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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 often how it works: settler funerals double as political rallies, moments to channel grief into territorial expansion, often followed by waves of organized violence. 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.

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 not just a few bad ministers or a temporary policy deviation, but a Zionist project with ever-expanding territorial aims and virtually no meaningful internal resistance within the Israeli political system—and that any real change 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, his answer was blunt: “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—the ones 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.

Questions like:

• Would he continue supporting Iron Dome funding even as Israel wages relentless aggression across the region with the knowledge that it is largely insulated from retaliation?

• What does a “two-state solution” actually mean at this point, beyond ritual incantation, given the geography of the West Bank and the sheer scale of the settlement project?

• How does one reconcile support for a “Jewish democratic state” with the reality that maintaining a Jewish-majority state in all likelihood requires the permanent subordination of non-Jews under its control?

• Given that decades of American pressure and diplomacy have failed to restrain Israel’s expansion, occupation, and aggression, what new, harsher measures would he actually be willing to try?

• At what point do we stop treating Israel as an ally in the normal sense of the term?

Khanna’s answers were revealing. At one point, he said plainly that the United States should view Israel first and foremost as “an occupying nation violating human rights,” and that this lens should guide policy. That is stronger language than you hear from almost any major Democratic figure with national ambitions. He said he no longer supports renewing the existing Memorandum of Understanding on military aid when it comes up in 2028, and took a shot at fellow ambitious California Democrat Gavin Newsom, whose recent comments on Israeli apartheid generated headlines but, in Khanna’s view, remain too vague to mean much.

He also made clear that, in his view, Congress is not where this will ultimately be decided: real change would have to come from a president, State Department, and national security apparatus willing to treat Israel as a state carrying out occupation and systematic rights abuses.

Still, Khanna stopped short of the more fundamental break that many people, myself included, now believe the situation requires. From my vantage point, it seems that he is trying to define a Democratic position that is much harsher on Israel than the party establishment has been, but still recognizably inside the boundaries of mainstream electoral politics.

In any case, I think the conversation was quite revealing about where the debate is headed, and I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

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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 that shape daily life 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 akin to the atmosphere Black families described in parts of the Jim Crow South, where the Ku Klux Klan rode at night, the law often 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. The message was unmistakable: you have no protection here, 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. They operate not with tacit protection from the law, as the KKK did, but with the visible 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. To make you disappear.

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 largely treats it as a peripheral regional conflict, surfacing only when the violence becomes too graphic or 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 logic becomes self-fulfilling: imposed neglect produces the very conditions later invoked to justify intervention, demolition, and seizure. This is precisely what happened in Sebastia, where locals were forbidden from maintaining the archaeological ruins, and that manufactured disrepair 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, the picture comes into focus. Israel has systematically intensified the violence, precarity, and economic suffocation that make staying unbearable—dismantling aid mechanisms, revoking roughly 100,000 work permits, driving unemployment toward 30%, and pushing families into debt and hunger. Now, it is extending control into even the most insulated Palestinian cities, while simultaneously stripping away the remaining legal barriers that once slowed the transfer of Palestinian land into Israeli hands.

“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—which warned that formally tying their work to such 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: 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, reframed as evidence of unhinged Muslim rage. It’s a move lifted straight from the settlers’ playbook.

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.

Taken together, these episodes reveal a durable political logic. 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 and movements 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.)

The pipeline from violent land seizure to official authorization has never run more smoothly. It’s only a matter of time before groups selling homes there are welcomed into synagogues across the U.S.

Even as the IDF itself reports a steep drop in Palestinian attacks in the West Bank—57 incidents in 2025, down from 258 the year before—it continues to claim a heightened risk of an October 7–style attack from a population it has largely disarmed, and from resistance groups it has systematically decimated. That claimed threat now justifies permanent deployments in Jenin and Tulkarm: new roads carved through refugee camps, buildings leveled, and residents treated as removable obstacles to “security”—all of it paving the way for resettling the north.

Meanwhile, the real growth curve is on the settler side: 867 Jewish attacks in 2025, a 27 percent increase from 2024, including 128 severe incidents—shootings, arson, and serious physical violence—up more than 50 percent year over year.

The settler pioneers, as their allies in government call them, are building new frontiers. A new outpost has popped up near Qusra—the deepest yet inside PA-controlled Area B—and it’s already been used as a base for settler attacks. Israeli forces have responded by tear-gassing the Palestinian village under siege.

To top it off, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir approved gun permits for residents of eighteen West Bank settlements this week, extending a firearms policy that has rapidly militarized civilian settlers.

In light of all this exciting news, the Knesset hosted an actual celebration. On Monday, MK Limor Son Har-Melech held a tribute ceremony for the Hilltop Youth—the loose moniker for the most violent settlers at the front lines of land seizure—billed as a “Great salute to the pioneers of the settlements, the hills and the farms.”

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Among those honored was Daniella Weiss, the “godmother” of the settlement movement, who proudly tells anyone who’ll listen that she feels no empathy when Palestinian children are killed, and who closed her eyes when a reporter tried to show her my footage of a settler clubbing a Palestinian grandmother.

Also in attendance at the Knesset ceremony was Elisha Yered, who was suspected of involvement in the murder of a Palestinian teenager in 2023. I highlighted Yered in my piece Good Settler, Bad Settler, documenting how he functioned as a central ideologue and organizer within the hilltop movement, bridging violent outpost builders with the senior politicians and ministers who protect and empower them.

Here is Yered on X after the ceremony, waxing poetic about how far the settlement movement has come—from state alienation to full embrace, and from the myth of “good” versus “bad” settlers to open unity (emphasis mine):

Just back now from a historic and moving event held today in the Knesset. An official tribute ceremony in the Knesset building to the pioneers of settlement, the hilltop outposts and farms, every minute of which was like a healing balm for the wounds of the past that refused to heal until this day.

Years of persecution, of scorn and contempt, of lack of recognition for the life’s work of those who stubbornly kept the ember alive, carved deep wounds also in the hearts of the toughest among the activists.

And after them came other years of awakening and breaking forward. The contempt was replaced by awe and support, but alongside them grew a disgusting selection by certain elements who tried to divide between the settlement movements, between the pioneers and their comrades, between those worthy of government support and those whose blood is fair game, between those carried on shoulders and those deserving of condemnation and hostile treatment.

And here came MK Limor Son Har-Melech, who from her very first day in office refused to toe the line with those who tried to sow division and discord, to divide and conquer. At the tribute and appreciation conference she launched today for all the pioneering movements, we sat there together. Activists from the hilltops alongside members of the Nahala movement, farm residents alongside veterans of the young settlement. Jews filling different roles in the campaign, but all fighting for the same goal and even joining hands many times.

The Knesset members and ministers who came to express their support and appreciation repeated the same message again and again. You are the ones on the front lines of settlement, pulling the State of Israel forward to its Zionist values that it forgot over the years. Every boy, woman or father sitting here—they are soldiers in every sense. And not just them, also members of the second circle and the supporting environment without whom nothing would have succeeded in happening.

He then goes on to thank many members of the Israeli government who attended the ceremony.

As I often say, I truly appreciate the settlers for their candor. They understand the assignment laid out from the earliest days of Zionism, and have no patience for the pretense of “peaceful coexistence.”

Here’s what I wrote in The Baffler about Bezalel Smotrich—the finance minister and de facto governor of the West Bank—who has done more than anyone to pave the way for the current explosion in settlement growth:

Smotrich has always understood the origin of the current propelling him. “I believe that the yearning of generations for this land, and the confidence in our ultimate return thereto, are the most profound driving forces of the progression of the Return to Zion which led to the establishment of the State of Israel,” he wrote in the 2017 plan. On the inconvenient reality of the land’s current inhabitants, he added, “The statement that the Arab yearning for national expression in the Land of Israel cannot be ‘repressed’ is incorrect. It worked fine for the State of Israel, and it needs to work in the same way for Judea and Samaria.”

For Zionism, Smotrich knows, the formula has never changed: the founding myth will drive you forward, force will deliver the promise.

And the end of my article in The Drift about Israel’s archaeological warfare:

Aharon Tavger, another settler archaeologist at Ariel University, contends that the law around the occupied territories has never made much sense. “If we accept the recognition of Israel — the Israeli state,” Tavger said, “because of the historical right, or the connection of the people of Israel to the land, there is no difference between Tel Aviv and Sebastia.” He continued, “And I can say even the opposite: The heartland of Israel, of the ancient Jewish land, is Judea and Samaria — the West Bank — much more than Tel Aviv.” The whole argument against excavating in the West Bank, in his view, raises a thornier question.

“In 1948, Israel also occupied territory,” he said. “So what’s the difference?”

This is not a story about excesses or deviations, but the logical extension of a project that has always depended on ethnic cleansing to sustain itself. The fantasy that liberal Zionism could restrain or civilize it has fully collapsed.

Over the past several years, Democrats and liberal institutions in the United States have cheered on, amplified, and ultimately helped operationalize what had long been a far-right smear campaign against UNRWA, the largest aid agency for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, effectively equating it with Hamas.

On Tuesday, that campaign reached its logical conclusion, as Israeli bulldozers tore through its headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem, confiscating equipment, expelling guards, and raising an Israeli flag over the ruins. Israeli ministers arrived on site to celebrate. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called it “a historic day.”

Created in 1949, UNRWA exists to serve Palestinians displaced during Israel’s founding and, in doing so, to preserve their status as refugees. That role alone makes it intolerable to a political project committed not just to removing Palestinians from the land, but to erasing the fact that they were ever there. In recent years, UNRWA has functioned as a lifeline in both Gaza and the West Bank—running schools, clinics, food distribution, and basic infrastructure where no substitute exists. In Gaza in particular, dismantling UNRWA has meant dismantling the only system capable of delivering food at scale, directly leading to the starvation crisis last year.

In early 2024, Israeli officials alleged—without publicly verifiable evidence—that twelve UNRWA employees, out of a workforce of roughly 30,000, had participated in the October 7 attacks. A U.S. intelligence assessment later characterized those claims with “low confidence” and could not independently confirm them. Even so, the damage was already done. Major U.S. outlets—most notably The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—treated the accusations as credible breaking news, splashing them across front pages while burying caveats deep in the text. The timing was exquisite: the allegations broke just hours after the International Court of Justice found that Israel was plausibly committing genocide in Gaza.

Dozens of Western governments initially froze funding to UNRWA. Most quietly resumed it once the claims collapsed. The United States did not. Instead, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan spending bill that extended the UNRWA funding ban, backed by Democratic leadership including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.

That complicity continues to this day, including from presidential hopeful Rep. Ro Khanna, who, just last week, voted for a bill that defunded UNRWA while sending security assistance to Israel. Days later, he offered a textbook display of liberal hypocrisy by circulating a strongly worded letter condemning Israel’s actions in the West Bank. (In September, Khanna also signed onto a letter decrying “man-made mass starvation,” apparently without noticing what policies were helping produce it.)

Here’s a remarkable exchange I had with Khanna last week, presented without comment:

The UNRWA precedent is now metastasizing. Israel has moved to shut down Doctors Without Borders clinics in Gaza, demanding staff lists, restricting speech, and barring supplies—explicitly citing the group’s use of words like “genocidal” as grounds for expulsion. Patients interviewed inside these facilities say that without these clinics, they will not survive. Amputees will lose access to physical therapy needed to walk again; burn victims will miss daily wound care that prevents infection and death; surgical wards performing dozens of operations a day will simply disappear. In a territory where Israel has already destroyed most hospitals, there is no backup system waiting to take over.

This is not an attempt to absolve Republicans. I take for granted that they will do what they have always done: inflict harm on brown people, wherever they are in the globe. What demands scrutiny are the “Good Liberals” who launder smears into respectable discourse, cast votes behind closed doors to codify them into law, and then retreat into moral language while the consequences unfold.

