In the plywood hut in which Palestinian Iman al-Hathalin and her family have lived since their home was bulldozed by the Israeli authorities in 2014, the warmth from a rickety samovar is welcome. Outside the only window, the winter sky is blinding white: it floods the room with an icy light and sends shadows dancing up the flimsy walls.
Everyone has been ill lately, it seems, including Hathalin’s two-year-old daughter, who sleeps fitfully on her lap, and Maya Mark, her Arabic-speaking Israeli guest. “It is not exaggerating to say Maya is like my sister,” Hathalin said. “I was so worried when she was sick. We are family.”
The friends are catching up in a village deep in the south Hebron hills, about as remote as it’s possible to get within the confines of the West Bank.
This rocky, difficult place is one of the fiercest frontlines of the occupation: Palestinian homes, paved roads and water cisterns are repeatedly demolished thanks to a near-total ban on construction, while illegal Israeli settlements flourish.
Rather than collapse under these pressures, however, the local community has become a deep wellspring for non-violent Palestinian activism, which has often worked hand in hand with the anti-occupation movement in Israel. In the absence of any meaningful top-down peace process, Hathalin and Mark are part of a new generation of activists who are quietly taking an extraordinary new step.
Together with Nnur Zahor, another Israeli Arabic speaker, Mark has created an immersive language-learning course for like-minded young Israeli activists, taught by eight local Palestinian women, including Hathalin. Over the course of several months, the project has helped to forge deep relationships between the students and people across several villages, and the Israelis’ presence is countering a rising tide of settler violence.
The project – it has no official name or title – is possible thanks to decades of work by older activists who built up trust between the communities: it is unlikely that it could scale up or be replicated elsewhere. But nothing quite like this grassroots, long-term idea has ever happened before, and everyone involved agrees it is a richly rewarding undertaking.
“The people here don’t need us at all,” Mark said. “Being here has taught me to be more modest about activism and about my role. It’s inspiring and a priceless experience, getting to understand the depth of resistance here.”
According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, a unique cave-dwelling culture has existed in the Hebron hills since at least the 1830s, the natural shelters used as homes and for keeping sheep and goats. In the decades since Israel’s creation, Bedouin families expelled from the Negev desert have also made their way to these arid foothills, north of their ancestral lands.
The territory was captured by Israel in the war of 1967, and is now part of Area C, the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control.
But Palestinian shepherds and farmers are no longer the only people living here. Dozens of Israeli settlements have been established since the 1980s – many illegal under international and Israeli law.
Encouraged by Donald Trump’s unyielding support for Israel’s right, the settlers have grown bolder in the past few years, seizing more and more land that Israel classifies as “state land” or “firing zones”, and their tactics have become increasingly violent. The UN recorded 410 attacks by settlers against Palestinian civilians and property in the West Bank in the first 10 months of 2021, including four murders, up from 358 in 2020, and 335 in 2019. Rather than intervene, the UN and rights groups say, Israeli security forces more often stand by or even join in.
The Palestinians can also turn to violence. Earlier this week, gunmen ambushed a car with Israeli license plates as it left Homesh in the northern West Bank, killing a 25-year-old and wounding two others.
Stone-throwing, shooting with live ammunition, cutting down or burning crops and olive trees, killing sheep and destroying or vandalising property are common. In one of the most recent high-profile incidents, in September dozens of armed men from two nearby outposts smashed through the Hebron hills village of Mufakara, breaking windows and solar panels, slashing tyres, overturning a car and injuring six people.
Before the pandemic, Hebron locals were often supported by international volunteers who helped escort children to school on roads between outposts and challenged settlers who trespassed on to private Palestinian land. But as the world’s borders closed, preventing travel, local activists decided to turn to Israeli friends.
“A few of us decided that we wanted to invite them to come. Not everyone in the area is OK with it, they don’t understand what we are trying to achieve. But before we had to wait to report settler problems, now our Israeli allies can get very close and document everything,” said Nasser Nawaja, a well-known local activist. “The Israelis are learning what it is like to live here. And our children are learning that Jews are not just settlers and soldiers.”
Small groups of Israelis have been rotating around a handful of villages in the Hebron hills since spring, although the volunteers asked for their exact locations to be withheld for security reasons. There’s little that seems to bond the 10 or so volunteers on the surface: they come from all over Israel, from different family backgrounds, and while all would describe themselves as politically on the left, they debate what that means.
The students have Arabic classes two mornings a week, with a curriculum Mark and Zahor designed especially for native Hebrew speakers. They get to practice in everyday life and there is no ban on discussing political topics. “When I came, I remember thinking, ‘What am I going to do here? How will I interact, how will I support this community?’ I didn’t understand anything being said in the summer, but now I get about 50% of the conversation. It’s very exciting,” said Maya Eshel, during a group meeting with the Observer at a community centre on a bleak, cold day last Thursday.
The group spend the rest of their time helping out as needed. They are most useful as watchdogs: if someone calls to say settlers are approaching a village, or won’t let shepherds reach their land, the volunteers leap into action, grabbing binoculars and cameras equipped with long-distance lenses donated by B’Tselem and hustling to their cars.
Sometimes their presence, or Hebrew conversation, can be enough to diffuse the situation. At the very least, they can record what happens and give testimonies to the police, although so far only one incident of dozens reported has been followed up.
During our visit, the relaxed end-of-the-week mood in one village shifted dramatically after a little girl ran up to the prefab and plywood houses, shouting she had seen two settlers approaching a Palestinian olive grove from the large settlement on the other side of the valley. The adults and the Israeli activists rushed to the nearest clear viewpoint; the village dogs barked. Through the binoculars, they decided the two figures looked like young boys. One appeared to be carrying a saw. On noticing the adults on the ridge, the children stopped, eventually walking back up to the settlement.
“Sometimes I am driving somewhere in the jeep, maybe it’s the middle of the night, to somewhere I’ve never been, and I stop and think to myself: ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’” said Matan Brenner-Kadish. “This idea is really not for everyone and, long term, we are just plugging holes in a boat. If what drives you is anger and shame, then this would be exhausting. But if you come from a position of accepting that this brings benefits for both us and them, it’s a different perspective.”
The project is not without risk. Earlier this month, three of the group were detained at a police station overnight on charges of not intervening to help a settler who was pushed to the ground by residents when he tried to enter a Palestinian village. Their cameras, laptops, phones and a car were confiscated – all without a warrant.They could technically face sentences of three years in prison. “One of the arguments the settlers use is our presence is a justification for more violence: one explicitly blamed us, said they are attacking because of us,” said Itai Feitelson, 26.
“They’d be violent if we were here or if we weren’t here. It shows that what we are doing is working,” said Brenner-Kadish. “And, at the end of the day, if the Palestinians can do this their whole lives, so can we.”