What do you mean?
People like Atiya, Elisha Yered or Amishav Melet have direct ties to the IDF or are IDF commanders who work directly with them. The IDF commander is responsible for providing them with an official IDF guard who essentially acts as their personal security guard and, in some cases, their enforcer. [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 the settlers had this direct physical connection to the military that might not have existed at all in years past. There might have been a tacit understanding before, but now it’s very direct. There is a man in the IDF Central Command whose job is to meet with outpost leaders and make sure they have everything they need, and that includes money.
The money is then used to pay the shepherds to work for them. Part of what the shepherds did was bring their livestock onto Palestinian land to destroy the vegetation, so they destroyed farmland. So they operate in this very strategic way that, from a distance, seems random. I think it was more random a while back, but now you can see it’s a well-oiled machine.
So has the approach of the authorities shifted from allowing violence to actively working with perpetrators?
Absolutely. I think this is the biggest change. In addition to being finance minister, Smotrich was responsible for leading an agency called the Settlement Authority, which he created within the Defense Department so that he could essentially be responsible for the military occupation of the West Bank and clearing out all the red tape involved in authorizing new settlements, new roads, or anything like that. So, for example, it’s now much easier for a settler leader who wants to create a new outpost to get whatever resources he needs because all the red tape from before no longer exists. Now, we have a bunch of messianic settler ideologues like Smotrich in government who just rubber stamp most of what they want.
It also comes down to the fact that these settler groups were incredibly well-armed. The settlers were basically sent to groups called Hagmar, where they just became settler soldiers, who basically wore full IDF uniforms and had rifles. Smotrich last year announced a so-called sovereignty plan that would essentially squeeze Palestinians into six major population centers, including Ramallah and other large cities. The way settler violence has unfolded recently, the way outposts have sprung up and villages have been emptied – it’s directly consistent with his plans.
I’ve heard people say that the attack on Heidi Levine received so much attention because she is American, when in fact it happens to Palestinians all the time, including during Friday’s attack, but gets far less attention. That’s certainly true, but I also think it’s important to understand how 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 during the Biden administration?
One Palestinian American I spoke to told me that under Biden, if an American was beaten or their house was burned down or whatever, or an American was brutalized by the IDF, someone from the embassy would come and express their condolences, and then they would leave and the victim would never hear from them again. For the Trump administration, they haven’t even made it yet. In other words, there is no substantial difference between the two. But one of them put a layer of dressing on it and showed that he cared about it.
I think Palestinian Americans are a good benchmark because they look like other Palestinians, but they have blue passports. So it’s kind of like you’re controlling a variable here. There are several Palestinian communities in the West Bank, eighty percent of which are Palestinian Americans. Due to their dual nationality, they used to be quite remote from the violence of occupation and settlers. But that privilege disappeared on October 7. Now, those Palestinian Americans are coming to terms with the fact that they are really just Palestinians. There is no difference.
As for Americans who are not Palestinian, like myself or Heidi – I mean, look, this is anecdotal, but I will tell you that over the course of my five trips, the level of violence that I myself directly faced did increase. My first three times, no one really laid a hand on me. I was in the car that was attacked. I was being chased. I had a gun pointed at me, but no one hit me. The last time I was here was in June and July and I was attacked multiple times. I’ve been here for ten days on this trip, and to be honest, I can’t remember how many times I’ve been attacked. And, look, I don’t look Palestinian. I usually shout in English. A lot of times I’m wearing a press vest or shouting that I’m a reporter, but they don’t care. They don’t even blink. This doesn’t bother them. They still come after me like everyone else.
Can you explain what happened on Friday?
It’s olive harvest day for Khirbet Abu Falah, a Palestinian community in the West Bank. And, like I said, this outpost is on a hilltop overlooking olive fields, and Palestinians are regularly attacked by the settlers who live there. So, the olive fields have essentially been off limits to Palestinians because of these attacks, but it’s their livelihood and it’s harvest time. So basically what a lot of communities do is they pick a day or a few days and everyone goes out together and hopefully gets a lot of protection.
However, from the moment we got there we saw settlers on the top of the hill preparing to attack. I mean, we literally watched them put on their clothes, put their masks on their heads, pick up their clubs, and it looked like a bunch of guys getting ready to fight, and that’s exactly what they were doing. The olive harvest is supposed to be a peaceful and celebratory family affair, but in this case only men harvest due to the risk of attack. There were no women or children there, they were just running as fast as they could, plucking the olives off the trees as we watched the settlers prepare to attack. After about an hour they started rushing down the mountain and initially they were just throwing very big rocks and they were using these slings. So these are very large rocks that are coming from a distance, very fast, and if you get hit by a rock, it can do real damage. So first they just charge with rocks. There were probably forty or fifty of them. You have to remember that the olive fields – as is the case in many Palestinian villages – are basically the buffer zone between the outpost and the village itself, as well as the residential core of the village. So if the settlers were able to go right through the olive fields, they were now entering the villages and they were going to start ransacking the houses and basically committing massacres.