Protective Presence in the West Bank

By Josina Manu Maltzman

/ First Place, 2025 Plentitudes Prize in Nonfiction /      

We arrive late, a little after 6am, and catch up with the shepherds already in their fields above the olive grove.  We are walking distance from the village of at Tawani, just past the last row of houses where the landscape turns to fields. From the rocky ground where I’m standing, I can see across the ridge to an Israeli settler letting his flock graze on the thistle and wheat grass that covers this land. I can make out that the settler is wearing his talis like a cape, and that he’s positioned just above the road that marks the edge of what is considered Palestinian Territory—although really, it all is.

If the settler lets his flock cross the road we will document it to support the petitions filed on behalf of the Palestinian shepherds. N, the other non-Palestinian here to support, points out a military jeep across the same ridge and we see it’s headed towards us.

The soldiers arrive within five minutes and the sun is already high, or so it feels, casting strong shadows. It is so bright I can’t see the screen of my phone as I record them walking towards us. I aim it in their direction as the captain shouts “Give me your ID!”

There are three of them, young white men in fatigues and army helmets carrying rifles and every piece of war gear they can possibly need.

“No, I will only give it to the police,” I say, and exchange looks with N. We talk to the captain while the shepherds deal with the other two military personnel. Four Palestinian boys have come out from the houses deep off the fork in the road, to watch.  

N and I have a safety phrase—Are you thirsty?—to negotiate handing over our passports to Israeli officials. It’s our understanding that the military doesn’t have the jurisdiction to demand our passports, but that the border police do. It’s unlikely they will call the police and more likely that we’ll play this game for a while before we either hand over our passports or they let everyone go.

We want to delay them for as long as possible but they’ve already detained the shepherds we’re with, so we’ll stick around anyway.

N pulls from her pocket a printed copy of the judicial decree allowing Palestinians to do their shepherding work and for international human rights observers to accompany them. The captain shrugs it away; he wants our passports.

I stand back to record a wide view, the blue sky so big and open, gripping the horizon.

“You are refusing to show us your passports? We’ll have to arrest you,” says the captain. Game over. We hand them our documents and now we are detained.

I’m already thirsty; I take a pull from my water bottle.

Two young women arrive, our Jewish Israeli comrades approaching quickly and speaking directly to the soldiers in Hebrew. Why are these people being detained? Show us your map and court order saying that Palestinians don’t have a right to graze their sheep here! 

Now they are detained along with us.

I am relieved they are here because they’ve dealt with the military much more than I have; it’s only my first week volunteering in the area.

Now we number twelve: the Palestinian shepherds, N, myself, the two Israeli comrades, and the four Palestinian boys who have joined us, sharing a bicycle and bouncing between us, laughing and playing games.

If we were a few yards off the road we could sit under the shade of olive trees but instead we stand in the open, passing water bottles as the sun pierces down. 

I went to Hebrew School from fourth grade until my Bat Mitzvah as part of my Jewish suburban American upbringing, but I’ve spent far more time studying Arabic in the last ten years. Just recently, in preparation for this trip, I thought to brush up on my Hebrew. In doing so I confirmed that I knew little more than basic numbers and words used in prayer, useful only to differentiate when someone is in fact speaking Hebrew.

Now, here in the region called Masafer Yatta, the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank, I am confronted with this painful juxtaposition: I associate these sounds with prayer yet I’m experiencing them as the language of an occupying force. Holy words I once felt drawn to, I now want distance from. I am but 50 kilometers from the bombs dropping in Gaza. My heart aches; my psyche twists.

My mind knows the difference between my Judaism and what Zionism is, and I know that it’s political Zionism itself that conflates the religion, the people, and the politics—making it difficult to untangle. I’ve been leading workshops on it for over ten years, so I’m well versed. But still the sight of a yarmulke on an armed settler charging towards me in a jeep, as happened the day before, adds to the rage lining my body.

I feel sweat collect in my armpits.

The shepherds’ herds are gone, I suddenly realize. I had been so focused on dealing with the soldiers I didn’t see someone come to take them home.

The minutes fold in on themselves. Moments of tension with the soldiers evaporate and the lulls drag on.

I fidget at the high collar of my white button-down shirt. The Israeli women we are with are wearing t-shirts and jeans while N and I are covered head-to-toe, with N even donning a surgical mask. I am too hot for that. I’m grateful to be covered up but still I crave ventilation.

My clothing is partly for the sun, partly for modesty, but also to keep my tattoos hidden. I figure all the photos the soldiers are taking of us are going into an AI recognition database and I want to keep what they have on me to a minimum.

