Fear and goading in the West Bank

By Wendell Steavenson

At midday on Friday October 13th, a scant week after Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack on Israel, Basel Adra, a human-rights activist from the Palestinian village of At-Tuwani heard a commotion and grabbed his camera. Children in the playground next to the village school were yelling and pointing across the valley. Two armed settlers and an Israeli soldier had walked down the road and were engaged in an altercation with the family that lived on the edge of the village. The men had come from an outpost of an Israeli settlement that was established on the hill opposite At-Tuwani in the 1980s, in spite of the fact that the area was outside Israel’s internationally recognised boundaries. The settlers snatched at the Palestinian family’s smartphones as they tried to film the encounter. One hit the father of the house on the forehead with his rifle butt.

This kind of incident is common in At-Tuwani, a village of 300 people. The residents of Ma’on, the neighbouring settlement, have harassed the Palestinian villagers for years, most often by threatening farmers in their fields and driving shepherds like Adra’s father from the hills where they grazed their sheep. Adra, in his late 20s, told me he had a photograph of himself at the age of three among the pine trees of the hilltop where now I could see the grain silos and barns of the settler outpost. “I don’t remember it,” he told me, “but the villagers used to go to these woods for walks and picnics.” After the settlers arrived, the Palestinians learned to band together to defend against incursions and protect each other from the beatings and arrests at the hands of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and the police.