Letter from the West Bank – The Dispossessed

Israeli settlers are escalating attacks on their Palestinian neighbors.

- By Shane Bauer. Photograph by Tanya Habjouqa

The family of Bilal Saleh, who was killed while harvesting olives. Since October 7th, the U.N. has recorded nearly six hundred attacks by settlers in the West Bank.

The sounds of destruction carried through the valley. It was October 28th, and I was standing on a rocky slope in the West Bank with Bashar Ma'amar, a Palestinian who records the aggressions of Israeli settlers. Ma'amar pointed a camera at a group ransacking a house below us. A couple of days before, the settlers had set fire to it; the house's owner had gone to the police, but they had not intervened. As we watched, one settler kicked at the front door, and another tried to penetrate the charred walls with a board. Others tore a hole in the roof and slipped inside. On the hillside opposite us, three Israeli soldiers and a man with a rifle stood watching. Eventually, the settlers joined the soldiers to walk back to Eli, their settlement, where mothers pushed strollers down tree-lined blocks of red-roofed houses, people played tennis on courts with views of Palestinian farmland, and men and women carrying M16s and Uzis shopped in strip malls.