mohammad Abu Sabha unconscious outside his home, fracturing his skull (second video below), then attacked his family, breaking his elderly mother’s arm and ribs and striking his teenage daughter as soldiers stood by. In Al-Halawa, settlers and soldiers jointly blocked ambulances and fire trucks at gunpoint after settlers stoned them.

The attack lasted over five hours. My sources on the ground described pure terror: families barricading their doors, hiding children, then fleeing for their lives as smoke filled their homes. The only arrests made were of wounded Palestinian villagers.

The Feuernacht was not confined to Masafer Yatta. Earlier that day, masked settlers emerged from a newly erected outpost deep inside Area B to descend on Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem, attacking a family home and setting multiple vehicles ablaze. They scrawled Hebrew slogans across walls—“Judea Is Awakening”—alongside a Star of David, then hurled stones at neighboring houses, shattering windows and leaving the village littered with broken glass. Residents reported hearing live gunfire during the attack.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, the IDF launched sweeping overnight raids, arresting at least 130 people across multiple governorates and transferring them to what Israeli human rights groups describe as a “network of torture camps,” where detainees have been reduced to “walking skeletons” under National Security Minister Ben-Gvir’s policy of starvation. Israeli forces also shot a 20-year-old man dead in South Hebron and wounded several others, including a young man shot in the thigh and arrested in Tulkarm as he left his home with his sister.

In Ras Ein al-Auja—once the largest shepherding community in the West Bank—the last remaining family fled after years of escalating settler violence turned into near-daily pogroms over the past month. In 2024, Israel’s campaign of stripping the local Palestinians of their rights culminated in the unilateral nullification of their land deeds, many of which dated back to Jordanian rule. Armed, masked settlers soon surrounded the village with outposts, cut water and electricity lines, stole livestock, and vandalized homes and property, ultimately emptying the area of its roughly 800 residents.

Homes in the tiny Bedouin village of Mukhmas were burned to the ground for the third time in as many months.

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My grandparents and great-grandparents, between them, survived the Russian pogroms, the Holocaust, and the Farhud in Iraq. These were the stories I grew up with, and they taught a simple lesson: recognize what’s unfolding before it’s too late, and do everything you can to stop it.

Today, as this desecration is carried out in our name—through the chillingly familiar pattern of stripping of rights, dispossession, terror, and expulsion—where are Jewish leaders and institutions?

Many of them have remained focused on the urgent issue of the day: scolding people for drawing comparisons between the Nazis and ICE, as it leads its own reign of state-backed terror, tearing families apart and executing civilians in the street.

On Sunday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said, “We have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”

In response, the U.S. Holocaust Museum—which has never posted about settler violence, and certainly not about ICE—posted this:

It may be useful to know that last year, Trump announced the appointment of Siggy Flicker to the Board of Trustees of the Holocaust Memorial Council. Flicker, as you hopefully don’t know, starred in The Real Housewives of New Jersey and, confusingly, Why Am I Still Single?!

More to the point, Flicker—now a custodian of the memory of the Holocaust—is the proud stepmother of a January 6 insurrectionist, whose photos from inside the Capitol she herself posted that day. At her induction ceremony to the Holocaust Memorial Council, Flicker stood by Donald Trump and raised an Israeli flag.

On social media, when she isn’t reposting content from President Trump and the US Holocaust Museum, Flicker regularly shares conspiracy theories. She promoted QAnon content during its heyday, and more recently, after Ilhan Omar was attacked while speaking at a town hall, she circulated a post claiming the assailant was actually an actor.

But she also offers a masterclass in demonizing entire ethnic groups, begging the question of how much she knows about what led to the Holocaust. One post she shared reads, “Stop comparing ICE to Nazis. Jews were not lawbreakers.” In another, she writes, “We should be educating every single human on this earth about this evil ideology called ISLAM! Save humanity from this radical poison!!!”

Has anyone expressed outrage that someone so plainly unfit to manage even a Twitter account has been entrusted with the memory of the Holocaust?

Also on the Board of Trustees is Martin Oliner, an attorney and far-right pro-Israel activist. Last year, he penned an op-ed for The Jerusalem Post—Let Donald Trump make Gaza great again—in which he explicitly advocated for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

“Let’s not mince words here,” Oliner wrote. “The people of Gaza are collectively guilty for invading Israel, murdering, raping and kidnapping Israelis and holding them hostage…. they are fundamentally evil, and they must pay a price for their actions.”

Of forced emigration, he wrote: “If enough countries get involved, the international problem of Gaza could be solved.” Call it a final solution.

In another op-ed, Make the Holocaust Memorial Council great again—are you sensing the pattern here?—Oliner wrote that he was grateful that Trump had “begun cleaning house at the [Holocaust] museum.”

In its new form, Oliner wrote, “Its educational approach must be changed. The museum has no shortage of visitors and reaches thousands of teachers. But they are taught about hate, in general… Being indirect by talking more generally about ‘hate’ has been incredibly ineffective.” Antisemitism is the worst form of hate, he explains, and the only one that should be taught at the Holocaust Museum.

Three months later, the Holocaust Museum of LA was forced to apologize for suggesting that nobody should be genocided.

