The Palestinian farmers and their children came on foot up the terraced hillside near the town of Halhul in the high country of the West Bank, carrying shears to prune their grapevines. With them came Israeli activists from Bnei Avraham (The Children of Abraham), a religious peace group. From above came other Israelis, at least two men carrying assault rifles, along with teenage boys, from a settlement outpost on Halhul’s land, some of the boys with spray canisters in hand, and then the fierce stink of pepper spray was in the air and an old man and a girl lay on the ground, wounded by spray in their eyes, their pain caught in shaky video footage from an activist’s phone.
The settlers, as if they were the ones in danger, alerted an army unit, and soldiers arrived, bearing a military document that declared the area off-limits to civilians. They ordered the Palestinians and the activists to leave—but not the settlers. By the day’s end, eight Palestinians were arrested and held for hours, one of them for days. One of the Israeli activists was questioned by police and released on condition that she not enter the West Bank for 15 days, as if keeping her away would prevent trouble.
Pruning the vines—on which the farmers depend for their livelihood, all the more so since being barred from working in Israel after the Hamas attack from Gaza of October 7, 2023—is essential to ensure the yield. But they remained unpruned.
This picture of one day in the West Bank, in the lush farm country between Hebron and Bethlehem, is pieced together from the accounts of two of the activists and one of the Palestinians, from the brief video footage, and from an oblique response from the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson’s office to my questions. It’s a scene in the ongoing saga of Halhul’s vineyards, and in the larger story of settler harassment and violence.
But it’s also part of the story of a growing number of Israelis engaged in a form of activism known as “protective presence”: accompanying Palestinian farmers and shepherds, putting themselves at risk of arrest and injury, and in doing so bringing settler terror into the spotlight of Israeli media and political debate.
Settler attacks on Palestinians have escalated drastically in recent years, according to human rights groups, especially since Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power at the end of 2022 as the head of an extreme right-wing government. A key factor has been the coordinated effort by settler groups to expand beyond suburban settlements to take physical control of much more land and to drive Palestinians off it. To do so, they’ve established small outposts, typically a single family accompanied by a few teenage boys—the so-called hilltop youth—who engage in farming and especially in grazing sheep, goats, and cattle over wide areas. A few outposts have been removed by Israeli authorities. Most have enjoyed support, including grazing permits and security equipment, such as all-terrain vehicles, from government bodies.
Over the three years of 2023 to 2025, 185 new outposts were set up in the West Bank, according to Hagit Ofran of the Peace Now movement’s Settlement Watch project, and researcher Dror Etkes of the Kerem Navot organization. (“Kerem Navot”—the vineyard of Naboth—is a reference to the Biblical story of how the evil King Ahab and his wife, Jezebel, stole a poor man’s land.) By the end of last year, these outposts had taken de facto control of an eye-popping more than 264,000 acres, nearly one-fifth of the entire West Bank, Ofran told me.
To do this, settlers have engaged in tactics ranging from fencing off grazing land and stealing agricultural tools to attacking farmers in their groves during harvests to rampages through villages. The violence reached a peak this spring when public attention in Israel was focused on the constant missile alerts of the war with Iran. During the six weeks of that conflict, the Yesh Din (There Is Law) human rights organization tallied 378 incidents of settler violence, with 200 Palestinians injured and eight shot dead.
On a recent day, I drove from Jerusalem with Gilles Alexandre, a 73-year-old member of the Jordan Valley Activists, to the pasturelands on the slopes above that valley in the northeast corner of the West Bank. Alexandre’s group works with about a dozen small Palestinian communities in the area, each consisting of one large family or several and their livestock, some living in semipermanent tents. A larger number of communities have abandoned their encampments under settler pressure. The rains were unusually good last winter, but outpost settlers regularly block hungry herds from reaching the high grass.
At a place known as Hamamat Al Malih, settlers allegedly stole 350 sheep last summer, taking what they could manage, killing the rest, and leaving the corpses in the fields. The last family of Palestinian herders gave up and left the spot early this spring. A small schoolhouse still served about 60 Palestinian children from the area until one night in April, when parties unknown bulldozed the building. Afterward, on a Jordan Valley Activists’ WhatsApp group, a member shared a picture of a book he’d found in the wreckage: an Arabic translation of Hebrew poet Leah Goldberg’s classic Room for Rent, a fable meant to teach children acceptance of people different from themselves. (Later, when I asked a spokesperson for Israel’s national police force if the sheep rustling or the school demolition was being investigated, I received the Kafkaesque response that he could only answer if I supplied the file numbers of the investigations.) We found only concrete and metal rubble, and a broken swing set and seesaw in the silent playground.
In a field a few miles from the ruins of the school, we met Nitsan Michaeli and two other activists, along with two Palestinian shepherds grazing their 800 sheep. Michaeli wore a loose shirt and pants, a wide-brimmed cloth hat, and a trim grey beard framing his deeply tanned face; he carried a staff and a cell phone and had a body camera hooked to the straps of his backpack.
A few minutes earlier, he said, a pair of settlers riding a dirt bike and a four-wheel ATV had approached. When Michaeli blocked their path and started filming them, the settlers left, most likely because they feared the effect of photographic evidence of whatever they had planned. For most of the Israeli public, what happens in the West Bank, an hour’s drive or less from their homes, might be “beyond the mountains of darkness,” to use an ancient Hebrew phrase. But videos posted on social media with Hebrew texts and shared with Israeli journalists are bringing the range war onto Israelis’ television and phone screens—and recruiting more activists who will film yet more testimony of what is increasingly and accurately described within Israel as Jewish terror.
