What's Being Tested on Palestinians Will Be Used on the Rest of Us
A dispatch from the West Bank, where the Israeli occupation is refining a system of violence the capitalist class intends to use everywhere.
Sorry I’ve been quiet – I haven’t published in a month. In that time I went to the occupied West Bank, crossed military checkpoints, watched Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers operate interchangeably, and listened to Palestinians who continue to fight, despite everything. Then I came home to my downstairs flooded with sewage water. At several points this week, I genuinely wished I was still in Palestine instead. And, for what it’s worth, Israel didn’t ban me – so I hope to go back as soon as I can.
I’m still sorting through interviews, notes, and hours of audio. I’ll have more in-depth reported pieces coming soon. But I wanted to send some initial thoughts and observations: what it was like to report from the West Bank as an American journalist, what I saw on the ground, and the messages Palestinians want people in the U.S. to hear.
Before we even entered, we were held at the border connecting Jordan and the occupied West Bank for hours and questioned one by one. I traveled with a small delegation made up of politicians, scholars, lawyers, activists, and journalists – all European, from Germany, France, Greece, Croatia, Belgium, Spain, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and more. The delegation was gathering for the Ramallah Congress on the Decolonisation of Palestine, organized by Al-Shabaka, Birzeit University, and Progressive International. I was the only one coming all the way from the United States.
One person in our group was denied entry with no explanation. We assumed his age and the stamps in his passport were enough to trigger whatever arbitrary logic Israeli officials use. A French MEP in the broader delegation, Manon Aubry, was allowed in at first. After she tweeted a few observations about the reality of the occupation, Israeli authorities emailed her to say her visa had been revoked and that she would be arrested at the next checkpoint.
It was a measure of how repressive conditions have become. Work of any kind – humanitarian, academic, or even cultural exchange – is becoming nearly impossible, and Israeli authorities are willing to threaten foreign politicians with arrest simply for describing what’s directly in front of them. The state isn’t even trying to offer symbolic gestures of openness anymore. That’s how thoroughly Israel has lost control.
When it was my turn for questioning, they asked multiple times what I do for a living and whether I knew any Palestinians. I’d written “journalist” on the border entry form, but I tried to downplay it. I said I write occasionally and wanted to see the holy sites – true, and also an attempt to avoid a Google search or an excuse to turn me away. Later, one of the European politicians told me she thought the Israeli officials were giving me a harder time because they were racially profiling me, the only non-European woman in the group.
While I was sitting off to the side of the line, already more than an hour into waiting, a white NGO worker nearby was frustrated that he and two Arab women had been pulled aside and questioned about their “connection.” “There isn’t one,” he said. “We just all speak French.”
It was a preview of the rest of the trip, and a narrow window into the barbaric conditions Palestinians are forced to live under. The control, the intimidation, the psychological warfare – the constant reminder that the Israeli occupation fundamentally stands against anything resembling a human life.
The West Bank Today
Most Americans have no real sense of what the West Bank looks like at this moment, how quickly the situation is deteriorating, or how calculated and coordinated the violence has become. On the ground, the boundary between Israeli settler terrorism and the Israeli military has entirely disappeared. Settlers and soldiers move as one force, reinforcing each other’s attacks and carrying out coordinated violence that is far more organized than in previous years. Together, Israeli forces are leading a deliberate, relentless effort to ethnically cleanse the West Bank.
In recent weeks, the occupied West Bank has seen a dramatic surge in Israeli settler terrorism, particularly targeting rural Palestinian communities during the olive-harvest season. Last month, there were 264 recorded settler attacks, the highest monthly figure in nearly two decades, according to the United Nations. Cars have been torched, olive groves burned, mosques defaced, farmers beaten, and entire harvests destroyed.
On Friday, our delegation went to meet with Eid Suleiman Hathaleen, an artist and activist from the village of Umm Al-Khair in the Masafer Yatta area in the occupied West Bank. We sat drinking tea in a small corrugated metal shelter – three walls, a roof, and a dirt floor – while the rain came down hard outside. Our guide passed around a photo of a double rainbow that had appeared over Gaza earlier in the day. Barefoot children ran in and out around us as we listened to our hosts describe life under occupation and the recent surge in settler terrorism.
Hathaleen’s father was killed by Israeli police, and his cousin Awdah was murdered earlier this year by a settler named Yinon Levi. Levi – who was sanctioned by Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States under then-President Biden for violent attacks on Palestinians – still harasses the community today. After killing Awdah, Israel held his body for 10 days and then arrested members of the grieving family. Awdah, a beloved activist and father of three, helped make the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land.
As we sipped on tea, a group of eight fully armed Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers pulled up in military vehicles to declare it a “military zone.” Some recorded and took photos of us on their phones, a routine intimidation tactic, and told us we had four minutes to leave. “Everyone with a foreign passport has to leave, and the Palestinians have to stay,” one of the masked militia members said. Hathaleen and our hosts apologized for the abrupt ending. On our way into the village, we had already been forced to reroute after discovering that the road leading in had been declared a “military zone” minutes earlier.
On our way out, two IDF soldiers peed openly on the roadside. One of their military vehicles tailed our bus for nearly twenty minutes. Palestinian roads were lined with Israeli flags for miles, and outside many villages we found settler propaganda spray painted onto walls and barriers. “No future in Palestine,” one message read. Our guide, a local peace activist, joked that this was actually unusually progressive: “They’re acknowledging the existence of Palestine now,” he laughed.
There Is No Ceasefire
People are tired. It was obvious everywhere. Palestinians are exhausted by war, displacement, and being forced to live under a system that constantly develops new methods of domination. But not one person I spoke with ever positioned themselves as defeated or without agency.
“We like to say we have two enemies: one is the Israeli occupation and the other is called capitalism,” said Ghassan Najjar, a farmer and activist in Burin, a Palestinian village south of Nablus. “We are free people, even if we are under occupation, because we are still struggling.”
I’ve reported on Congress, weapons transfers, and funding battles. But seeing the Israeli occupation up close – the state-backed settler terrorism, the surveillance, the pace of destruction – still stunned me. No amount of reading prepares you for the scale or the cruelty. Most Americans will never see it for themselves, and much of the Washington press corps has no sense of what their coverage helps justify.
Again and again, Palestinians urged the West to stop saying “ceasefire.” Nothing has stopped. “Ceasefire” is a word Western governments use to calm their own publics, not one that reflects the reality on the ground, they said.
“You’re not just fighting for us,” countless Palestinians told us. “You’re fighting for yourselves.” What’s being tested on Palestinians today, many warned, is what the capitalist class intends to enforce on people everywhere tomorrow.
Great article!