So it should come as no surprise that the Holocaust Museum, run by far-right Trump cronies, would say such things. But what about the good liberals?

Moving left, we reach Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, both-sidesing Walz’s Anne Frank remark alongside the Trump administration’s smears of Alex Pretti, while also whitewashing his murder:

Greenblatt—who has openly reoriented the Anti-Defamation League away from its broader anti-hate mission, toward a singular focus on antisemitism defined to center anti-Zionism—has never tweeted directly about ICE, nor about settler violence in the West Bank. He did, though, once turn to Twitter to announce the ADL’s intention to “correct the misguided move by Ben & Jerry’s independent leadership to pull out of areas in the West Bank.” That’s right: Greenblatt has condemned ice cream more times than he has condemned ICE.1

According to the ADL, if comparing ICE to the Nazis is wrong, then comparing Israel to the Nazis is downright antisemitic. This is from the Understanding Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism page of the ADL’s website:

For my own part, I’d suggest that if Israel and its defenders would like to see the Nazi comparisons go away, perhaps they should consider cutting ties with Nazi-friendly figures. Remember this?

Last weekend, after Elon Musk’s latest Nazi babbling came under fire, even Prime Minister Netanyahu took time out of his busy schedule to defend him:

In 2025, Israel’s Genesis Prize Foundation, dubbed the “Jewish Nobel,” announced its first non-Jewish recipient: Argentina’s neo-fascist president Javier Milei, who, while maintaining steadfast support of Israel, appointed a literal Nazi to head Argentina’s state lawyers.

In November, Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, invited the British white nationalist activist Tommy Robinson to tour Israel as his guest. Robinson has a long public record of antisemitism, including claims of Jewish control over British politics and media and deep ties to extremist networks associated with neo-Nazi and Holocaust-distortionist politics.

Nor was the invitation an anomaly. Chikli has repeatedly argued that Europe’s nationalist right should be embraced as partners against what he calls the “real” antisemitic threat—radical Islam—and has made this approach the basis of a now-annual antisemitism conference in Jerusalem.

Last week, as I noted in The End of Liberal Zionism, Israel deported an American Jewish activist due to his “leftism,” citing as evidence a photo of him protesting against Nazis in Charlottesville. The insinuation is unmistakable: that someone who would protest Nazis might also protest Israel.

They may not be wrong—and there is, tellingly, also a huge overlap between pro-Palestine and anti-ICE protesters. One might think this would finally lay to rest the claim that the pro-Palestine movement is animated by antisemitism rather than opposition to state-backed ethnic violence and solidarity with oppressed people. But no.

When I posed this as a question on Twitter, pro-Israel accounts explained to me all the reasons I was wrong: the protesters don’t care about immigrants, they’re actually just attempting to hijack and redirect the anger toward Israel; they are strictly there to connect ICE to the IDF; they believe ICE is controlled by Jews.

In the case of both protest movements—pro-Palestine and anti-ICE—their critics refuse to confront state violence on its own terms, preferring instead to recast opposition as evidence of a deeper, more sinister motive.

It’s worth recalling that in 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the World Zionist Congress and claimed that Adolf Hitler did not intend to exterminate Europe’s Jews—only to expel them—until he was persuaded otherwise by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The claim was swiftly rejected by Holocaust scholars, who noted that Hitler’s genocidal intent long predated the meeting, and that there is no record whatsoever of the conversation Netanyahu described:

The purpose of the lie, however, was clear. Netanyahu was advancing a long-running political argument, drawn from fringe Holocaust scholarship, meant to trace a straight line from Husseini to Yasser Arafat, from Arafat to today’s Palestinians, and from today’s Palestinians back to Nazism; in this rendering, the Palestinian struggle is not a liberation movement, but a continuation of the Holocaust.

There is a durable political logic here. State violence, whether carried out by ICE in American cities or by settlers and soldiers in the West Bank, is insulated from historical comparison to the singular atrocity of the Holocaust—and as such, from the highest degree of moral scrutiny. Holocaust memory itself is reduced to an instrument of political enforcement, overseen by radical and unhinged ideologues unburdened by history. Figures with documented ties to Nazism can be welcomed into the fold, so long as their hatred is redirected toward a more useful scapegoat. Nazism is never a warning about what states do to the marginalized; it is a charge reserved exclusively for Palestinians, and for anyone who stands with them.

“There are two million Nazis in Judea and Samaria,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared shortly after October 7, and from there, the Jewish reign of terror reached new heights.

In the West Bank, out in the open and for everyone to see, roaming bands of masked, heavily armed settlers—operating under state and military protection—are systematically emptying Palestinian communities through violence and terror. In the past two years, dozens of Palestinian communities have been erased. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Tens of thousands of refugees have been dispossessed again, their homes reduced to rubble by airstrikes. Thousands more have been disappeared into prisons where they are routinely starved and tortured. In the West Bank, there is no Hamas to point to, no October 7 to blame.

And yet, the dominant response from Jewish institutions has been silence. This, we were taught, is as grave a crime as any. History will not judge it kindly.

(Cover photo taken by Ron Amir for +972 magazine.)

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