Thread by @shane_bauer

When I was in the West Bank settlers attacked olive pickers, saying they were Hamas agents. IDF soldiers used the same pretext to stop the harvest. One soldier told me picking olives was a “political act.” A thread on things I saw while reporting for The New Yorker:

Olive groves have become dangerous. I went to one with @thabjouqa where a man had been killed a week earlier. IDF soldiers appeared on a hill and pulled weapons on us. I caught some of it on video. One cocked his rifle right after I turned the camera off. It was terrifying.

I witnessed settlers rampage on several occasions. They tended to be young, and usually had soldiers protecting them. It was like watching a coming of age ritual in which they learned that the land was theirs to take with impunity. Here they destroy a house with soldiers watching

I watched young settlers seize a spring from Qaryut. In this video, shot by Bashar Ma’amar, they are destroying the water basin Palestinians used to irrigate crops, again with soldiers nearby. As the days passed, they turned it into a swimming pool, sometimes with snipers above.

The mayor of Eli, Ariel Elmaliach, took me to the spring. When I asked why they were taking it from Qaryut, he told me, “If you are coming to a new land, and you are now the owner of that land, then you put in that land the rules that you want.”

The settlers latest land-seizing strategy is through shepherding. They set up illegal outposts, range sheep over a wide area, and attack Palestinians that enter their turf, keeping huge swaths of the West Bank—especially areas eyed for annexation by Israel—empty of Arabs.

I visited a shepherd outpost run by Moriah and Moshe Sharvit. Arabs were not “regular people,” Moriah told me. She said her husband was stopping Palestinians from “stealing” land that was given to the Jews by God. She said their illegal farm was supported by various govt branches

As Avi Naim of the Ministry of Settlement Affairs put it, settlers were helping “prevent Palestinian invasions” of West Bank land. “You take people who believe in that goal as a pioneering mission, and let them spearhead the work to keep control of land,” he said.

Moriah Sharvit told me the army gave her and her husband M16s. Since 2020, the Sharvits had surveillance cameras on the land surrounding the outpost that were controlled by soldiers at a command center. Then after Oct 7, Moriah said, Palestinians living nearby “just left.”

The night after our interview at the outpost, a fire was lit in one of the nearby Palestinians’ empty houses.

The Palestinians from those houses told me after October 7, Moshe Sharvit and his brother showed up with M16s, beat an old man, and told them to leave.

A number of Palestinian communities were depopulated before and after October 7. This is Wadi Al-Seeq, which was evacuated by settlers and soldiers on October 12.

When I visited the empty community, I ran into Neria Ben-Pazi, the man who organized the expulsion of the Palestinians. He lives there now. A settler publication said his illegal outpost had previously been visited by senior IDF officers and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

I was surprised how openly settlers likened the current time to 1948, the year 700,000 Palestinians were exiled. David Elhayani, governor of a settler regional council, told me, “The fight of 1948 is the same fight [today] in all of Judea and Samaria”—the fight over land.”

In one village, settlers left fliers on farmers’ cars. It read, “You wanted war, now wait for the great Nakba. . . . This is your last chance to escape to Jordan in an orderly fashion before we forcibly expel you from our holy lands, which were given to us by God.”

It’s not just fringe extremists glorifying the nakba. Bezalel Smotrich, who oversees the West Bank, wrote, “Zionism was built based on population exchange” including “the exit of masses of Arabs” from Israel. “This historic pattern seems to require culmination.” This is his goal.

I wrote about the violence of settlers, and the ways the state of Israel supports them in grabbing land, for The New Yorker. newyorker.com/magazine/2024/…