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Words and photos by Anna Blackshaw As the eyes of the world have been on Gaza, violence in the West Bank has been escalating to near record levels. According to a report by the United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNWRA), 40,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been displaced by Israeli forces in just the first two months of 2025, making this the largest displacement of civilians since 1967. These forced removals occur alongside the highest rates of Israeli settler terrorism in the West Bank in over two decades. Palestinian shepherds are attacked while grazing their sheep, families are chased out of their homes at gunpoint, homes and cars are set on fire, sewage is dumped into wells and springs, olive trees are burned down (at a rate of 25,000 trees in 2024 alone), and rampages through villages keep families on alert day and night.  The olive tree is a powerful symbol of peace, resilience, and steadfastness for Palestinians. Its deep roots and ability to withstand harsh conditions reflect the endurance and perseverance of the Palestinian people. Cultivated in the region for thousands of years, olive trees are deeply embedded in Palestinian traditions, cuisine, and daily life, serving as a vital connection to heritage, resistance and identity. I witnessed this violence firsthand last year doing protective presence in a rural area of the West Bank, where Palestinian families, mostly shepherds and farmers, are terrorized everyday by the settlers who have illegally built settlements and outposts on land after violently displacing the families who have lived there for generations. I am there as part of a Palestinian-led initiative that brings internationals to communities facing violence to protect civilians in the West Bank through protective presence, accompaniment, and other means of unarmed civilian protection. We are there to both document these crimes and to act as a deterrent in the hope that our presence could somehow slow the pace of the violence. But even more importantly, we are there to witness and to bring home the realities of life under Israeli military occupation – an apartheid system that is funded, constructed, and enabled by the United States government. In the field we are faced with settlers and Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) with firearms and bulldozers funded by the US government. We carry phones and cameras. In the absence of any repercussions or consequences for the extreme acts of violence, our presence there feels vital, but also, wholly inadequate in the face of an empire's army. Still, the families tell us they feel safer when we are there.
We work in pairs and stay for a few days at a time with families who have requested our presence. We sleep in their homes, eat meals with them, play with their children, practice our Arabic, and drink tea, always on the alert for the settlers or military who harass, intimidate, threaten, and attack every single day. On my first morning of duty, I am awakened at sunrise by L, our host and the mama of the house, who gestures at the hills behind their home, where settlers on foot and on horseback with guns strapped across their chests are guiding their sheep onto the family land. I raise my camera and start filming, and we all stand watching as they encroach further and further onto the land. They see our presence and for hours we are at a standstill, us watching and filming, while they watch and film us too. The papa, Z, points to a crumbling stone house near where some of the settlers are gathered. “That was my grandfather's house,” he tells me through a translation app, “the house I grew up in.” He was born on this land, as was his father before him. For generations his family has tended to the soil, farmed, and shepherded here. There are fig, mulberry and olive trees, enormous prickly pears and lush rows of cabbage. Z gestures to the hills and tells me that this land has been classified as a military firing zone, one of the many ways Israel uses arbitrary zoning laws to deny Palestinians access to their own land. After October 7, the army came to his home and forced Z and his family to leave at gunpoint. They burned his car, tore down his almond trees and grape vines and destroyed his kitchen. He and his family have only just returned. In the hills above, the illegal outpost grows. First settlers came and planted an Israeli flag, then they brought a bus, then families, and then the sheep. The settlers now graze their flock on Z’s land every day. We watch as they are joined by more settlers, these ones arriving in trucks.
The next evening, right after dinner, settlers come and set fire to Z’s truck. We are chatting and sipping tea when suddenly a cry goes up and everyone bolts up the hill to find huge flames engulfing the truck. This is the same truck that just hours prior I had been dancing around and photographing children on. It was the second time in six weeks the settlers have lit it on fire. For over 20 minutes I watch and film as Z’s family struggles to put out the fire with hoses from their already depleted water tank, and it’s barely making a difference. The original version of this article included a video of the fire. The Settlement Enterprise Israel’s settlement enterprise is a calculated strategy of land theft and displacement. Since 1967, Israel has established and expanded Jewish-only settlements across the occupied territories that serve a singular purpose: to entrench Israeli control and erase Palestinian existence from the land. Today, there are over 700,000 Israeli settlers illegally residing in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, at least 15% of whom—or 100,000—hold US citizenship. Their presence is not incidental; it is actively facilitated by Israel and financially supported by the U.S. government and private American donors. Settlers receive financial subsidies, lower utility costs, and tax breaks, while the Israeli military ensures their safety even as they attack Palestinian families with guns, arson, and theft. For decades, the United States has played an indispensable role in Israel’s settler-colonial project, bankrolling the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and shielding Israel from any repercussions. US military aid to Israel—totaling over $310 billion since Israel’s founding— directly funds, arms, and enables the violent displacement of Palestinians. In 2024 alone, the US sent $17.9 billion to Israel. In the West Bank, the US provides the equipment and the arms that facilitate the vision of the settlers to seize more land and the systematic terrorization of Palestinian communities by heavily armed settlers operating with total impunity. It sustains the Israeli military’s occupation of the West Bank, including assisting Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) units, including the notoriously violent Netzah Yehuda battalion, an IOF unit with a long record of human-rights abuses against Palestinians. And in January 2025, the Trump administration approved 134 armed Caterpillar bulldozers to be delivered to Israel. These are bulldozers that will be used to destroy and demolish Palestinian homes. They will knock over water tanks and destroy sheep pens while forcibly seizing land for more illegal settlements.