We four supporters happen to be white women, but there are volunteers of all kinds coming to work alongside Palestinians here. As I notice this I chuckle; how very American of me to log our demographics. N is tall and skinny, with the hands of a violinist. Their short cropped hair is very gender queer in this environment, making me feel at home.

A white van pulls up; three Palestinian men wanting to go home or to work or wherever their destination. The captain turns them around; no one is allowed to pass while we are there being detained.

I don’t know how to describe the color of this land. It’s golden but not that yellow, it’s brown but not dark. Would it be called ochre? I’m sure there’s a word for it in Arabic.

The shepherds are sitting on a row of small boulders lining the road; I pull out my phone to make small talk. I want to ask one of them how many times they’ve been detained like this but I don’t trust my skills to get me that far, so I speak into a translation app.

This shepherd and his brother Mosab live on the edge of the village, closest to the encroaching Israeli settlement Ma’on. I’ve spent many hours with Mosab. His accounts are disturbing. Around ten years ago the settlers laid out poison in the fields where he grazes his sheep, killing many, along with wild animals who also ate the poison. Then last year, settlers broke all the legs of the sheep in his neighbor’s flock, killing them. This finally drove out his neighbor. One settler told Mosab, “If I see someone open the gate to your sheep, I will kill them all.”

They once stole his prized horse and returned it severely beaten.

And because it’s a small community, Mosab knows his torturers. The guy who stole and beat his horse is a butcher in the settlement.

This whole area of Masafer Yatta is only about twelve square miles and is comprised of twenty Palestinian villages. The region is considered Area C, which means that Israel has legal jurisdiction over it. Near the end of 1999, Masafer Yatta was declared a closed military zone and Israel began imposing eviction orders to all the families who had been there for generations. At the same time, Israeli settlements—open only to Jews and illegal under international law—began expanding in the closed area.

The residents of Masafer Yatta have banded together to fight the eviction in the courts, and to try to stave off settler expansion into their lands by refusing to leave. During this over-twenty-year-long court battle, the residents have been denied permission to build on their lands: no wells, no additions, no improvements. The Israeli military regularly issues demolition orders on people’s homes, livestock pens, solar panels—anything that is part of day-to-day living for this community’s way of life—while at the same time settlements with pools and playgrounds grow and grow.

I haven’t been here long but I’ve already watched the effects of this, all around me.

One soldier stands by the cab of the armored truck; he’s the tallest of the three. Another soldier guards us. The captain in his oversized army helmet, who appears in his early thirties, paces in a tight circle talking on his phone.

I watch the soldier who is watching us. His beard and mustache are soft wisps of youth concealing a child’s face. He smiles at the kids and rests his hands on top of his rifle to ask them their names in rough Arabic.

The kids yell back at him a chorus of “انت كلب! You dog!” then laugh and run in zigzags around us like they’re playing tag. The soldier laughs too, wanting in on the game. The smile on his face betrays that he doesn’t understand the language, that he doesn’t know these children are calling him a dog. Palestinian children here in the West Bank are detained, beaten, shot—and they watch as their family members are detained, beaten, shot. And this soldier, with his blooming beard and mustache, thinks that his smile is bigger than his weapon.

Does he not understand the violence he brings with him?

I feel my cheeks flush red. I watch the kids track circles in the dirt.

We sit.

We pace.

We dissolve into the heat, all of us.

The kids leave and return so quickly I hardly notice their absence. They’ve brought tea thick with sugar, the electrolytes our bodies need in this weather. They pass around small paper teacups to everyone except the three soldiers, then fill each one.

The children aren’t being detained right now; they can come and go. But they might as well stay here as anywhere else and besides, if something worse were to happen they could run home and tell others.

They are used to this life, far more than I am.

I gulp down the sweet tea, taking in its minty ether.

I’ve learned a lot about the occupation by watching the children. Their anger, their boredom.

One night, when I was in Dheisha camp in Bethlehem two weeks prior, I was startled by the tortured screams of a dog. I ran down to the street with my friend who lives there and stood behind her while she shamed the kids for beating a defenseless animal until they took off running.

The next day I watched a six-year-old yell out to no-one in particular, “انا فلسطيني I am Palestinian!” and make a gunshot sound then act dead, as if gotten shot. I see how children work through, how they process, in their minds and bodies, being occupied.

Slow genocide is what is happening here in the West Bank, on a different scale and timeline than in Gaza but no less horrible. If this slow choking could be captured in a photo it would have a content warning label.

I wipe sweat from my forehead.

I adjust the shade offered by my wide brimmed hat.

“Protective presence” is my stated role here. We internationals witness all the ways Israeli settlers, militia, military, and police abuse Palestinians and deny them their human rights.