To be perfectly clear: countless mainstream Democrats and liberal institutions helped deliver Itamar Ben-Gvir one of his lifelong dreams—the destruction of the largest aid agency for Palestinians. That is whose team they’re on.

Whatever one thinks about Israel’s history, the comforting versions of that story no longer do any explanatory work. What matters is what Israel is today. The Israel that has thrown its full support behind the most violent settlers in the West Bank. The Israel that is dismantling critical aid networks for Palestinians just because it can. The Israel that, on Wednesday, violated the “ceasefire” for the umpteenth time by killing three Palestinian journalists in Gaza while they were documenting life in displacement camps.

In the United States, as we sink deeper into fascism, the way our bipartisan consensus on Israel intersects with this trajectory has become impossible to ignore. Figures like Jonathan Greenblatt, Bari Weiss, and Chuck Schumer have systematically downplayed the rise of literal Nazism on the American right in favor of targeting critics of Israel. (A Justice Department official who resigned in May put it plainly: “There was no interest in antisemitism unless it involved protests of Israel or the war in Gaza.”) Last week, Israel dispatched officials across the U.S. to pressure institutions into banning the term “West Bank” in favor of “Judea and Samaria.”

This is why, as I wrote last year, Trump was so savvy to deploy a crackdown on pro-Palestine activists as the vanguard of his assault on the Constitution, one that was facilitated every step of the way by Democrats. America’s unwavering support for Israel—the “beacon of democracy in the Middle East,” where millions can’t vote or claim basic rights—has long been one of its central contradictions. It was only a matter of time before an authoritarian cashed in.

It should come as no surprise, then, that ICE’s tactics increasingly resemble the IDF’s: executing civilians in broad daylight with impunity, blocking medical care, and issuing bald-faced lies about the circumstances of these killings. This is not to suggest that one is derivative of the other, but that this is what a fascist crackdown looks like, whether it’s carried out at home or abroad.

Today, support for Israel means support for a far-right, antidemocratic movement that is killing and displacing Palestinians and Arabs across the region, while feeding into the erosion of civil liberties here in the United States. And as if we needed further proof of that connection: On Thursday, Haaretz reported that U.S. authorities chartered a private jet owned by an Israeli-American businessman and close friend of Donald Trump to deport eight Palestinians living in the United States to the West Bank. Days earlier, Israel deported an American Jewish activist due to his “leftism,” citing as evidence a photo of him protesting against Nazis in Charlottesville.

The through-line is no longer subtle. A single political logic now runs from hilltop outposts to humanitarian strangulation, from Gaza to the West Bank, and straight into the heart of American institutions—where many of the same Democrats who maintain steadfast support for Israel now caution against the push to abolish ICE. This is the end of the story liberals told themselves: that power could be outsourced without consequence, violence compartmentalized, and moral language made to stand in for material reality. What remains is a single, expanding architecture of force. History will not be confused about who made that possible.

A few final notes before I sign off:

• In case you missed it, I had what I thought was an excellent conversation with Mouin Rabbani about Israel’s endgame in the West Bank. You can watch it here.

• Columbia Journalism Review interviewed me about how I navigate the line between reporting and activism.

• I’ll be joining an online panel discussion on the West Bank hosted by the Arab Center Washington DC on January 29 at 10 a.m. EST. You can register here.

• And some rare good news: after a sustained global pressure campaign, Israel called off plans to demolish a youth soccer field in Aida Refugee Camp in the West Bank.

See you next time.

—Senior settlement official, speaking to Ynet this week

Now is the time when Substackers make predictions about the coming year. Fortunately for me, the subjects of my reporting proudly telegraph their every move, making prediction less a matter of prophecy than of listening closely to what the leaders of the settlement movement and their allies are already saying—and following those statements to their logical conclusions.

In short, here is my prediction for the occupied West Bank in 2026: Everything is going to get worse. The violence, the ethnic cleansing, the settlement building. All of it.

To get there, I spent the past two weeks combing through Israeli headlines, op-eds, and planning documents that spell out, in plain language, the settlement movement’s plans.

For those of us in New York, that future is already being marketed at select local synagogues, which continue to host settlement fairs, real-estate events, and information sessions offering step-by-step guidance on buying into the settlement enterprise, carefully whitewashed of the bloodshed that sustains it. And because that distortion is reinforced by headlines and condemnations fixated on the protesters outside, it is more important than ever to understand the machinery behind this movement and what it is preparing to unleash in 2026.

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Still, one day boredom overtook hunger. The boys saved scraps of bread from their meals, mixed them with water, and shaped them into chess pieces. They scratched a board into the concrete floor, set the pieces out to dry, and within a few days had a complete set. Mohammed told me he played three matches and won all three. The fun lasted about a day before they were caught.

Guards stormed the cell, filled it with pepper spray, beat the boys with sticks and shields, and confiscated the chess set. They were left choking and crying on the floor, as they often were, with nothing to flush the chemicals from their eyes. It burned everywhere, especially on their scabies, which for many had turned into infected, open sores. The guards also took their mattresses, so they’d be sleeping on bare metal bedframes again. Similar punishments followed when they made playing cards from the cardboard of toilet paper rolls. Or when they did pushups. Or sang. Or laughed. The boys in Israeli military detention are forbidden from being boys.

Three weeks after Mohammed was freed, I went fishing with him in Florida. I’d spent five months covering his detention and the fight to free him, and his family asked me to come down and be with them during his first week back in the States, a return he’d made many times before. Mohammed is a dual citizen who’s split his childhood between Florida and the West Bank.

We were standing on a dock at the edge of a pond, using rickety fishing poles and cheap lures we’d found inside the rental his father had booked to house some family friends visiting from Birzeit. Mohammed’s feet and ankles were caked with mud. Earlier, we’d gone kayaking. He wanted to look for gators, so we paddled into lagoons and through thick marshes, following bubble trails and leaping fish. We found none, so we decided to race back, but Mohammed’s arms grew tired, and he was feeling mischievous. He pulled up behind me and tethered his kayak to mine so I could tow him in while he lay back, grinning. When we got back to the dock, he grabbed a rod and paddled back out, but sheepishly returned when he was ready to admit he needed to be taught how to cast.

Soon, he announced he was bored. Maybe after three casts. I told him fishing took patience. He shrugged. “I want something fast.” His father caught a small bass, and when he tossed it back, Mohammed raced in after it to scoop it out of the water and hold it up as if it were his own. We put the rods away and went swimming in the pool. At first, he kept his shirt on, embarrassed at how skinny he’d become. We teased him, and he took it off. We propped a pool net against the barbecue and turned it into a basketball hoop. I threw him alley-oops as he jumped in again and again, slamming the ball home. He is, unmistakably, a sixteen-year-old boy.

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Mohammed told me that on February 16, the night he was abducted from his home in Al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya, soldiers blindfolded and zip-tied him, threw him face down onto the metal floor of a military jeep, then kicked him with heavy boots and beat him with their rifles as they drove. It was around 3 a.m., and he didn’t know where they were taking him. They arrived at a military compound—later identified as Ofer army camp—where he said he was pulled from the vehicle and forced to sit on the ground, still blindfolded and zip-tied, while soldiers continued to beat him on his head and all over his body. He had no shoes or socks. From there, he was frogmarched across sharp rocks to the police station a few hundred meters away.

They pulled his blindfold down and put him in a chair. He asked to speak to his parents and they refused. He was never offered a lawyer. It was freezing in the room, he said, and he had no coat. Across a table, two masked men with machine guns accused him of throwing stones at an Israeli car. He denied it. He told me the interrogator threatened that if he didn’t confess, he would instruct the soldiers to beat him again. Eventually, Mohammed said, he broke. “I couldn’t handle it anymore,” he told me. He admitted to throwing a stone, which he maintains he didn’t do, but not to hitting anything. When it was over, he said he couldn’t walk and was dragged into a holding cell, where he would remain for the next several weeks.

Even before all this, Mohammed was small for his age; now, months of malnutrition in prison may have permanently stunted his growth. He tries to make himself look taller when his photo is taken, standing on his tiptoes or on stacked soda cases. He won’t smile for the camera—the teenage-boy thing again—but it comes naturally, so in many photos you can see him biting his cheeks. The only way to capture him smiling is to sneak a video when he thinks you’re taking a photo, then pull a screenshot from the moment before or after. He didn’t like the photos his family chose to share as part of the campaign to free him. “I look like a baby,” he says. He still does, but it’s true: his face was chubbier then. He showed me a picture of himself standing in front of a sports car with his arms crossed, where his shoulders look bigger. Why couldn’t they have used that one? he wonders. He still has scabies rashes on his arms and legs.

During his detention, his father often described him in interviews by saying, “He’s a kid that’s impossible to dislike.” I didn’t understand it until I met him. I’ve met a lot of young Palestinian men, and many seem older than they are; they’ve been through it, and it shows. They are rough, scarred. But not Mohammed. He comes off like a boy. Somehow still has his innocence. He makes strong, open eye contact. He cannot sit still, cannot hold back his smile, even when he tries to be serious. He leapt out of his seat when I showed him a card trick, demanding to know how I’d done it. Above all, Mohammed is gentle. To spend time with him is to want to protect him—and to feel rage at what was done to him.

On March 10, Mohammed was transferred to Megiddo, a military detention center that B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, has described as part of a “network of torture camps.” (“When we got off the bus,” one detainee told B’Tselem, “a soldier said to us, ‘Welcome to hell.’”) The severe overcrowding was the result of policies overseen by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who has boasted about making conditions significantly worse for Palestinian prisoners. At the moment, Ben Gvir is leading a push to legalize the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of terrorism offenses, a category defined broadly under Israeli law, and has signaled his support by wearing a gold noose pin—closely resembling the yellow hostage ribbon—on his lapel.

In Mohammed’s cell, two surveillance cameras hung from the ceiling. An Israeli flag was mounted on the wall. The toilet was just a hole in the corner; they propped one of their paper-thin mattress upright for privacy. Some had bedframes, others were on the floor. A large, barred window looked straight onto a wall. The cell was stifling in the summer and frigid in the winter. There was no sunlight, just the blinding artificial light all day and night. There was no clock; the only marker of time was the daily wake-up at 4 a.m., when guards shone flashlights into their eyes, banged on the bars, and forced them to line up on their knees to be counted. (Mohammed, now, can count to eleven in Hebrew.) Each day, the boys were allowed out of the cell once, for between ten and forty minutes, to shower or go to the yard. The yard had no basketball hoop, no balls, no recreational equipment. Nothing at all.

The boys weren’t given individual plates, just a platter to split, but Mohammed told me no one ever tried to take more than their share. For breakfast, bread and a small bowl of labneh. Lunch and dinner were rice. Sometimes, hummus, tahini, beans, or a small sausage, if they were lucky. Occasionally, a cucumber or tomato to divide among eleven boys, cut with a plastic spoon. No fruit. They all craved sweets, but none were ever given, so they chewed dried-up toothpaste like gum. Mohammed was embarrassed to tell me this, afraid people would laugh. (I assured him they would not.) One small tube was given to the boys to share each week. On March 13, three days into his detention at Megiddo, his sixteenth birthday came and went without him realizing. When the others found out days later, they made him a cake with bread and tahini.

One of his cellmates—17-year-old Walid Ahmad, whom he quickly grew close to—was visibly sicker and weaker than the others when Mohammed arrived. Skin and bones, Mohammed told me. He had severe diarrhea, couldn’t keep food down, and shivered constantly. His skin was covered in scabies, which was ripping through the prison, leaving all the boys infested and scratching themselves raw. The boys worried about Walid, begged the guards to let him see a doctor. They refused.

