Standing at the Gates of Hell

It is spring in Palestine, and Eid al-Fitr has just passed. It’s customary to buy new clothes for the feast, but with people desperately short of funds, this tradition was out of reach for most this year. It was hard to find signs of celebration, even the smallest manifestations of joy, anywhere. In Ramallah, where I live, the city was quiet and subdued. Distress and worry were visible on people’s faces. Since 2023, an already dire economic situation in the West Bank has been exacerbated by the Israeli government, which has withheld tax collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority and prevented Palestinians from working in Israel. The long detours drivers must take to avoid a constantly expanding set of Israeli checkpoints have hiked up the price of local produce.

In another time, going for picnics in the lush green hills so full of wildflowers—anemones, cyclamen, and yellow mustard seed—would have been an affordable alternative to a grand feast. Yet this Eid, even that pleasure was denied. The hills around Ramallah are becoming more militarized by the day, with settler outposts being erected on high grounds and masked settlers brandishing machine guns roaming the area, ready to attack anyone daring to take a walk.

On Saturday, March 21, an eighteen-year-old man from an illegal farming outpost called Shuva Yisrael Farms died in a traffic accident when his ATV collided with a car driven by a Palestinian. Without evidence that the Palestinian driver intended harm, settlers immediately took to social media to urge Israelis to carry out what one called “revenge and expulsion of the enemy.” Their audience was eager to oblige, shooting and beating Palestinians and burning cars and homes in twenty-five near-simultaneous attacks in villages across the West Bank. Israel’s defense minister, Bezalel Smotrich, extended condolences to the man’s parents “over the murder of their son . . . who fell guarding our country while holding on to the land of Samaria.” The deceased’s father called his son a “communal sacrifice” for the settlement cause.

Not that the settlers have ever needed a reason to harass and beat Palestinians, destroy their property, and seize their farmland. Such violence has been ongoing since the early 1980s. At the time, under pressure from Israeli law professors, the Israeli attorney general appointed a committee of jurists to investigate law enforcement in the West Bank and Gaza. When the committee exposed numerous crimes carried out by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank—assault, destruction of property, armed threats, shootings, and attacks on schoolchildren—settlers, as well as the police and army, tried to obstruct the publication of their findings. When they were finally released in 1984 in The Karp Report: An Israeli Government Inquiry into Settler Violence Against Palestinians on the West Bank, the government ignored it.

In addition to their decades of living under the threat of settler violence, Palestinians in the West Bank have long been accustomed to war’s dangers. In Ramallah, where, like everywhere else in the West Bank, there are no bomb shelters, I have lived through seven wars—beginning with the Six-Day War of 1967—yet never have I felt so vulnerable as I do today. That isn’t because of the Iranian and Hezbollah bombings: neither has targeted the West Bank, and only occasionally has shrapnel fallen here from missiles or interceptors (On March 18, for instance, an errant Iranian missile hit the town of Beit Awwa near Hebron, killing four women in a beauty salon and wounding thirteen others). It’s because the war is being used as cover for a sharp rise in settler violence, with no apparent effort by Israel’s government to control it.

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Until recently, the Israeli army was not an accomplice and the government did not overtly incite the settlers. Today, though, that has all changed: Israel’s right wing, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security and a settler himself, unabashedly encourages the use of pogroms against villages spanning from the Jordan Valley to Israel’s 1948 border—acts that constitute the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And armed settler militias, often operating with support from the army, attack and harass Palestinian communities across the West Bank in an effort to make life so unbearable for them that they will be forced out.

West Bank Palestinians are determined to stay. If they face a new catastrophe, it will not be one of exile.

Since the latest war’s onset, the settlers have become more emboldened than ever before. According to the Israeli monitoring group Yesh Din, there have been more than 257 reports of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank since the first U.S. airstrikes on Iran, including shootings, physical assaults, property damage, and threats. In this span, settlers have killed seven Palestinians, one of whom died after inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers amid a settler attack. In these attacks (and all the others over the decades in the West Bank), settlers take advantage of the approximately 898 military checkpoints and obstacles that severely restrict Palestinian mobility—permanent checkpoints, iron gates that close off villages, earth mounds, and roadblocks—knowing that, in the wake of their violence, ambulances will not be able to reach the victims in time.

Israel’s ‌government has also authorized a construction push to build new settlements—an expansion effort that Smotrich, who grew up in the settlement of Beit El near Ramallah, has admitted is designed to bury the idea of a Palestinian state. Indeed, the construction has crept into areas of the West Bank that were supposed to be protected from it. Under the Oslo Accords of 1993-5, the West Bank was divided into three areas: Area C, comprising 60 percent of the land’s area, is under full Israeli control; Area A, comprising 18 percent, is under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority; Area B, the remainder is under joint Israeli and Palestinian jurisdiction. Today, settlement does not stop at Area C, where settlers now outnumber Palestinians: it is now encroaching into Area B and even to Area A. Earlier this month, +972 Magazine reported that settlers have taken control of around 25,000 acres in the two Areas, bringing the total amount of land held by settler outposts across the West Bank to over 250,000 acres. And since the beginning of the year, the Israeli military has carried more frequent raids into Palestinian towns and cities in Area A to arrest residents, often without charge.

Compounding our constant pain at witnessing more and more of our land being colonized is the fact that Palestinians living in the West Bank cannot feel safe anywhere. On March 14, the Bani Odeh family were returning home to their village in Tammun after shopping in nearby Nablus for Eid—a trip that requires passing through multiple checkpoints—when an undercover Israeli Border Police officer shot at their car, killing the father, mother, and two of their children. The Israeli Justice Ministry unit that probes police misconduct has yet to summon the murderers for questioning.

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Some have claimed that Palestinians are facing a second Nakba, the catastrophe of expulsion, but I am not so sure. In 1948-9, Palestinians were caught by surprise. They didn’t fully realize what was happening and that they would never be allowed to return to the homes they were forced out of. Nor did they anticipate that the Zionists would deny that they ever constituted a national group with a long history tied to the land. At that time, so close to the Holocaust, the world sympathized with the Jewish plight, leading to an outpouring of support for the Zionists to establish a state of their own in Palestine.

These factors no longer exist—and in fact the opposite might be true. The destruction of Gaza has eroded international support for Israel. Neither Jordan nor Egypt is willing to participate in ethnic cleansing by receiving Palestinians forced out. And the Palestinian right to self-determination has won international recognition and support. Today, with the memory of the Nakba still so vivid, Palestinians are determined to stay. They will surely resist the effort by the settlers and the army to force them out en masse, yet with the war raging, the dangers they face have never been so great. If Palestinians in the West Bank face a new catastrophe, it will not be one of exile.

At home in Ramallah, I hear the sounds of the war—the explosions, the drones, the missiles and warplanes—and see images on television of buildings toppled, crumpled, crashing to the ground raising clouds of dust and debris, some burning, others falling in one large heap, the widescale destruction in Tel Aviv, Tehran, and Beirut. I shudder as I feel the shadow of Gaza’s fate hanging over me. I’m surrounded by a looping reel of devastation in our cursed region. As we stand at the gates of Hell with no apparent route back, I wonder how much longer it will go on, this relentless, merciless, never-ending cycle.

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