The Palestinian activists on the ground in Masafer Yatta have a non-violent strategy of utilizing international presence for documenting these abuses which ultimately supports their legal battles. They believe, based on their experiences, that our presence will make the settlers, militia, military, police behave slightly better than if we weren’t here.

I position myself so that I can get a good photo of the young soldier’s rifle. I send the picture to a friend in the U.S. and ask him what make it is because I don’t recognize its beefy stock; I have a limited vocabulary when it comes to firearms.

The white van is back to try again. Again they are turned around.

One of the Israeli activists is out of water so I pass her mine. She’s about twenty-five—half my age—and has a dual US/Israeli citizenship; a crisp east coast accent gives her away. She’s been living here in the Masafer Yatta region doing protective presence for a few years, just like the friend she is with.

The four of us women are standing facing each other, arms crossed in boredom and kicking dirt and passing water. We’re telling our stories, getting to know each other.

This is my second time volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement. The first time was over twenty years ago, in 2002. When I signed up for that delegation, we trained to accompany shepherds in their fields just as I am doing now. But while I was on the airplane headed from New York to Tel Aviv, a Palestinian man named Abdel-Basset Odeh detonated himself in a Jewish nursing home in Netanya, killing himself and thirty Jewish elders during a Passover seder. When my plane landed, Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield was in full effect in the West bank: severe lockdown with a curfew imposed and tanks in the streets. We internationals were split into groups and stayed in one of three refugee camps in Bethlehem. I was assigned to al ‘Azza camp.

The camps regularly experienced raids and roundups of all boys and men over sixteen—some of whom were then disappeared—and they hoped our presence would deter the Israelis. Instead of accompanying shepherds in their fields I was witness to Israeli snipers shooting at people for leaving their homes.

We’ll never know if our presence had a direct effect, but there weren’t any military incursions into the camps while internationals were there. This is why I answered the call again, I believe that the people who live here know what they need for their own liberation.

I’m mid-sentence telling my story when I notice the young soldier has moved very close to us, listening. I quickly shut up.

My friend texts back “At a glance, I think it’s a Colt M4 carbine. Israeli infantry uses the Tavor x95 or TAR-21 rifles.”

A lot of their weapons are made in the US, a lot in Minnesota where I’m from. It’s good to note where the tools of occupation are made. Global North economies are built on the weapons industry, which profits from these human rights abuses—one reason why the supply keeps flowing. N is from Sweden where Aimpoint, the company that makes the rifle sights used by the Israeli military, is based. Since I’ve been here, I’ve heard two people describe what it’s like to realize a rifle’s laser sight is trained on you: it is oddly, and almost imperceptibly, warm.

The cheap plastic of my water bottle crinkles as I tip it up to my mouth. I know I’m dehydrated because I haven’t had to pee this whole time, and I am glad to not be dealing with that discomfort.

The family with whom I stayed last night, a few villages over, has been living on their piece of land for generations. They are the last family standing in their village since the illegal settlement of Avigail sprouted up. Settlers stole one of the family wells, the oldest, to use as a mikvah or ritual bath. The family has two smaller wells close to the house; settlers snuck in and poured gasoline to ruin them. The family somehow managed to clean them and now have security cameras set-up everywhere, donated by a legal support project.

I sat and watched with the family as settlers bathed in their stolen well and they could do nothing about it. My skin itched with shame as I watched the settlers dip in that water made holy. Other people’s drinking water, robbed in the desert.

I wonder what going back to my life in Minneapolis will be like. My pulse quickens as I wrestle with my Jewish faith after what I’ve seen being done in the name of Jews everywhere.

I don’t know yet that in the coming weeks I will go to shabbat services with my radical, queer, antizionist community—only to cry in the back. I will fast on Yom Kippur with the weight of over forty-four-thousand murdered on my chest, and I will rage when I hear friends are throwing a dance party in a sukkah—something I would normally love to attend—because how dare they have fun while Palestinians are being burned alive in tents?

The wrestling won’t end any time soon and I will know that, after over twenty years of witnessing occupation and its effects, it’s my complicated and critical relationship to being Jewish that gives my faith meaning. The very act of confronting injustice in the world is the most Jewish part of me.

I don’t ask the Israeli activists if they wrestle with being Jewish the way I do; it’s not a conversation I want to have right here, right now. The question would be both too intimate and too self-centered for the moment.

My two-liter bottle of water is almost empty and I have no idea how much longer we’ll be here, so I take a shallow sip. It’s warm and tastes slightly of plastic; I savor it a moment before swallowing. I scan the distant ridges, thinking about the contradictions of my presence on this landscape. I fill my lungs with dry, hot air and am thirsty again.