On March 22, twelve days after Mohammed arrived at the prison, Walid collapsed during their daily trip outside the cell, falling face-first and splitting open the bridge of his nose. A pool of blood formed around him. The boys rushed to help and were pepper-sprayed. Mohammed said Walid remained conscious for about two minutes, looking around, scared, before losing consciousness again. A guard then arrived and dragged Walid’s motionless body across the floor by his hair.

Four days later, the boys learned that Walid, who was never charged with a crime, was dead. Back home, Mohammed’s family heard that a teenage boy had died in Megiddo and spent an entire, unbearable day trying to determine whether it was him; instead, they learned it was a boy from a neighboring town. An Israeli surgeon who observed Walid’s autopsy reported that the 17-year-old showed signs of prolonged starvation—extreme weight loss and muscle wasting—along with untreated colitis and scabies. A prison medical report also revealed that he had complained to the prison about inadequate food since at least December. His body has still not been returned to his family.

Months later, in September, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the state was failing to provide adequate food to Palestinian prisoners, and that it was legally obligated to provide them with enough nutrition to ensure “a basic level of existence.” Ben Gvir accused the judges of “defending terrorists” and said that the minimal food provisions he ordered would remain unchanged.

My mother joined us in Florida on Wednesday. For months, she’d been calling her representatives daily to demand Mohammed’s release, and she felt deeply connected to him and his family. When she arrived around eleven in the morning, Mohammed was clearly just waking up. But he registered who was at the door, and his eyes lit up, his face softened, and he stepped forward to hug her.

We exchanged gifts and played with the kids, drank coffee and ate sweets. Mohammed’s mom, Mona, brought out baklava; my mom had brought rugelach she’d made from my great-grandmother’s recipe. Mohammed and I slipped away to do a quick workout—push-ups, pull-ups, planks—before heading outside to play a makeshift game of HORSE, throwing a tennis ball against a stop sign. Inside, our mothers talked for a long time. Later, my mom told me that Mona said she cried every night, imagining what might be happening to her son. The helplessness was suffocating: she was desperate to touch him, to comfort him, to tell him it would be okay. The horror and dread Mona described, my mom said, were indistinguishable from what she would have felt if it had been me.

More of Mohammed’s extended family joined us, including his new cousins, seven-month-old twins, whose faces he stared into endlessly.

At dinner, while the men argued over the check, each insisting they’d cover it, a woman from another table quietly paid the bill. She was a local Palestinian American doctor. She recognized Mohammed, my mother, and me, and told us she had been calling her representatives every single day to fight for his release. Her voice was shaking as she spoke to us. She hugged Mohammed. It was very tender. He doesn’t seem to know what to make of his sudden visibility, but you can see he’s drawn toward people who make him feel safe.

Mohammed doesn’t really want to talk about his time in jail. He’d rather play soccer or chess. (When we played, he pulled out a chess app on his phone to use as a clock; I ran out of time, he gave me extra, and still beat me.) He’d rather work behind the counter at the family’s ice cream shop, where he packs so much into each cone that it feels like lead in your hand. He takes the work seriously—asking lots of questions, rinsing the scoops, quickly restocking flavors and toppings as they run low.

He was supposed to work there this past summer, training under his cousin Sayfollah Musallet, who owned the shop with another cousin. But Sayf, 20, was murdered by settlers on July 11, while Mohammed was in prison. He doesn’t know the details yet: that his cousin was beaten to death on his own land, where they used to pick olives and have family barbecues; that IDF soldiers blocked ambulances from reaching him for two and a half hours as he struggled to breathe. I tried to ask him about Sayf—twice—but his eyes turned glassy, and he shook his head. It was the only thing he wouldn’t talk about.

After Sayf died, Ambassador Mike Huckabee visited his father, Kamel, at his home. Kamel invited Zaher, Mohammed’s father, to join the meeting so they could plead for help. “They took my son away,” Kamel said to Huckabee. “We can do nothing about that. But can you give us something back, give us some happiness back? Can you at least get Mohammed out of jail?” Huckabee pledged to help, but Mohammed didn’t receive his next consular visit for another three weeks. (His first came about six weeks after his arrest.) They didn’t hear from Huckabee again until the day Mohammed was released in November, when he called Zaher to apologize for how long it took. (Kamel says he has not heard from him since that meeting, after which Huckabee publicly demanded accountability for what he called a “criminal and terrorist act.” Six months later, no one has been arrested for the killing of Sayf, though Kamel and other locals say they are certain of the identity of at least one of the settlers involved—a man who, they say, continues to roam the olive fields with a machine gun, threatening Palestinians.)

Mohammed told me that roughly every two weeks, guards carried out random searches, beating the boys and frightening them with large, ferocious dogs. Arms, legs, and ribs were routinely broken. Mohammed injured his shoulder once, and it took two months to regain full mobility. He remembers seeing the treads of thick-soled boots coming down on his head. Guards frequently pepper-sprayed the cell; on four or five occasions, they sprayed him directly in the face. Once, he said, because he was laughing.

The only news they had from the outside world came from new prisoners coming in. Or, on one occasion, when rockets from Iran soared over the prison. So the boys knew nothing about their own families. They were forbidden from ever communicating with them; Israel has said that preventing its child prisoners from speaking with their parents is a matter of national security. (Using the same justification, Israel has banned Red Cross visits to prisoners since October 7, in direct violation of international law.) Mohammed told me he dreamed about his family every night, and in his nightmares, something terrible had happened to them. He was afraid he would be released and find they were gone.

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We stayed out late every night at a kava café next to the ice cream shop, also owned by the family. There was a revolving door of Palestinian American relatives and friends, friends of friends, many from the same West Bank village, Al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya. They showed up straight from school or work, in sweaty gym clothes after pickleball, there to see Mohammed and to sit and talk endlessly. The hospitality is too much. These people are relentless. Maqluba, shawarma, hummus. Knafeh, ma’amoul. Pizza, waffles, ice cream. They won’t take no for an answer. It never ends. I calculated that I ate roughly forty-five servings of ice cream that week alone—three ice creams a day, three servings each, for five days. We drank coffee until midnight, played poker, went back to the house around two. As I brushed my teeth, they brewed another pot.

One evening, we drove out to a ranch owned by three brothers from the extended family. The men went out to a range and shot guns. After my time in the West Bank, it was jarring to see Palestinians with guns. It all felt illicit, like a drone might take us out. But here, they are Florida men.

They had two ATVs, and Mohammed couldn’t stay off them. He tore around the property for three hours, stopping only for dinner, meat sajiyeh with tomatoes, cooked over an open fire by his uncle Zeyad. It was, frankly, loud and annoying, but no one had the heart to stop him. “You can’t make up for everything in one night,” Zeyad told Mohammed when he drove by for a snack. He laughed and kept going. I went along for a joyride and bailed when I realized he was trying to break the sound barrier. When he finally joined us by the fire, he tried to chop wood, couldn’t free the axe after the first swing, dropped it, and moved on. He picked up a giant log we’d been using as a seat and tossed it into the fire, toppling the carefully stacked pile. A small transgression; everyone groaned, then a cousin rebuilt the fire without comment. We sat around drinking coffee and talking. About family, business, politics, Israel-Palestine. Their views are all over the map—something to unpack another time. A ten-year-old explained the Big Bang to me.

One of the visiting friends was a musician and composer, Rami Washaha, who teaches at the Edward Said Music Conservatory in Birzeit. His brother was shot dead by Israeli soldiers four years earlier. He lugged a violin, an oud, and an olivewood recorder with him, providing a soundtrack of traditional Palestinian and Arab music. The younger boys danced dabke. Mohammed feigned interest for a few minutes before heading back out to the ATVs.

We ate ice cream and said our goodbyes. They all kissed Mohammed on the head. He fell asleep instantly on the drive back home.

After five months, Mohammed was transferred from Megiddo to Ofer prison. He’d still not had a trial, and each time he showed up for a hearing, he was told it was delayed. Once, he waved at the security camera, hoping his family might see it, and a guard slapped his hand down. They’d never presented any evidence against him, nor accused him of causing harm. He was allowed two lawyer visits in nine and a half months, and they had no answers. He thought he’d be in jail for years.

Conditions at Ofer were even worse, and Mohammed’s health deteriorated. His entire body was covered in scabies. It was worst around his groin. He had lost nearly a third of his body weight. At one point, he became so sick he couldn’t eat or get out of bed. He was allowed to see a prison doctor, who he said accused him of lying and offered no treatment. (Mohammed was treated for scabies once during his imprisonment; with no follow-up care, he says, it never went away.) For the first time, he told me, he was afraid he might die.

Outside the prison, the grassroots campaign to free Mohammed was picking up steam. Thousands of people were calling their lawmakers daily, and lawmakers were in turn pressuring the U.S. Embassy to intervene. After Zeyad traveled to D.C. in September with a delegation of American families whose relatives were killed or abducted by Israeli settlers and soldiers, the embassy assigned Mohammed’s case to an official, Mark Marrano, whom the family says became their first consistent interlocutor. He visited Mohammed in prison and reported his worsening physical and mental health to the family. (Mohammed told me that each time embassy officials came, guards threatened to beat him if he made them “look bad.”)

When news of his condition became public and lawmakers began expressing outrage, the Israeli embassy in Washington circulated a memo on Capitol Hill full of misinformation, including about Mohammed’s health. Netanyahu’s office put out a statement accusing Mohammed of committing “a serious potentially deadly crime,” claiming it was a criminal rather than diplomatic matter. The memo and statement backfired, further angering lawmakers and intensifying pressure for his release.

On November 27th, a guard told Mohammed he was due in court. But he knew his next hearing wasn’t scheduled until mid-December, so he thought they might have been mistaken. It turns out, a new lawyer had secured a deal for him, almost certainly made possible by sustained outside pressure. Mohammed had become a giant headache for the Israeli government, and they were ready to get rid of it. When they told him he would be released, he thought it was a cruel trick.

He was sent back to the cell and told he would be released in two hours. He still didn’t believe it, but to be safe, he said goodbye to the others. They gave him their families’ home addresses so he could visit and assure them their children were all right, but he had no pen or paper, so he tried to memorize them. Then guards pulled him out, put him in a car, and drove him beyond the prison gates, where his father was waiting. Mohammed told me he thought he might have been dreaming. He kept asking his father if it was real.

His father was euphoric but alarmed by his son’s emaciated state, and drove him straight to the hospital. On the way, he told Mohammed that his cousin Sayfollah had been killed. His nightmare had come true. Mohammed couldn’t breathe, and his father had to pull the car over to help him calm down. At the hospital, he was reunited with the rest of his family, including his uncle Kamel, Sayfollah’s father. For Kamel, Mohammed’s return brought tremendous joy, but watching his nephew absorb the news of Sayfollah’s death felt like losing his son all over again.

In the days that followed, the only times Mohammed left the house were to visit Sayf’s grave with Kamel, and to see the families of the prisoners whose addresses he had managed to remember. Two days after his own release, Mohammed’s three friends who had been arrested alongside him were freed as part of an extension of the same deal.

Mohammed seems to be recovering quite well. After a week of struggling to eat, he is now ravenous and has begun to put weight back on. They are indoctrinating him in their pickleball obsession. He is happy, eager to resume something like the life he had before his imprisonment. For Palestinians, this kind of rupture is grimly routine. No family has been spared from Israel’s brutality. Their suffering is ordinary and human. So is the anger, visibly smoldering in some as Mohammed described his treatment in prison. But the resilience is learned, passed down, and continually reforged. Mohammed has absorbed from his family and loved ones that he has to feel the pain and then go on with his life. “Just look at Gaza,” they often say. “What choice do they have?”