In some cases, though, protective presence simply means putting oneself between the attackers and Palestinians. In December 2023, Alexandre was spending the night at Al Farisiya, another herding community in the northern Jordan Valley. Assailants who invaded the encampment at two in the morning blasted pepper spray in his eyes, continuing to attack him with stones after he collapsed, and severely beat another Israeli volunteer who tried to protect him. With the activists’ help, though, the Al Farisiya community has resisted expulsion.
Michaeli began accompanying herdsmen 10 years ago, after the first outpost appeared in the area. That was the start of the Jordan Valley Activists. Today the group has over 100 volunteers from around Israel, with as many as 20 in the field at any time. Since October 7, as attacks increased, more people have joined and have begun spending nights as well as days with the herding communities.
Other groups work elsewhere in the West Bank, a geographic division of labor. They are engaged in a battle of attrition in the face of settlers who have the stronger hand, at least as long as this government is in power.
Yet protective presence is the bravest and probably the most effective Israeli resistance to settlement I’ve seen. I’ve covered settlement in the occupied territories for over 40 years, and I wrote the authoritative history of how the disastrous project began. Since the start, there have been Israelis who opposed settlement. Yet while they spoke, and wrote, and voted, and held protests, the supporters of settlement built roads and homes, and they moved in and stayed. The protective presence volunteers are in fact present, in the West Bank, connected to Palestinian communities, making them visible to other Israelis.
Bnei Avraham stands out because its volunteers are overwhelmingly young—and religious. The group began in 2022; the following year it became part of the newly formed Hasmol Ha’emuni (The Faithful Left) movement, which seeks to reclaim Judaism from the revanchist reading of the religious right that has become the most visible face of the settlement movement.
Efrat Reubinof, one of Bnei Avraham’s founders, spent her teen years at a girls’ boarding school she described a “flagship” of hard-line Orthodoxy and nationalism, and later continued her religious studies at an academy for young women in a West Bank settlement where the curriculum included visits to outposts. In a process of “questioning all sorts of things I grew up with,” she told me, the turning point was attending, “out of curiosity,” a dialogue seminar of Palestinian and Israeli women in Germany, and hearing “firsthand what it’s like living under the occupation in the West Bank.”
Roei Kleitman, another of the founders, says that Bnei Avraham chose to focus on the region around Bethlehem and Hebron in the southern West Bank in part because many of its members had earlier studied in the prominent religious academies in settlements in that area. The group decided to work with farmers in large, established communities such as Halhul that can withstand pressure to leave but are in danger of losing their farmlands. There, he says, the Israeli activists can “join the impressive struggle of Palestinians who believe in nonviolent resistance.”
The activists have, however, regularly been the target of violence. “Settlers have thrown stones at us, sprayed us with pepper gas,” says Reubinof. “I’ve been pushed, and kicked,” she says, and pauses a quarter of a second before adding, “and touched, like, in a harassing way.” But “if we hadn’t been with the Palestinians,” she said, the settlers “also could have shot at them.” Reubinof is speaking to me at a sidewalk table outside a tiny Jerusalem café on a peaceful evening, yet her voice is the narration of a completely different scene, the confrontation outside Halhul where settlers descended from an outpost and she was recognized by soldiers as the activists’ leader and arrested.
“It feels like a duty,” she says, “to stand and resist and say” to the settlers, “No, you don’t represent me, you aren’t connected to the religion that I believe in.”
Bnei Avraham’s first contact in Halhul was Mohammad Shaban, who owns 15 acres of vineyards. When the first volunteers came, he told me, many people in the town said “they don’t trust Israeli people,” believing that “they are all the same.” Then the townspeople saw that when the farmers and activists managed to reach vineyards together, the Israelis worked harder than anyone else, and Bnei Avraham volunteers were injured in confrontations. During Ramadan, Shaban invited the Israelis to an iftar meal with Halhul residents. Halhul children met Israelis who were not soldiers, and religious Israelis who were not settlers. Shared meals became a ritual. On a day that I visited Halhul with a dozen volunteers, I listened as, over a meal of hummus and pita, Kleitman and Shaban compared the stories of Moses in the Bible and the Quran.
“We became like a family,” says Shaban. “They became famous in Halhul.” And beyond: Palestinian communities keep contacting Bnei Avraham asking for help. The number of volunteers is now over 150.
In parallel, protective presence activists have boosted coverage in the Israeli media of settler violence. Shaban notes that Bnei Avraham has brought journalists from the mainstream daily Yediot Aharonot to Halhul. A columnist for the paper’s weekend magazine recently accompanied activists to another West Bank town, Tarqumiyah. A recent hour-long report by Israel’s public TV channel on attacks on Palestinians by settlers serving as army reservists began with an interview with Bnei Avraham’s Kleitman.
An ex-general, working with activists, has brought retired high officers and security officials to the northern Jordan Valley. Veteran military correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai accompanied four former generals on such a tour and wrote in Yediot Aharonot that the settlers were engaged in “ethnic cleansing” of much of the West Bank, carrying out the strategy of the far right with Netanyahu’s cooperation. This is a simple, uncomfortable fact, but Ben-Yishai’s voice makes it harder for centrist Israelis to ignore.
The coverage is crucial, because a strategy of nonviolent resistance succeeds by arousing a much larger political constituency against an evil. On a day-to-day level, protective presence volunteers may enable shepherds and farmers to hold on. Stopping the campaign of violence and expulsion depends on national politics: first, on turning Netanyahu and his allies out of power in this fall’s election, and second, on ensuring that the very diverse coalition likely to succeed them is under public pressure to reverse this government’s policy toward settlers and Palestinians.
The activists willing to put their bodies on the line are a conduit through which the picture of what is happening to Palestinians in the pastures and farmlands of the West Bank reaches the living rooms of Israelis. Covering settlement has sometimes pushed me toward despair. With the protective presence activists, I allowed myself to hope.