US–based tax-exempt organizations, such as the Central Fund of Israel, funnel millions of dollars to fund illegal Israeli settlements each year. These organizations finance extremist settler groups that burn homes, shoot unarmed civilians, and seize Palestinian land. They provide legal defense for settlers convicted of violent crimes and fund religious schools that preach ethnic cleansing. The US government allows these organizations to operate freely, subsidizing settler terrorism under the pretense of charity. This slow but deliberate process is what Israel calls “creating facts on the ground.” It is a strategy designed to make the theft of Palestinian land irreversible. But the settlers’ violence is not only about territorial conquest; it is also about breaking the spirit of Palestinian communities, instilling fear, and severing the deep ancestral ties they have to their land. Settler violence is meant to destroy not just homes and livelihoods but also the very sense of safety, stability, and continuity that defines Palestinian identity. All Israeli settlements—whether in East Jerusalem or other parts of the West Bank, whether officially approved by the government or not--are illegal under international law. Israel is considered an occupying power in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights, which means it is required to follow international rules, including the Fourth Geneva Convention. This convention clearly states that an occupying country cannot move its own people into the land it occupies. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines this kind of population transfer as a war crime. Despite these laws, Israeli settlements continue to expand, violating international agreements meant to protect occupied populations. The illegality of Israeli settlements was confirmed by the United States in a 1978 State Department’s legal advisory issuing an official opinion to congressional leaders, stating that “the establishment of the civilian settlements in those territories is inconsistent with international law.” Our unconditional support for Israel also violates US laws that prohibit giving assistance to countries who violate internationally recognized human rights or block humanitarian assistance. The US has the legal and political framework to take action against Israel’s crimes—it simply refuses to do so. The Way Forward A comrade working on Capitol Hill recently shared that there is a growing wedge in the Democratic Party over Palestine. That the nearly 100 Congressional votes for a ceasefire and the 130 votes for conditioning aid to Israel that we earned over the last year and a half of relentless organizing—numbers that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago—show that we are shifting the political landscape. It is imperative to push that wedge open even further, to continue to grow and build our grassroots and political power, to force accountability, and to make it politically untenable for lawmakers to oppose Palestinian self-determination. Can we do this in a Trump presidency? Is this possible? Like so many of us, I have been thinking about this question, as we witness the unhinged behavior of Trump and his oligarchs in recent weeks. But then I bring myself back to the West Bank and think about the 70-year resistance to occupation that Palestinians have embodied by their unshaken commitment to remain. This is sumud—the Arabic word for steadfastness, but also, a distinctly Palestinian form of resistance. It is the unwavering commitment to remain, to endure, to refuse erasure and to defy a system designed to uproot and destroy.
For Palestinians, to exist is to resist. Sumud is the rhythm of everyday life under occupation—an instinct for survival, a refusal to surrender to Israeli surveillance, violence, and dispossession. It is planting new olive trees after settlers have burned yours down. It is rebuilding homes after bulldozers have reduced them to rubble. It is staying put when every mechanism of the occupation is designed to drive you out. Sumud is not just resilience—it is a declaration: We are still here. We are not leaving. This must also be the clarion call of our movements. We are still here. We are not leaving. To be steadfast and to understand that ending US support for Israel’s apartheid system will be a long and difficult fight and that we must be in it for the long haul. Because even while the terrain that we are fighting on has changed, one thing that has not is the strength of our collective power to raise our voices, to build political will, and to keep moving as we launch into this next phase of our organizing. This is a political fight. And it is one that will only be won through sustained organizing, strategic pressure, an unrelenting demand for accountability and a commitment to keep showing up. To be steadfast.  Although the apartheid wall physically separates Palestinians from one another and their ancestral lands, it remains a temporary obstruction—one that cannot ultimately break the bonds of a people or erase their connection to their homeland. We Are Still Here On the day after the fire, I stand with Z in the waning twilight, sipping tea, and looking up at the illegal outpost on the hill above us. I think about the land that is etched into the fabric of this family. Where Z raised his family and where his father raised him, and his father before that. Where he grows the most beautiful lettuce that we eat right out of the ground, and olives that he harvests and cures from these trees. The same land that just hours before the fire, I raced across during the golden hour with his sons and nephews being silly and jumping from rocks and kicking around a ball. When we climbed to the top of the hill behind his house one of the boys motioned across the hills to the settlements and simply said, “Almustawtinin [Settlers].” And then he sang me a Palestinian chant with his arms raised high in pride and strength.
This article was originally published by the Oakland Institute, a leading policy think tank that brings fresh ideas and bold action to the most pressing social, economic, and environmental issues of our day. It was republished with permission from the author. Comments are closed.
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