The family faces difficult decisions. Mohammed missed a full year of school. For now, they are letting him rest, play, and ease back into normal routines. Trauma, of course, takes many forms, and he is not out of the woods. But soon they plan to begin homeschooling him, hoping to catch him up by the fall. They want to return to their home in the West Bank, but they are afraid. The family is known to Israeli authorities, and they worry about retaliation. Settlers have occupied their olive fields and now use the surrounding hills to launch attacks on the village itself. On Wednesday, December 24, settlers burned a home there, leaving graffiti that read, “Hello from the outskirt kids.”

At least 350 Palestinian children remain in Israeli military detention, many without charge. Mohammed believes he saw over 500. As far as we know, none of them holds American citizenship, which means they do not benefit from the kind of grassroots pressure campaign that helped secure Mohammed’s release. His family is committed to fighting to free them all. Mohammed talks about them often.

While I was in Florida, I mostly tuned out the news. But a few stories broke through. An online lynch mob doxxed and falsely accused a Palestinian American student of carrying out the Brown University shootings, with no evidence whatsoever, plunging him into what he later described as an “unimaginable nightmare.” “But it is a story every Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and marginalized person knows all too well,” he said.

Then, in a single day, two Palestinian sixteen-year-old boys were shot dead in the West Bank, one by an Israeli soldier, one by a settler. The boy killed by soldiers was immediately branded a “terrorist” by the IDF and accused of “hurling a block” at them, an allegation offered to justify his summary execution.

Days later, a security-camera video emerged showing the eighteen seconds before the shooting. The boy walks down an alley as two Israeli soldiers crouch behind a corner. When he reaches it, one soldier raises his rifle and shoots him at point-blank range. There is no reason to believe he threw anything at all.

The Israel Prison Service and Israeli Defense Forces did not respond to requests for comment.

For more on the effort to free Mohammed, see my interview with Zeyad here.

For Kamel’s account of the simultaneous grief and joy of this moment, watch my interview with him here.

Reader Note: As many of you know, I recently took the plunge into full-time writing and reporting, leaving behind the work that paid my bills for the past fifteen years. Journalism isn’t exactly a gold mine these days—especially for those committed to holding power to account and covering what the mainstream won’t—so paid subscriptions are what make this possible.

Every bit of my reporting, including my trips to the West Bank, is self-funded. No crew, no security team—just me. This holiday season, consider upgrading to a paid account to get access to all of my work, including exclusive interviews and on-the-ground reporting. It costs just $6.67 / month for an annual subscription, or $8 month-to-month.

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Last year, I reported for The Drift from the West Bank village of Sebastia, where Israel has been using archaeology as a tool of annexation. The piece traced how archaeology has long been embedded in Zionism as a means of converting selective history into modern territorial control.

I returned in October and found that my grimmest predictions are coming true: Israel has effectively built an archipelago of militarized archaeological outposts, nearly 40 percent of the village is slated for expropriation, and violence around the heritage sites is escalating. Just weeks after my first piece was published, Israeli snipers shot and killed a fourteen-year-old boy.

All over Sebastia, you can see what Israel’s professed care for protecting heritage looks like in practice:

Ayman Schaer, who was shot in the Roman acropolis during my visit in March 2024, is still bedridden, his leg held together by pins. [Graphic video warning]

Elsewhere in Sebastia, beyond the archaeological sites, settler outposts have spread across agricultural fields, and armed settlers and soldiers have blocked locals from reaching their own land, routinely humiliating them:

In other words, the situation in Sebastia—like much of the West Bank—is rapidly spiraling out of control. You can read my new report here:

The Drift

Israel's archaeological apartheid: an update

Last year, I reported for The Drift from Sebastia, a Palestinian village in the West Bank that was built around the ruins of at least ten major civilizations. It is, among other things, the site of Samaria, the northern capital of the ancient Israelites some three thousand years ago. For some religious Zionists, this sliver of Jewish history makes Sebas…

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3 months ago · 10 likes · Jasper Diamond Nathaniel

For more on the efforts to stop the expropriation, follow @SaveSebastia on Instagram.

More soon,

Jasper

If you’re looking for a meaningful holiday gift, might I suggest putting it toward independent journalism?

November offered a reminder of what this work can actually do—especially with a mainstream media that refuses to hold power to account. The settler I documented clubbing a grandmother in a video that drew international outrage was indicted on terrorism charges. A few hours later, 16-year-old Mohammed Ibrahim—whose case I’ve covered almost daily since July while most outlets ignored it—was freed from Israeli military detention.

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Paid subscriptions are 20% off through the end of the year. If you’d like to support my work and get full access to all of my reporting and analysis—or gift it to a loved one (or an enemy)—now’s a great time.

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Before I get into it, I want to quickly note the horrific news I woke up to this morning about a shooting massacre at a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi Beach. I considered holding off on sending this piece, but decided there’s no reason to wait—if anything, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank tends to accelerate in moments like these.

I’m going to resist the urge to fire off a take before we have a clear picture of who is responsible, or before I’ve had time to fully reflect. Unfortunately, Netanyahu showed no such restraint, wasting no time at all in blaming the shooting on the Australian government’s support for a Palestinian state.

A depraved response to a depraved act, which has nothing to do with the real struggle for Palestinian freedom. More on this later.

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The interview is a long one (...again), but for good reason: we walked step-by-step through every phase of the fight, from the hours after Mohammed’s abduction to the moment he was freed. We talked through the legal maneuvering in Israel, the political pressure (and public shaming) in Washington, the relentless phonebanking campaign, the increased urgency after Mohammed’s cellmate—and then cousin—were killed, the strategic use of public statements from Israeli authorities against them, and the backchannel diplomacy. We also discussed the role that various US lawmakers played in the effort—including one AIPAC Democrat whose role has not been discussed until now—and named and shamed those who did nothing. Zeyad also explained the personal reasons he took on this fight, and the interview includes a cameo from his infant son, Sayfollah—named for his nephew who was beaten to death in July.

What emerges is not a single winning tactic or turning point, but a sequence of overlapping pressures and contingencies that finally forced Israel to let him go. At a time when so many people feel helpless in the face of compounding Israeli injustices and U.S. complicity, I’d like to think this offers a playbook for how to organize on the ground to secure material wins in cases like this.

If you’re looking for a meaningful holiday gift, might I suggest putting it toward independent journalism?

November offered a reminder of what this work can actually do—especially with a mainstream media that refuses to hold power to account. The settler I documented clubbing a grandmother in a video that drew international outrage was indicted on terrorism charges. A few hours later, 16-year-old Mohammed Ibrahim—whose case I’ve covered almost daily since July while most outlets ignored it—was freed from Israeli military detention.

All of my reporting is self-funded. If you want to help me keep doing it, consider gifting a paid subscription to my newsletter—for yourself or for someone who needs it.

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Get 20% off for 1 year

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If you’ve been following the story, one face you’ve probably seen in the reunion photos and videos—often the one texting me updates in real time—is Kamel Musallet, Mohammed’s uncle and the father of 20-year-old Palestinian American Sayfollah Musallet, who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in July. For Kamel, Mohammed’s return has been a whiplash of joy and fresh grief: welcoming his nephew home while also watching him learn—after nine and a half months cut off from the outside world—that his cousin had been murdered, a moment that ripped open wounds the family has been carrying ever since. (I wrote about Kamel and the broader community of Palestinian American families fighting for justice in Washington in a recent piece for The Paris Review: A Hill To Die On.)

In our conversation, we talk about what this week has been like for him, the details of the day Saif was killed, the role the IDF played, and Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s initial expression of concern followed by months of silence. We also go deep on the specific struggle in Al-Mazra‘a al-Sharqiya, where settlers have taken over the private Palestinian olive groves that families have tended for generations, and are now using the hilltop as a strategic position to launch attacks and threaten nearby towns.

It’s a long interview, but in my opinion, an important—and very moving—one, illuminating a real story about a town’s fight for survival in the West Bank and the human stakes of this moment. I hope you’ll watch the whole thing.

Jasper

PS — I talked about Mohammed’s release on The Majority Report (26:30) and Bad Hasbara (9:00) this week.

If you’re looking for a meaningful holiday gift, might I suggest putting it toward independent journalism?

Last week offered a reminder of what this work can actually do—especially with a mainstream media that refuses to hold power to account. The settler I documented clubbing a grandmother in a video that drew international outrage was indicted on terrorism charges. A few hours later, 16-year-old Mohammed Ibrahim—whose case I’ve covered almost daily since July while most outlets ignored it—was freed from Israeli military detention.

All of my reporting is self-funded. If you want to help me keep doing it, consider gifting a paid subscription to my newsletter—for yourself or for someone who needs it.

Give a gift subscription

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I’m planning major reporting trips and investigations in the coming months and years, continuing to document the reality on the ground in the West Bank and the direct link between settler violence and the state behind it. With mainstream outlets still failing to cover the West Bank with any real depth, independent journalism needs all the support it can get.

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Last week, I wrote about the Good Settler / Bad Settler fiction, in which the supposedly “fringe” settlers do the dirty work—attacking Palestinians, driving families off their land—before the “good” settlers show up to build a respectable façade and the state steps in to bless it, pausing only to condemn the violence once it becomes a PR liability.

In the days after I published, Prime Minister Netanyahu broke his silence on the surge in settler attacks, condemning the “handful of extremists” who “attempt to take the law into their own hands”—a useful reminder that the state considers brutalizing Palestinians and seizing their land to be its own job. Then, on Monday, the IDF’s Central Command—led by Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, who last week waved the attackers off as “fringe anarchist youth” and is supposedly overseeing the crackdown—approved Smotrich’s plan for 10 new settlement-jurisdiction zones in the northern West Bank, part of a wider campaign to convert illegal outposts into formal settlements. In practice, it elevates the very violence he claims to be policing into state-sanctioned progress, rewarding the perpetrators with new boundaries, new authority, and a government stamp of legitimacy.

All of this came to mind when the latest Mamdani scandal broke last week, after rowdy protesters gathered outside Park East Synagogue in New York to oppose an event hosted by Nefesh B’Nefesh—an organization that helps North American Jews make Aliyah by moving to Israel and the occupied West Bank.

Here is the New York Times—hardly an outlet inclined to bolster Mamdani or anti-Zionists—on the organization:

In a statement on its website, Nefesh B’Nefesh said it was “dedicated to supporting, educating, and advising individuals and families throughout their Aliyah (immigration to Israel) journey.” The group condemned “the violent rhetoric and aggressive behavior that took place outside of the Park East Synagogue.”

Ms. Katsman said Nefesh B’Nefesh “does not endorse, recommend, or promote any specific community, location or neighborhood to move to in Israel.”

But that appeared to be at odds with the organization’s website, which contains pages of detailed recommendations about life in Israeli towns as well as in some of the largest settlement blocs in the West Bank. Those include the 22 settlements in Gush Etzion, an area south of Jerusalem, and Ma’ale Adumim, a large settlement located between the northern and southern West Bank that many Palestinians see as a threat to the territorial integrity of any future Palestinian state.

Nefesh B’Nefesh encourages Americans to move to smaller settlements, too, which it portrays as integral parts of Israel. It describes the settlement of Elkana, in the occupied West Bank, for example, as “a beautiful, comfortable and well-situated community in the center of Israel. Location! Location! Location!”

In response to the protests, Mamdani’s team put out this statement: “The Mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so. He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”

The outrage among the “good liberals” of New York and beyond has centered almost entirely on the second part of Mamdani’s statement, and on the protest itself. To be fair, the protesters played all the hits—“globalize the intifada,” “Death to the IOF,” etc.—which, in my mind, are in no way antisemitic but certainly signal a type of militant anti-Zionism that frightens people in the pro-Israel crowd. But my question for this crowd is this: Where is the outrage over the event itself?

To put my cards on the table, I believe that “liberal Zionism” is an oxymoron. Nobody has been able to explain to me how a state that must forcefully maintain a Jewish majority in an Arab region can also uphold basic liberal values. But for the purposes of this argument, I am accepting its premise that “liberal Zionism” is fundamentally different from the messianic vision of Greater Israel promoted by the Smotriches and Ben Gvirs of the world. So my next question is: Why are you so bad at maintaining this distinction?

