The End of a Village

A dispatch from the beautiful, tortured village of Umm al-Khair.

The thing to understand about Israeli settlers is that they already have plenty of space. But staying put would mean failing to fulfill their purpose: expanding Israeli control of the West Bank and driving Palestinians off their land.

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.

Sick sheep.

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.

The view from neighboring Zuweidin, where a settler brought a flock of sheep to graze on the village’s land.

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.

The spot where Awdah was killed.

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.

Kinan with his uncles.

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.

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