What do you mean by that?
A guy like Atiya or Elisha Yered or Amishav Melet has a direct connection to the I.D.F., or a commander in the I.D.F. that they work directly with. And that I.D.F. commander is responsible for giving them an official I.D.F. guard, who basically serves as their personal security and their enforcer in some cases. [In a statement, the I.D.F. said, “The claim that the IDF provides personal security guards to the leaders of the outposts is entirely unfounded.”] So settlers have this sort of direct material connection to the military that, in years past, may not have existed at all. At other times it was probably more tacit, but now it’s direct. There’s a guy in the I.D.F. central command whose job is to meet with outpost leaders and make sure they have everything that they need, and that includes money, too.
And so then that money is used to pay shepherds to work for them. And part of what the shepherds do is they bring their livestock onto Palestinian land to destroy their vegetation, so they kill off the farmland. So they’re operating in this very strategic way that, from a distance, appears to be random. And I think at one time in the past it was more random, but now you can just see that it’s a well-oiled machine.
So the approach by authorities has changed from letting violence happen to actively working with the perpetrators?
Absolutely. I think that’s the biggest change. Smotrich, in addition to being the finance minister, also heads up something called the Settlement Administration, which he created within the Ministry of Defense so that he could basically take charge of the military occupation of the West Bank and clear all the red tape involved in authorizing new settlements, or new roads, or things like that. So, for example, it is now much, much, much easier for a settler leader who wants to create a new outpost to get whatever resources he needs for that, because all that red tape that used to be there doesn’t exist anymore. Now it’s a bunch of messianic settler ideologues like Smotrich in the government, who are just rubber-stamping most of what they want.
And that also trickles down to the fact that these settler groups are unbelievably well armed. Settlers have been basically deputized into these groups called Hagmar, where they just become settler-soldiers, who are basically wearing full I.D.F. attire and have rifles. Smotrich has what is called a sovereignty plan, which he unveiled last year, to basically squeeze Palestinians into six major population centers, which include Ramallah and the other big cities. And the way that the settler violence has unfolded recently, the way that the outposts are popping up and the villages are being emptied—it’s in direct alignment with his plan.
I have heard people say that the attack on Heidi Levine only got so much attention because she was American, when in fact this type of thing happens constantly to Palestinians, including during the attack on Friday, with much less attention. This is surely true, but I also think it’s important to understand how the settlers and the Israeli government view the risks of attacking Americans, especially American journalists. How has this question changed since you started making these trips, which was during the Biden Administration?
A Palestinian American who I talked to about this told me that, under Biden, if an American was beat up or they had their home burned or something, or an American was brutalized by the I.D.F., somebody from the Embassy would come and send their condolences, and then they would leave, and the victim would never hear from them again. With the Trump Administration, they have not even been making the trip. In other words, there’s no material difference between the two. It’s just that one of them was putting a dressing on it to act like there was some care.
I think that Palestinian Americans are a good measure for this because they look like other Palestinians, but they have blue passports. And so it’s sort of like you’re controlling for a variable here. There are Palestinian communities in the West Bank which are, like, eighty per cent Palestinian American. Because of their dual citizenship, they used to be pretty insulated from the violence of the occupation, from the settlers. But that privilege disappeared on October 7th. And now those Palestinian Americans are coming to terms with the fact that they’re actually just Palestinians. There’s no distinction.
As far as Americans who are not also Palestinian, like myself, or Heidi—I mean, look, it’s anecdotal, but I will tell you that, in my five trips, the level of violence that I have directly faced myself has quite literally increased. My first three times, nobody ever actually laid hands on me. I was in cars that were attacked. I was chased. I had guns pointed at me, but nobody ever struck me. The last time I was here, in June and July, I was attacked multiple times. This trip, I’ve been here for ten days, and to tell you the truth, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been attacked already. And, listen, I don’t look Palestinian. I’m usually shouting in English. A lot of the time I’m wearing a press vest or I’m shouting that I am a journalist, and they just don’t give a shit. They don’t even blink. It doesn’t faze them. They still come after me just like they would anyone else.
Can you explain what happened on Friday?
It was the olive-harvest day in Khirbet Abu Falah, a Palestinian community in the West Bank. And, like I said, there’s this outpost that exists on the top of a hill that overlooks the olive fields, and the Palestinians are routinely attacked by settlers that live there. So, because of these attacks, the olive fields have basically been off limits for the Palestinians, but this is their livelihood, and this is the harvesting season. And so, basically, what a lot of these communities do is pick a day, or a couple of days, when everybody will go out together, and the hope is that there will be protection in numbers.
But, from the minute we got there, we were watching the settlers at the top of the hill prepare for an attack. I mean, we were literally watching them suit up, put their masks over their heads, pick up their clubs, and it looked like a group of people getting ready for battle, which is exactly what they were doing. The olive harvest is supposed to be this peaceful and celebratory family affair, but in this case, because of the risk of attack, it was only men who went to harvest. There were no women or children there, and they were just racing as fast as they could to get the olives off the tree, because we were watching the settlers get ready to attack. About an hour into it, they start charging down the hill, and initially they are just hurling really big rocks, and they have these slings that they use. So these are really big rocks that are coming in from a distance, really fast, and, if you get hit by one, it can do real damage. So first they’re just charging down with rocks. There’s probably forty to fifty of them. And you have to keep in mind that the olive fields—and this is the case in a lot of Palestinian villages—are basically the buffer between the outpost and the village itself, the residential core of the village. And so, if the settlers are able to push right past the olive fields, they’re now in the village, and they’re going to start ransacking homes and basically doing a pogrom.