It’s revealing that so many who claim to oppose settlements see no issue with fraternizing with an organization that literally helps people move into them. In a parallel universe, these same voices would be outraged to learn that an organization helping Jews immigrate to Israel is also helping them immigrate to the occupied West Bank—which its own website presents as part of Israel, the framing of the far-right—and that a Manhattan synagogue invited them in. Alas, in this universe, they circle the wagons.

This is the Good Settler / Bad Settler fiction playing out in real time on the Upper East Side. The violence happens over there, in the hills of the West Bank, carried out by those “fringe” elements the good liberal Zionists claim to condemn. Meanwhile, over here, in Manhattan, the infrastructure of violent occupation is maintained through organizations with glossy websites and synagogues with respectable boards.

One of Israel’s great achievements has been whitewashing its own brutality so thoroughly that it can claim the moral high ground while casting anyone who objects as the real aggressors. We hear constantly about the need for pro-Palestine crowds to root out the antisemitic elements among them. Fair enough; every protest movement has its rot. But the so-called liberal Zionist camp is long overdue for its own reckoning—not with a fringe, but with its foundation. It might be time to consider exactly who they are welcoming into their own homes, and whether, if they looked too closely, they’d find the entire project far more hollow than they’d like to admit.

While I have you, I thought I’d share this Drop Site interview with my mom and me—words I never thought I’d write—which I think offers some insight into where my work comes from.

If you don’t have time to watch the whole video, just watch these two clips for now:

Here’s a response on X from a real, working rabbi, who also writes for prominent Jewish publications and serves as a commissioner on Kentucky’s Commission for Human Rights:

In almost any other context, is there any question that this would be read as a straightforward use of an antisemitic trope? Hard to say, when the people appointed to answer that question are the ones trafficking in it.

When I pointed out the hypocrisy, the good rabbi deleted his post and accused me of being both Hamas and a Nazi—something he’s made a habit of doing.

Here’s another response:

So I answered:

And—would you believe it—Jonka Molly immediately deleted their question. A true hallmark of “genuine curiosity.” Not before firing off this parting shot, though:

I’ll let you do the math on whether that timeline makes sense. But putting that aside, I do appreciate Jonka for expressing, in one neat sentence, what much of the contemporary Jewish establishment now believes Judaism means.

More coming very soon.

Jasper

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The IDF told Haaretz that the violent settlers are “fringe anarchist teenagers” who need “intervention from welfare and education institutions.” Army Chief Eyal Zamir called them a “criminal minority tarnishing a law-abiding public.” President Isaac Herzog said the attacks were committed by a “handful of perpetrators.” The head of the army’s Central Command, Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, complained about responding to an “anarchist fringe youth” that diverts resources from counterterrorism. Yesha Council Chairman Yisrael Ganz—who represents the settlers—condemned the “small group of extreme anarchists,” while Samaria’s regional council leaders denounced the “small band of rioters who travel from place to place with the intent to provoke unrest and behave violently.” Even the celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach decried “hooliganism and vigilante justice” by “a few rotten apples.”

Of course, these claims don’t match what’s happening on the ground.

The idea that this is just the “youth” is plainly inaccurate. It is certainly true that teenagers and even children are often put on the front lines—some outposts even register as “foster homes” to recruit at-risk minors into the hilltop movement—but many of the most violent settlers are full-grown men. Yinon Levi, who murdered Awdah Hathaleen in Umm al-Khair, is 31. Ariel Dahari, the man I filmed clubbing a grandmother, is in his twenties. The leader of the nearby outpost, who waved his pistol at us and is known to orchestrate these attacks, appears to be in his forties or fifties:

It’s hard to square the idea of a “small band” of roaming extremists with the reality of eight attacks per day across the entire West Bank—from the Hebron Hills in the south to the Tulkarm Governorate in the north—launched from a network of outposts embedded in virtually every region of the occupied territory.

And then there’s the characterization of the violence itself. Saying these attacks “divert resources from counterterrorism” assumes, by definition, that the settlers carrying them out are not terrorists themselves. And that tracks: we know exactly how the state behaves when it does view something as terrorism. In Bethlehem this week, the Shin Bet and IDF carried out coordinated raids across fifteen sites, arrested fifty alleged Hamas operatives, seized weapons, and rushed the case materials to military prosecutors, claiming that they’d stopped an “imminent” attack. By contrast, in Turmus’ayya—where dozens, if not more than a hundred, settlers launched a very real, not imminent, attack—it took three weeks to make a single arrest, even as authorities continue blocking Palestinians, activists, and journalists from reaching the olive fields where the violence is taking place. And calling the attacks “vigilante justice” suggests that the underlying cause is legitimate, and that the issue is merely that private citizens are taking on a role the state should handle.

Meanwhile, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—who is actually in charge of law enforcement—did what he always does: said the quiet part out loud, declaring that he was “proud” the police were not “harassing” Hilltop Youth members. “The days of police using the Hilltop Youth as a punching bag are over,” he said.

Still, the barrage of statements accomplished its goal: shoring up the false dichotomy between the “good settler” and the “bad settler,” in which the former supposedly represents the vast, responsible majority and the latter a tiny fringe. It also gave Israel’s allies the breathing room to maintain blanket support in the face of such heinous images. When asked about spiraling settler violence, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed to Herzog and the IDF’s “strong condemnations” as evidence that Israel was taking the issue seriously, while also making clear that the problem wasn’t the violence itself but “some concern that events in the West Bank could spill over and undermine what we’re trying to do in Gaza.”

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Last week, in response to the arrest of Ariel Dahari—the man who clubbed the grandmother Um Saleh in Turmus’ayya—I wrote about the evolving relationship between the settlers and the state:

It’s worth remembering that years ago, before settlers rose to the highest levels of government, the Israeli military often found itself chasing them around the hills of the West Bank, frustrated that they were trying to carry out ethnic cleansing on their own terms. Among those being chased were Smotrich and Ben Gvir themselves, back when they were fringe provocateurs rather than government ministers. Their freelance violence created instability the army had to contain, rather than the more orderly, state-sanctioned version of land theft carried out through official settlement building…

Dahari’s arrest is a faint echo of the old security establishment that sometimes found itself at odds with the settler movement—on tactics, if not intent. But this arrest, more than anything else, looks like an attempt to clean up a PR crisis caused by the video. Whether or not Dahari does real jail time, I have no illusions that it will lead to any real dismantling of the terror network in Turmus’ayya and beyond. The ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is—and always has been—a state-backed project, and a flicker of accountability here does nothing to change that.

But if you really want to understand this dynamic—not as I describe it, not as Israeli officials spin it, but as the settlers themselves understand it—look no further than a remarkable Hebrew-language article published this week in Arutz Sheva, the settlers’ flagship media outlet: Hills, farms and everything in between: putting the settlement map in order. It’s written by Elisha Yered, a 22-year-old far-right activist who has rapidly become one of the most influential ideologues of the hilltop movement that builds illegal outposts on Palestinian land.

In August 2023, Yered and another settler were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the fatal shooting of 19-year-old Qusai Jamal Maatan during a settler raid on the Palestinian village of Burqa. Israeli MKs and Ministers sprang to his defense, with Ben-Gvir declaring he should be rewarded. Within days, Yered was released from custody.

But Yered is far from “fringe.” He served as the official spokesperson for Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har-Melech, a member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition and a close political ally of Ben-Gvir. He has helped establish and fundraise for illegal outposts across the West Bank and is deeply embedded in the networks that link settlers to the very ministers who oversee Israeli law enforcement. Here is the Times of Israel on his arrest:

“I suggest security services direct their efforts toward dealing with the nests of terror instead of chasing after [settlers] who hold on to our land with devotion,” added [MK] Son Har-Melech.

Somewhat undercutting the settlers’ position, an unidentified security source told Ynet that Yered “has been heating things up in the area for a long while, also leading to a rise in Palestinian terror and rock throwing.”

The outlet noted that Yered had in the past called for the “erasure” of Palestinian villages on social media as well as for “revenge…with blood” for attacks, saying if security forces did not do so, “brave Jews” would.

In his new op-ed, Yered opens by brushing aside the official narrative that frames the recent violence as the work of “fringe youth.” In his telling, every faction of the settler movement—from the young men who torch olive groves to the leadership of the regional councils to the state authorities behind them—operates along a shared continuum, coordinating informally and formally despite tactical disagreements. The idea that these actors are isolated from one another, he suggests, is either naïve or deliberately misleading.

He then dives into the internal debate that has shaped the modern settler movement—the one I outlined last week—over whether Jewish sovereignty in the West Bank should be advanced through authorized state-backed settlement construction or through unregulated land seizures carried out by “vigilantes.” For decades, the Israeli security establishment, aligned with the former approach, tried to rein in the hilltop movement—raiding their outposts, confiscating equipment, issuing administrative orders—but the settlers kept pushing forward. Eventually, the state gave up.

When Israel realizes it can’t eradicate a movement, he argues, it simply redirects it—much like its approach to Hamas, which it has long tried to “buy off with benefits.” Beginning about a decade ago, he writes, Israeli authorities decided it was easier to accommodate settler ambitions than to clash with them. They began approving “coordinated” outposts—usually a trailer or tent placed on state land, often just outside the fence of an existing settlement—and turned a blind eye as more remote hills were seized by their less-disciplined counterparts.

At first, he writes, the state’s red line was absolute: no construction outside the settlement fences. Then the unofficial deal became: fine, but don’t push too deep into the open areas. Then: fine, as long as it’s on state land. Then: fine, survey land too. Eventually: fine, anywhere in Area C. And now, he says, the limits have expanded again—into Area B, supposedly under full Palestinian civil control. To prepare for this next phase, Yered describes how his network has mapped the most “breakable” zones in Area B, drafted settlement blueprints and territorial corridors, and assembled dedicated groups to carry out the work. The movement, he boasts, has already established seven new outposts in these mapped locations in the past few months alone.

This is what it looks like in Turmus’ayya, where settlers have gradually swallowed more of the olive fields—seizing land, structures, and vantage points from which they now launch their attacks:

To state the obvious, Yered’s language is not that of a “fringe group.” It’s the language of a political actor confident that the state will eventually ratify whatever facts it creates on the ground.

And why wouldn’t he be confident? Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has spent the past two years fast-tracking the retroactive legalization of dozens of illegal outposts and expanding existing settlements to absorb the surrounding “neighborhoods” settlers built without approval. In other words, the violent settlers function as the spearhead of official policy.

Yered’s argument is also revealing for what it says about the division of labor between the “good settlers” and the “bad settlers.” In his telling, the authorized farms—the legal settlements—and the “unauthorized” hills—the illegal outposts—depend on one another. The state-approved settlers can only operate because the hilltop youth push the boundaries outward, absorbing the initial blowback and expanding the horizon of what the government later deems tolerable.

As he puts it, the outposts that began as “three young men” have become settlements with dozens of families, while what once began with lone trailers “now proudly emerge in large numbers, receiving official protection from the military.” On the ground, he writes, there is “fruitful cooperation” between the two camps—from “assistance in security incidents and firefighting,” to logistics, to regular ideological gatherings.

We saw a perfect demonstration of that cooperation this week. The “good settler” interviewed by the BBC, Amichai Luria, lives in Shiloh, one of the movement’s most respectable, government-backed settlements—across the olive fields from Turmus’ayya—a place frequented by Ambassador Mike Huckabee. His winery relies on grapes grown on Palestinian land seized by the “bad settlers.” And when he was asked about the brutal clubbing of Um Saleh on that very same land, he dismissed it as nothing more than “an attempt to make the Jews look bad.”

