Evil in the West Bank – David Shulman

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For the last three years or so, the pastoral West Bank village of Ras al-‘Ain was my home away from home, its Bedouin people an extended family. Israeli settlers living in illegal outposts adjacent to the village assaulted it daily throughout these years and have now finally overwhelmed it. All the families have taken apart their houses and left.

Ras al-‘Ain was the last large Palestinian village in the southern Jordan Valley. The others, including the twin village of Mu‘arrajat two miles away, had been destroyed and their people expelled in a highly effective campaign of ethnic cleansing backed by the Israeli government. For many decades roughly a thousand people lived in Ras al-‘Ain. They belonged to three Bedouin tribes—Rashaida, Jahalin, and Ka‘abneh—that united in the hope that together they could withstand settler violence. Most of the villagers were shepherds, surviving in a subsistence economy. On the night of March 7, 2025, dozens of heavily armed settlers under the protection of the police and the army invaded Ras al-‘Ain and stole at least a thousand, and possibly as many as 1,500, of the villagers’ sheep and goats. We have excellent video documentation, taken by two remarkably courageous activists, of that raid. The Palestinian owners submitted a formal complaint to the police, with the video documentation, but—as usual these days—within a few hours the police closed the file on the grounds that there was no supporting evidence. A thousand sheep are worth some two million Israeli shekels. The economic foundation of the village was devastated.

Still, most of the families held on. The village was on privately owned Palestinian land that under Israeli law should have been off limits to the settlers. No Israeli official, however, was prepared to enforce the law. The police have been turned into a vicious ultranationalist militia under the command of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the serial criminal (dozens of indictments and several convictions) and hate-monger appointed minister of national security by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There is also no succor from the Israeli civil courts. After the theft of the sheep, those who remained in the village still had to deal with the daily incursions of the settlers, including beatings, curses, threats, harassment, pepper spray, and more theft. Our activists—all of us Gandhian-style nonviolent resisters—did what we could to block the violence, with some success.

In late December 2025, the settlers plowed a large expanse of the village land—plowing in the West Bank is a claim to possession—and created the rudiments of another illegal outpost inside Ras al-‘Ain, not far from an outpost set up earlier a little farther south. The plowing was preceded by a day of particularly savage attacks on Palestinians, journalists who came to report, and our activists. The settlers also besieged several of the houses bordering the plowed field and the outpost, blocking the residents’ access to food, water, and electricity. As our friend Salameh told me, “We have nothing left—no money, no food, no water, no medicines, no rest, and no hope.” Within a few days of this torment, the families began the excruciating business of demolishing their houses. I witnessed it. It was perhaps the hardest day I have known in twenty-some years in the occupied West Bank.

A few families managed to stay on, braving the danger. Settler gangs roamed the village freely, exulting in their victory over what they call “the enemy”—the peaceful people of Ras al-‘Ain. Daily and nightly attacks on Palestinian homes and families continued. By now the village has been emptied of its people. If you’d like to witness human evil at its worst, come with me any day to the West Bank.

The story of Ras al-‘Ain has been replicated again and again throughout Area C in the occupied territories, which is under full Israeli control. By our count, Ras al-‘Ain is the eighty-sixth village destroyed in the last two to three years. No one knows for sure how many brainwashed, hate-driven, sadistic settlers are now active in Area C. Many of them are adolescents trained to hurt and kill; most of them hope for an apocalypse that will herald the arrival of the Messiah. Netanyahu, in his usual mendacious style, recently claimed in an interview that there are only about seventy of them. He knows better than that. The real number is closer to many hundreds, maybe more; they are not subject to punishment or restraint of any kind. If the government wanted to stop these pogroms and the entire project of ethnic cleansing, the army could do so in a few days. So far there’s no sign of the Messiah. However one looks at the situation, we are witnessing a major moral disaster resulting from numberless crimes against humanity. And then there is Gaza.

The army in the territories, like the police, like the civil service, indeed like most of the institutions of Israeli democracy, has been corrupted by Netanyahu’s government. Officers and soldiers at all levels are firmly bonded with the bloodthirsty settlers. The Supreme Court is fighting for its survival in the face of overt statements by the prime minister, as well as several of his ministers, that they will not honor its rulings. Put simply, the government is now the number one enemy of the Israeli state as we have known it.

Elections are scheduled for later this year, but there is every reason to doubt that they will actually take place or that they will be honest and secure. Already the right-wing parties of the governing coalition are advancing bills in the Knesset that would rig the elections in their favor. A new law still pending would bar anyone or any party that has even hinted at support for the Palestinian cause and is thus classed as a terrorist from being elected to the Knesset. For the Kahanists like Ben-Gvir and the wild and thuggish settlers, any Arab person is by definition a terrorist. The goal is to disqualify Israeli Arab parties from participating in the elections, with the result that Arab voters will not turn up to vote. Decisions about disenfranchisement will now rest entirely with the Central Elections Committee, made up mainly of members of the Knesset, rather than with the Supreme Court, which in the past had oversight of such questions. In those days the bar was set very high, as is normal in a true democracy. Not anymore. If the Israeli Arab parties, which won over 10 percent of the votes in the last elections and are likely to win more than that this year, are barred from running, the Israeli right wing will rule for the foreseeable future. As of this writing, the four Arab parties that ran in the 2022 elections are trying to create a single joint list.

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