“It’s amazing to me how people talk about these rare occasions [when] people misbehave,” he said. “Oh, some people were trying to pick olives and some Jews came and bothered them. Give me a break. There are more muggings on the main street in London than there [are] here… Most of the Arabs, if they could, would follow Hamas or Hezbollah. Very, very, very few want to coexist or live in peace, and at the first opportunity they have, they’re going to wipe us out… The future is very simple. Hopefully the army will wake up, hopefully people will understand that we have to prepare ourselves, that they’re coming for us.”

The best defense is a good offense, he suggests—and Yered would seem to agree: “Reality is never static,” he writes. “Either you advance forward or you retreat.”

And then comes the theological core. All talk of “containment boundaries,” “state land,” and “survey land,” Yered argues, is ultimately a distraction. The land was promised to the Jews by God. No one has permission to surrender a single dunam. Those who do the work of seizing it—often violently—are not anarchists but divine pioneers fulfilling a prophecy, even if the state publicly scolds them for it.

It ends, fittingly, with Yered offering a salute to the same “youth” the Israeli government claims to be battling: “I don’t know if you feel it on the hill,” he writes, “but you have tremendous public support… everywhere from the people of Israel.”

Three months ago, Yered hosted Ben-Gvir and the commander of the West Bank police district—Deputy Commissioner Moshe Pinchi—for a friendly tour of a brand-new illegal outpost Yered helped establish. They sat together, listened to settlers’ complaints, and posed for smiling photos that Yered then posted online.

Pinchi—furthest on the left in the above photograph—is the same official who, after my video of the Turmus’ayya attack went viral, said the image had “kept him up at night.” The officials now condemning settler violence are, quite literally, the very same ones celebrating its architects—and supplying the scaffolding that lets them keep building.

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The Israeli government has spent the past three years aligning itself structurally and ideologically with the settlement movement—transferring West Bank governance from the military to civilian ideologues, fast-tracking outpost legalizations, pouring billions into settler roads and housing, dismantling nearly every bureaucratic brake that once slowed expansion, and even arming the most notoriously violent settlers. Now, while the world fixates on headline-grabbing violence, quiet policy shifts continue to accelerate beneath the surface. 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—and one inseparable from the very dynamics of encroachment that produce those threats. The deeper a settlement pushes into Palestinian land, the more “dangerous” its surroundings become, producing a circular logic in which expansion manufactures the “insecurity” that then entitles it to further state support.

The Yesha Council, which represents the settlers, praised the bill’s advancement, saying it “joins the revolution led by Minister Bezalel Smotrich in recent years in Judea and Samaria, which effectively consolidates Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank.” One day later, they joined the chorus condemning the “small group of extreme anarchists.”

The state and the different settler factions may quarrel over timing, optics, and methodology, but they agree on the destination. The “fringe anarchists” push past the map, the respectable settlers move in, then the state later incorporates the gains. The security establishment condemns the violence on television and then protects the outposts that emerge behind it.

There are certainly still elements within the Israeli government and security establishment who object to the most violent settlers, and even to settlement expansion. But what Yered’s piece makes clear is that unless there is a meaningful faction within Israel determined to dismantle the entire settlement project in the West Bank—and there is not—then there is no meaningful opposition to its continued growth and all the violence that comes with it. The “good settler” and the “bad settler” are two sides of the same coin, and there is no supporting one without the other.

And this is why a single arrest doesn’t change the trajectory. Ariel Dahari may have overstepped the moment, but the machinery that empowered him is much larger than any one man, and it is operating in the open. Fortunately for its operators, the mainstream media is not paying attention.

Reader Note: As many of you know, I recently took the plunge into full-time writing and reporting, leaving behind the work that paid my bills for the past fifteen years. Journalism isn’t exactly a gold mine these days—especially for those committed to holding power to account and covering what the mainstream won’t—so paid subscriptions are what make this possible.

Every bit of my reporting, including my trips to the West Bank, is self-funded. No crew, no security team—just me.

If you’d like to lock in the lowest rate and get access to all of my content—including exclusive interviews and on-the-ground reporting—I’m offering 20% off this month: $64 for the year, or $6.40 month-to-month.

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This is the first edition of a new feature for paid subscribers, where I’ll share what’s on my mind, unpack important and under-reported stories, interview sources on the ground, and more. The free newsletter isn’t going anywhere—but if you value my work, consider upgrading so you don’t miss a thing.

As many of you know, I recently took the plunge into full-time writing and reporting, leaving behind the work that paid my bills for the past fifteen years. Journalism isn’t exactly a gold mine these days—especially for those committed to holding power to account and covering what the mainstream won’t—so paid subscriptions are what make this possible.

Every bit of my reporting, including my trips to the West Bank, is self-funded. No crew, no security team—just me.

If you’d like to lock in the lowest rate, I’m offering 20% off this month: $64 for the year, or $6.40 month-to-month.

Get 20% off for 1 year

Thank you—your support means the world to me.

Today’s lineup:

• My deep dive into Ariel Dahari—the Israeli man I filmed attacking Um Saleh in Turmus’ayya—who was arrested on Sunday, three weeks later.

• Exclusive updates on the case of Mohammed Zaher Ibrahim, the American teenager imprisoned in Israel.

• A look at the hysterical reaction to Zohran Mamdani’s election.

First, if you missed it: I joined Chapo Trap House to discuss the spiraling violence in the West Bank—violence that reached record levels this October, with the UN reporting more than 260 settler attacks during the olive harvest, an average of eight per day—before moving on to more pressing topics, like settler dating apps and Canary Mission hostage videos.

I also spoke with Chris Hayes on Why Is This Happening, which felt like a win in terms of reaching a more mainstream liberal audience with stories of state-backed settler terrorism. It’s a good one to send to friends or family still clinging to their illusions about Israel.

Arrest of Turmus’ayya Settler Terrorist

On Sunday, Israeli authorities arrested the man they say attacked Um Saleh in Turmus’ayya, on charges of “terror and assault.” His name is Ariel Dahari, a twenty-something from ‘48 Israel—not the West Bank—who has been on the state’s radar for years.

Here’s what I said about a potential arrest last week, before it happened:

Below is a rundown of what I was able to find on Dahari. As you read this, it’s worth remembering that years ago, before settlers rose to the highest levels of government, the Israeli military often found itself chasing them around the hills of the West Bank, frustrated that they were trying to carry out ethnic cleansing on their own terms. Among those being chased were Smotrich and Ben Gvir themselves, back when they were fringe provocateurs rather than government ministers. Their freelance violence created instability the army had to contain, rather than the more orderly, state-sanctioned version of land theft carried out through official settlement building.

Background: Dahari is from Nof Ayalon, a community inside Israel, but he appears to have spent much of his free time in the occupied West Bank, immersing himself in the hilltop youth world and drifting between hardline settlements like Yitzhar and Bat Ayin, both known for extremist violence.

2019–2020: Shin Bet “Jewish terror” case. In late 2018 and early 2019, Dahari (then 18) was arrested alongside other far-right youths in a Shin Bet “Jewish terror” probe, suspected of conspiring to carry out a terror attack, membership in a terror organization, and other racially motivated crimes.

In January 2020, a judge publicly criticized the Shin Bet’s late-night interrogations of Dahari and another suspect, saying they amounted to abuse and violated basic rights, and ordering that the terror suspects be allowed eight consecutive hours of sleep. The case sparked protests from settler activists, who staged mock torture scenes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and accused the Shin Bet of persecuting Jewish suspects.

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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. 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.

Anywhere else, this would be cruel. Here, it is sadistic. This is the same village where, on July 28, the settler Yinon Levi shot and killed Awdah Hathaleen—a teacher, activist, father of three, and pillar of Umm al-Khair—and walked away scot-free.

You’ve likely seen the clip from that day. Levi arrived with a bulldozer to prepare the ground for the outpost, ripping through the village’s land and severing water and electricity lines. When villagers protested, the bulldozer driver swung its extending arm into Ahmad Hathaleen, Awdah’s cousin, knocking him out cold. Levi then stepped out in front and fired wildly into the crowd. Awdah was standing with his three-year-old son, Chamudi, when he was killed on the basketball court. The locals told me Chamudi still repeats, “Daddy got hurt,” and asks when he’ll wake up.

Here is Ihmeed Hathaleen, another cousin, describing Awdah’s lingering presence in the village:

When the army arrived, Levi smoked cigarettes and joked with the soldiers, pointing out which residents he wanted arrested. Nineteen villagers were detained and jailed. At the time, they didn’t know if Awdah had survived. They learned he hadn’t from the guards’ taunts while bound and blindfolded, face down on the floor of Ofer prison. (As Ihmeed told me this story, we watched footage of Palestinian prisoners being released from Ofer as part of the “ceasefire” deal.) Israeli authorities withheld Awdah’s body for eleven days.

Levi, for his own part, never faced any charges. The judge said she couldn’t be sure that the bullet came from his gun, and that even if it had, it was plausible he fired in self-defense. Several Knesset members accompanied him to court, hailing him as a Jewish hero and pioneer, finding new frontiers for the Land of Israel.

One month later, as the village mourned, the settler caravans moved in. Four at first, and then three more. Over the next month and a half, they built out living quarters and began conducting religious ceremonies. Days before I arrived, they ripped out over a hundred of the village’s olive trees in the night to build a path through their land, fenced in with barbed wire.

(Above and below: Ahmad Hathaleen showing me the damage.)

On October 12, the day I arrived, a Jerusalem District Court issued a temporary injunction barring settlers from moving into the outpost, prohibiting any further construction, and ordering that the caravans and fencing on village land remain frozen until further notice. If there was any celebration, I missed it, because by the time I made it to the village, the settlers were working on the outpost again. Or rather, they had never stopped.

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.

During my first night in the village, settlers showed up in trucks at 3:30 a.m., unloading belongings under the cover of darkness, making enough noise to rouse the whole village. The next day, they installed new fencing, erected a tent, and continued openly defying the court order.

On my second evening, I watched children play soccer as the sun went down. Suddenly, settlers began streaming down from Carmel—at least a hundred—for another religious ceremony. One man with a particularly large gun pointed at me, shouting in Hebrew, then summoned two soldiers, who waved me over.

The soldiers accused me of “filming settler children.” Their tone was one of forced incredulity: What kind of person films someone else’s kids? I explained I was filming the soccer game. Unsaid was the obvious fact that if any settler children were filmed, it was because their parents had marched them through private Palestinian land, into the camera’s frame.

But there was no reason to say this, because that’s the whole point. The settlers often keep children around for exactly this purpose. The victimhood narrative never ends. Levi absurdly claimed he was protecting a minor when he shot Awdah, referring to the teenage settler driving the bulldozer through Umm al-Khair and nearly killing Ahmad. It’s the same reason they send kids to terrorize villages: if you dare to resist, you’ve behaved aggressively toward a child. The soldiers took a photo of my passport and let me off with a warning.

Everything in the village feels fragile. The few sheep they have left are sickly, most of their grazing land confiscated.

The people are proud, strong-willed, determined to remain—but they know exactly what they’re up against, reminded of it every minute. In several directions, giant Stars of David jut from the ground or are mounted on rooftops, lit at night like flaming crosses.

More settlers arrive at the outpost each day. They carry assault rifles. On the basketball court, the reddish-brown stain of Awdah’s blood is impossible to scrub off.

At night, I distributed the sour gummy candy I’d brought. A sugar high swept through the village. For an hour, I was a kingpin. Sometimes I dealt straight to the toddlers; other times, the older kids took bundles to ration out as the highs began to fade. They climbed on me, on each other. Demanded I spin them faster, faster, on the merry-go-round. The playground turned feral. The monkey bars weren’t enough, so they swung from ceiling beams, launched themselves from spring riders, raced up twisty slides, and leapt from the top. Then the stash ran dry, and everybody fell asleep.

There are children everywhere in Umm al-Khair, and the whole community is their playground. They have their own nuclear families, but they’re also raised by the village. Especially the three young children Awdah left behind—five-year-old Watan, three-year-old Chamudi, and Kinan, not yet one. The men in the village carry them around as if they were their own.

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Here is Joseph Weinger, an activist and researcher whom I met in Umm al-Khair, on the village’s history in the NYRB:

Its Palestinian Bedouin founders, displaced from the Arad desert during the Nakba of 1948, bought the land for thirteen camels from a Palestinian Arab in the city of Yatta. The village’s land tenure documents theoretically guarantee private property rights, including protection against expropriation, but they went unheeded when the community came under Israeli military occupation in 1967. Thirteen years later, Israeli soldiers confiscated nearly half the village’s land to establish a base directly abutting Umm al-Khair. They called it Carmel.

In 1981, like many settlements during this period, Carmel transitioned from military to civilian status. Quickly Umm al-Khair’s residents found their access to traditional grazing lands severely reduced and their mobility across the area curtailed. After 1995, when the Oslo II Accord placed 60 percent of the West Bank—including Umm al-Khair—under full Israeli control as Area C, the state ratcheted up its use of bureaucratic euphemisms like “survey” or “state” land to seize more and more Palestinian territory in the region. Now all but two structures in Umm al-Khair carry demolition orders for having been built without a permit; many have already been reduced to rubble. Those still standing are makeshift tin buildings vulnerable to the elements and steady decay.

Two months later, this piece is outdated. Last week, Israeli forces stormed Umm al-Khair to deliver final demolition orders for nearly everything that remains, warning that bulldozers could arrive anytime after November 10. Some believe it’s retaliation for the court order blocking construction of the outpost—which has been ignored anyway—but it was likely coming either way. Israel is determined to destroy this community, to ethnically cleanse it of Palestinians, and clear the way for more Jewish settlers. There’s a sense that Umm al-Khair may be the first domino to fall—the closest Palestinian community to Carmel, and the most vulnerable. Once it’s gone, the settlers will keep moving down the hill, chasing the other communities of Masafer Yatta off their land. I feel sick when I think about it. They have no other land, nowhere else to go. They’re still in mourning, and now they’re fighting simply to exist.

A year before he was killed, Awdah published a piece in +972 Magazine, describing a week of demolitions and violent settler raids: In Umm al-Khair, the occupation is damning us to multigenerational trauma. “I saw the first bulldozers arrive in my village 17 years ago,” he writes. “Now, after the most brutal weeks in our history, my son will carry similarly painful memories.”

“The demolition forces enter the village. All the children run to their mothers, who scramble to salvage whatever they can from their homes before it’s too late. Everyone watches on anxiously to see who will be made homeless today… Our children ask us why this is happening, but we have no answers…

I’ve tried to shield my 4-year-old son from this harsh reality as much as possible, so that he will not have to carry the same memories that I did. But sometimes, no matter how good a father you are, there are things you cannot control …

He even knows some of the settlers by name. Sometimes I tell him that they went to jail; I’m lying, but I want to make him feel safe …

Since the attacks, my son has started stuttering — an entirely new symptom, and one that terrifies me. The doctor told us that the best treatment for stuttering is a safe environment. But this is what we cannot guarantee for our children: in Umm al-Khair, no one is in a safe place.”

As I prepared to publish this piece, something grimly familiar happened—I got a call from someone on the ground with news of another attack, a statistical inevitability when you’re writing about the West Bank. Early this morning, settlers led by the local leader Attia cut through a fence to let their sheep graze on what remains of Umm al-Khair’s fields. Several residents were beaten with sticks. Ahmad, who was struck by the bulldozer the day Awdah was killed, sustained another head injury—his second in three months. A 55-year-old man was also hurt.

The villagers, already bracing for their community’s demolition and regular settler attacks, now fear the army will arrive at any moment to arrest the victims and their family members. As Ihmeed told me this, beneath the shouts of panicked residents, I could hear the children playing.

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Note to Readers:

I’ve recently taken the plunge into full-time writing and reporting, leaving behind the work that’s paid my bills for the past fifteen years. It’s both exciting and unnerving—journalism isn’t exactly a gold mine these days, and every bit of my reporting, including this trip, is self-funded. I travel with no crew, no security team—just me. But, at the risk of sounding sentimental, I’ve never felt more certain of my purpose. In the end, this feels less like a decision than an inevitability.

To make this sustainable, I’ll be introducing a paywall soon. If you’d like to lock in the lowest rate, I’m offering 20% off through November—$64 for the year, or $6.40 month-to-month.

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It’s tough out here for independent journalists—especially those committed to holding power to account and covering what the mainstream won’t—so your support truly means the world. And as always, I’m grateful when you share this newsletter with others who you think should be reading it.

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In the coming weeks, I’ll be sorting through everything—organizing notes and footage, structuring timelines, following leads, connecting dots. The shape of a larger piece is starting to form in my mind, but that one will likely be for a magazine, so it may be months before it’s out. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to share shorter pieces that illuminate the unprecedented levels of violence and injustice unfolding across the West Bank.

To start, I want to pull on some threads from the incident two weeks ago, when I—and many Palestinians—came very close to being lynched by a mob of Israeli settlers.

Some Background

For years, settlers have crept closer and closer to Turmus’ayya—a relatively wealthy town outside Ramallah made up of mostly Palestinian Americans who travel back and forth between the US and the West Bank. These particularly violent settlers have splintered off from nearby settlements, including Shiloh, to establish outposts on stolen farmland, seize farmhouses, and attack Palestinians who try to reach their olive groves.

Despite the escalating violence, local farmers keep returning to their olive groves—not only for income, but for pride, and, above all, because they see it as the last line of defense before the settlers reach the village itself. In June 2023, settlers staged a pogrom in a residential neighborhood of Turmus’ayya: torching homes and cars, injuring fourteen people, and killing a young father. Locals fear this will become the new normal if they can’t hold their ground in the fields.

The past two olive harvests have been marked by violence and meager yields, carried out under the constant threat of settler attacks. This year, Turmus’ayya’s farmers decided to move as one—heading out together on Sunday, October 19, hoping that safety in numbers might hold. But a day earlier, one farmer and his son got a little too brave and went out alone. Settlers armed with farm tools descended on them almost immediately, leaving the father with deep gashes on both sides of his head, and their truck wrecked and set ablaze before they managed to escape.

On the morning of October 19, I joined the farmers. We knew there would be confrontations, but no one anticipated the scale or ferocity of what followed.

The Timeline

7:35 a.m. — Farmers meet at a central point in town and begin driving into the olive fields in a caravan. I ride with Yaser Alkam, a Palestinian American farmer and lawyer who has a home in Anaheim, California.

7:37 a.m. — The caravan is stopped by a settler standing in the road with a gun, holding it in plain sight and staring us down while speaking on his phone. Several others appear behind him. Later, I learned his name: Amishav Melet, leader of the Or Nachman outpost in Turmus’ayya’s olive fields (seen in the video above)—an infamously violent settler whose gun was once confiscated by the IDF after he shot a Palestinian, according to an Israeli police officer I spoke to. Remember his name.

The caravan turns around to find another route.

8:16 a.m. — The new route is successful. Farmers and workers disperse to their own plots of land. Right away, we find that Alkam’s trees are barren—most likely due to poor weather, rather than settlers having picked them already. He decides to head home. I plan on hitching a ride to join another farmer.

8:35 a.m. — We begin the drive out, but settlers are waiting at the top of the hill. We try another road, but an army jeep blocks the exit.

8:37 a.m. — Yaser and I decide it’s too dangerous to drive toward the jeep; Israeli soldiers are known to fire on approaching cars that don’t have yellow (Israeli) plates. Since he’s Palestinian and I’m not, we agree the safest bet is for me to walk forward with my hands raised and try to speak with the soldiers. As I approach, they aim their rifles at me—standard procedure in the occupied West Bank.

8:38 a.m. — I put my phone in my pocket, recording audio only, and explain that we’re trying to get back to Turmus’ayya, but settlers are blocking the exit. I tell them I’m American. A soldier asks if I “have family here,” likely trying to determine whether I’m an American or a Palestinian American—as in, am I a real American—a distinction that usually matters, though maybe not in this case. After questioning, they tell me they’ll provide us with safe passage out of the fields.

8:42 a.m. — I return to the car, and we drive up the hill toward the army jeep. At the top, meters away from the jeep, we find two settlers on an ATV—including Amishav Melet, the armed local leader we’d seen earlier. He is on his phone again. Nearby, a Palestinian car has its windshield smashed and tires slashed. Workers stand outside of it. I ask the soldiers if they will move the settlers. The soldiers tell Yaser and me to wait, and confirm they’ll move the settlers so we can pass.

8:44 a.m. — The army jeep suddenly speeds off over the ridge, leaving us—and the other Palestinians who have already been attacked—stranded with the settlers, including the armed Melet. You can catch a glimpse of him through the windshield in this next video.

Moments later, Melet and the other settler ride their ATV in the same direction the soldiers went and disappear. Thinking we’re in the clear, we begin to head back toward town, but quickly see the damaged car struggling. I get out to help and tell Yaser to keep driving—you can’t go very fast here, and I’ll catch up.

8:49 a.m. — While I’m helping push the damaged car, a mob of settlers suddenly pours over the ridge, hurling stones and charging toward us. I run, filming for a few seconds before putting my phone away and sprinting as fast as I can down the hill towards the village. The Palestinian driver in the damaged car, I later learned from video footage, was dragged out but managed to escape. The settlers set his car on fire.

Here’s a shot from another angle, filmed by a Palestinian across the fields. That’s me in black, running and filming.

The particularly brutal details of what happens next aren’t relevant to the new developments, so I won’t include the video again—frankly, I’ve seen it enough, and it’s already in my previous post and widely circulating online. To quickly summarize:

8:51 a.m. — I reach Yaser’s car, but we’re stuck in a logjam and can’t move. A masked settler carrying a club—clearly fashioned as a weapon—smashes through our rear windshield, then runs ahead and attacks a defenseless woman standing beneath an olive tree: Afaf Abu Salia, a grandmother known as Um Saleh, the sister-in-law of the man dragged from the car. (If you watch the video above closely, you can see it’s the same settler who assaulted them both.) He knocks her unconscious with the first blow, then strikes her motionless body twice more before moving on to club two activists.

8:53 a.m. — I get out of the car and reach the severely wounded Um Saleh by 8:54. She’s moaning in pain, barely conscious, blood running down her face and soaking through her hijab. Settlers are still hurling stones, and smoke from several burning cars billows into the sky. With two others, I help her into a car. Yaser picks up one of the injured activists and drives him to the hospital. He has a broken arm, broken leg, concussion, and needs staples in his head.

Over the next five to ten minutes, the settlers begin retreating up the hill as a crowd of Palestinian villagers gathers below.

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The Immediate Aftermath

I stayed at the scene for over an hour after the attack, and no Israeli forces—police, military, ambulances—ever appeared. Despite this, after the video went viral, the IDF fabricated a story to the BBC and other outlets, claiming “the confrontation was dispersed after its forces arrived.” It’s a bald-faced, categorical lie.

A few hours later, the US Embassy in Israel contacted me. Two senior staffers expressed outrage and sympathy and promised to follow up after internal meetings. Here is our next exchange:

Days later, when I was again in danger—this time surrounded by settlers in Duma—the same embassy officer ignored my messages.

I’ve also been ignored by my own representatives—Senator Chuck Schumer, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Representative Dan Goldman—whom I’ve publicly called out in widely shared videos. They’ve ignored my mother, too—a “Jewish grandma,” as she likes to remind them on her daily calls to their offices, who’s voted for Schumer and Gillibrand for decades.

A political contact with a direct line to Ambassador Mike Huckabee sent him the video of the ambush, explained that I was still in the West Bank, and asked if he would speak with me. He declined.

The Next Day

The next morning, Turmus’ayya’s farmers carried out their first successful olive harvest in more than a year. They credited the viral footage, which had turned into a growing PR crisis for Israel. Soldiers patrolled the fields, and—for once—no settlers attacked or threatened the farmers.

The IDF and Israeli police showed up to conduct an “investigation.” I spotted the soldier who had promised us safe passage before abandoning us with the settlers and confronted him. He and others insisted it was all an accident, that they were very sorry, that they hadn’t known settlers were present, and that of course they cared, otherwise they wouldn’t be there now. What clearly troubled them most, though, was not the attack itself, but my public accusation that they had led us into an ambush—an allegation they said made them look very bad.

Accusing me of spreading propaganda—a day after nearly getting me killed—was a nice touch:

After this, I showed the soldiers two separate videos that flatly contradicted their account—footage of me asking for safe passage and them confirming they’d provide it. Confronted with the evidence, they abruptly changed their line: it was “not our mission to protect you.”

Later, I learned that one settler had, in fact, been present in the olive fields that morning during the so-called investigation: Amishav Melet. Activist Avishay Mohar and journalist Oren Ziv photographed him there and reported that he arrived in a vehicle with an Israeli police officer who was at the scene to “investigate” the attack.

What We Know

To be clear, I have no “smoking gun” proving that the IDF directly colluded with the settlers in the ambush. But here are the facts:

1. Amishav Melet—the armed, infamously violent leader of the local outpost—spotted us within minutes of leaving for the olive fields that morning, blocking our path and flashing his gun. As he spoke on his phone, more settlers began emerging from the hills behind him.

2. Melet tracked us through the olive fields and, an hour after we first spotted him, stood beside the Israeli soldiers as they promised us safe passage away from him and the other settlers, back toward the village. Instead, the soldiers sped off in their jeep, leaving us behind with Melet, again on his phone. Minutes later, Melet drove away in his ATV in the same direction as the soldiers, and the lynch mob of armed settlers attacked.

3. Despite the chaos—screaming, burning vehicles, explosions, and sirens from a Palestinian fire truck echoing across the hills—the IDF didn’t return for more than twenty-four hours.

4. The next day, Melet arrived at the crime scene with one of the Israeli police officers “investigating” the attack and chatted with them while they collected evidence and interviewed witnesses.

The most generous interpretation is that the soldiers didn’t know dozens of settlers were lying in wait. But even then, they knowingly left us with the armed leader of the outpost after promising safe passage away from him, and failed to respond to the large-scale assault that followed minutes later. Then they returned to the scene with him a day later as though nothing were amiss.

There’s a much more damning interpretation that doesn’t need to be spelled out.

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The Days Since

Two days later, at the villagers’ request, I went to the Israeli police station to give a statement to the officer leading the investigation. I walked him through the full timeline and provided extensive photo and video evidence. Still, it was clear his main objective was to establish that I had no definitive proof that the IDF knew the mob was waiting to attack. He kept pressing on whether I could prove the masked men were settlers and not Arabs. I told him I wasn’t going to play that game—that he knew as well as I did who they were—and eventually he dropped it.

At one point, I had to remind him that I was a victim, not a suspect—that his job was to investigate who was responsible for the attack—and that he should consider how he was speaking to me in light of that. He seemed taken aback, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him before.

For a moment, I thought the public outrage over the footage might force the Israeli police into a token arrest—that they would track down the man with the club, throw him in jail for a week, and pin the entire assault on him. But as the days passed and no arrests were made, I began to doubt that even that would happen.

If the Israeli authorities were serious, there are obvious places to start. Bring in Amishav Melet—already known to the authorities—who was present before, during, and after the attack. Question the soldiers who promised us safe passage and then abandoned us. Interview the police officer who arrived at the scene in Melet’s company.

And if they were truly interested in finding the man who clubbed a defenseless woman, sending her into the ICU with a brain bleed, they could use the same tactics they unleash when hunting Palestinians: gates around every settlement and outpost, checkpoints at every intersection, random settlers stripped, frog-marched, beaten, detained. Smoke him out.

As far as I can tell, none of this has happened.

A week after the ambush, I returned to the scene with a media crew. An IDF jeep rolled up, and according to a Hebrew speaker with us, one soldier looked at me and said to another, “Yeah, that’s him.” They detained me for about thirty minutes, until I got a lawyer on the phone—whatever he said made them drive off without a word. Later, a reliable source informed me that a Telegram group made up of local settlers and soldiers had been circulating my face and name.

In the days since, Melet has remained a fixture in the olive fields, threatening farmers who try to return to their land. On Monday, October 27, when Yaser revisited the site of the ambush with an NBC crew, Melet showed up and told Yaser—and the reporter—that he would “break his face” next time he saw him.

The following day, a convoy of Israeli military jeeps was spotted at Melet’s outpost. Soldiers were seen chatting casually with him. Hours later, he joined them as they tear-gassed a group of farmers and detained several of them. At the police station, Melet was again at their side, pointing out Palestinians he claimed had “thrown rocks” at him.

The scene echoed the killing of Awdah Hathaleen in Umm al-Khair earlier this year, when the shooter—the notorious settler Yinon Levy—was photographed chatting with soldiers afterward, pointing to which Palestinians to arrest. Levy, of course, was never charged. Not long after, settlers built an outpost just meters from the town’s community center, and last week the Israeli government, escorted by the military, issued demolition orders for nearly the entire village.

None of this should come as a surprise. As I’ve written before, these violent settlers are simply doing their job. The most brutal among them are celebrated as “Jewish pioneers,” expanding Israel’s borders, and rewarded by the state with money, weapons, and infrastructure. The settlement project—endorsed at the highest levels of government—is, at its core, a campaign of ethnic cleansing. In this instance, Israel has had no choice but to manage the PR fallout by publicly condemning the attack, but the support runs far deeper than a few choice words.

Up the Chain

A few days ago, an officer from an Israeli intelligence agency contacted me about the case. After consulting with residents of Turmus’ayya and an Israeli attorney who specializes in settler violence, I agreed to meet—if nothing else, everyone felt it was important to provide official documentation to those ostensibly tasked with bringing the attackers to justice.

I can’t share much more, but the agents told me that my footage and its widespread coverage had “seriously shaken things up” at the highest levels of Israel’s security establishment. The local police were no longer in charge, they said—this had become the most intensive investigation of settler terrorism in the region’s history. Even so, I told them I didn’t believe the authorities were truly committed to taking down the terror network in Turmus’ayya. The system investigating these crimes is the same one enabling them.

They assured me they’d prove me wrong. I reminded them that doing so would require more than a few symbolic arrests—it would mean evicting the settlers from Turmus’ayya’s olive fields, dismantling their infrastructure, and ensuring they never return. To this, they had no response.

The Bigger Picture

The story of settler terrorism in the West Bank seems to have broken containment. In Israel, it’s now front-page news in all but the most hardline outlets, and major Western media have picked it up too. I’m glad my documentation helped push it into the spotlight—but to be clear, such attacks happen every day across the West Bank, often with the IDF’s direct backing. The only difference this time was that an American was there to film it.

Israel has responded to all this coverage in predictable fashion—by trying to silence those documenting its crimes. In recent days, it has begun deporting activists.

Still, this whole ordeal has shown that, as impervious as Israel often seems to public criticism, it isn’t. The footage may have brought a brief pause to the violence in Turmus’ayya, but lasting change will require sustained pressure and attention—not only to the violence itself, but to the system that enables it. For my own part, I have no intention of letting this go until real justice is served, and until the people of Turmus’ayya—and the West Bank as a whole—are free to live in peace.

A Moment of Light

I thought I’d end with something nice for a change. A week after the attack, I had the honor of meeting with Um Saleh. She is severely battered, clearly still shell-shocked, and unaccustomed to this spotlight that she certainly never asked for. But towards the end of our meeting, she began to smile a bit. I think she’s starting to realize that she’s become an inspiration to millions, a symbol of Palestinian resilience.

The municipality of Turmus’ayya had reached out a few days earlier to say they were planning a ceremony to honor me and the injured activist, who has chosen to remain anonymous. I told them it wasn’t necessary; I’m just here to document what they live through every day. But they insisted. The worst part of the violence, they explained, was the feeling that it was all happening in darkness—that nobody knew or cared. Now, with their story seen by millions and even raised on the Senate floor, they finally felt the world was watching. They didn’t expect things to change overnight, but they said it had given them hope—something in short supply around here.

So of course I agreed. It was very special. You could feel what it meant to them to be seen, to know their struggle had reached far beyond the village. The kids were especially excited.

I feel a little awkward sharing something like this, but honestly—it’s been a pretty good antidote to feeling powerless all the time.

Consider all this the tip of the iceberg. Much more is coming soon. In the meantime, I’ve been making the podcast rounds. Here are a few recent appearances if you’d like to hear more:

• Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti

• The Majority Report with Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland

• System Update with Glenn Greenwald

• Drop Site News

Finally, if you haven’t already, please read my story in The Paris Review from last month about the Americans who have been killed by settlers and soldiers in the West Bank—and their families’ futile efforts to find justice in Washington: A Hill To Die On. The Turmus’ayya attack happened just a few kilometers from where several of them were killed and abducted. While I was running that day, one thought kept going through my head: my parents could be on that next trip to D.C.

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Note to Readers:

I’ve recently taken the plunge into full-time writing and reporting, leaving behind the work that’s paid my bills for the past fifteen years. It’s both exciting and unnerving—journalism isn’t exactly a gold mine these days, and every bit of my reporting, including this trip, is self-funded. I travel with no crew, no security team—just me. But, at the risk of sounding sentimental, I’ve never felt more certain of my purpose. In the end, this feels less like a decision than an inevitability.

To make this sustainable, I’ll be introducing a paywall soon. If you’d like to lock in the lowest rate, I’m offering 20% off this week—$64 for the year, or $6.40 month-to-month.

Get 20% off for 1 year

It’s tough out here for independent journalists—especially those committed to holding power to account and covering what the mainstream won’t—so your support truly means the world. And as always, I’m grateful when you share this newsletter with others who you think should be reading it.

Also… tomorrow is my birthday.

Thank you,

Jasper

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Editor’s Note, Nov. 2, 2025: Two weeks later, I wrote a detailed account of the attack’s aftermath, which you can read here:

Fellow Substacker highlighted it in her newsletter this past week, calling it “A disturbing close-up look into the cold dysfunction of our government.”

I’ll have more for you soon from the ground in the West Bank—including from Al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya, the village I describe in this piece as “the Miami of the West Bank, if Miami were hemmed in by masked marauders who terrorized its outskirts and hunted residents for sport.” But for now, please take twelve minutes of the 3.5 hours you typically budget for my weekly news roundup to read this story instead.

PS — forgive me for repeating the same plea I made yesterday:

With this trip, I’ve taken the plunge into full-time writing and reporting, leaving behind the work that’s paid my bills for the past fifteen years. It’s both exciting and unnerving—journalism isn’t exactly a gold mine these days, and every bit of my reporting, including this trip, is self-funded. But, at risk of sounding sentimental, I’ve never felt more sure of my purpose, so in the end, this feels less like a decision than an inevitability.

To make this sustainable, I’ll be introducing a paywall soon. If you’d like to lock in the lowest rate, I’m offering 20% off this week—$64 for the year, or $6.40 month-to-month.

Upgrade Now for 20% Off

It’s tough out here for independent journalists—especially those committed to holding power to account and covering what the mainstream won’t—so your support truly means the world. And as always, I’m grateful when you share this newsletter with others who you think should be reading it.