West Bank Palestinians Suffering from Widespread Violence, CW Activist Reports

Cassandra Dixon (Mary House of Hospitality, Wisconsin) has been visiting Palestine most years since 2006 for one to three months a year, helping to provide international accompaniment to Palestinian schoolchildren, farmers, and families. Most of the year, she works as a carpenter and provides hospitality to women and children visiting the federal prison at Oxford, Wisconsin. Given her long relationship with several West Bank Palestinian communities, I reached out to ask for an update on how her friends are doing. She responded with this letter.
—Jerry Windley-Daoust

Hello all,

Jerry has kindly asked me to share some updates about how things are for the people and communities that are dear to me in the West Bank.

I can only say that things are immeasurably worse for everyone in every possible way.  Worse than I could ever have imagined.  Every conversation  brings news of some fresh and previously unimaginable hell.

The communities where I have spent the most time over the last 15 years are in the south of the West Bank, in an area called Masafer Yatta.  It is comprised of small villages, whose resident’s primary way of making a living is through caring for herds of sheep and goats.  It is claimed by Israel as a firing zone, as is 18 percent of the West Bank, and even before October 7 all of the communities there were facing forced removal from their lands to make way for military training, and for new settlements and settler roads.

All of the families I know there have experienced violent settler attacks on their homes, villages, mosques, olive groves, grazing land, gardens, water wells, livestock, cars, and most devastatingly on  their own bodies and  on their families.  I know families who leave their homes each night with their children and blankets to sleep among the rocks and hills outside their villages because settlers have attacked them so often in their homes that it is impossible to sleep at night.   I know children who are unable to reach their schools with any consistency because of the threat of settler violence on the paths they walk to reach them.  

An elderly widow and her children, who own close to nothing and are largely dependent on neighbors to help them survive, have been repeatedly attacked inside their cave home.  Settlers have stolen the plates of food from in front of them, physically hurt them, and stolen the sheep and goats that represent all they own on earth.  All she owns is dependent on the land, and the settlers clearly intend to drive her from it,

A young man, the cousin of dear friends, was shot in the stomach at close range by settlers who invaded his village as Friday prayers were ending.  He was shot just yards from the mosque as he was leaving, fought for his life for months, and is still unable to work.  

A dear friend has been attacked repeatedly while driving, but since he is the sole source of transportation for his village he has little choice but to risk his safety over and over — to get children to school, elderly people to and from the hospital, milk and cheese to buyers and food and animal feed to the families of his village.  

And as if the threat of settler attack were not enough, new road closures and checkpoints have made an already completely bizarre driving situation even worse.  A 15-mile trip to buy groceries can easily turn into a full day of driving in order to go around one obstacle after another, and can result in an arbitrary arrest at any moment.  

Settlers throughout Masafer Yatta, and in fact throughout the West Bank, are making good use of the assault on Gaza.  They have stolen huge areas of Palestinian grazing land by occupying it with herds of sheep and goats that have destroyed the winter crops that should now be feeding the sheep of the rightful owners.  Their presence is a persistent and continuing threat of violence, and the appeals of landowners to police to intervene and prevent the thefts and violence have gone unanswerd.    The settlers are now nearly indistinguishable from the army — often appearing dressed in military uniforms and carrying military weapons given to them by the state of Israel.  In one recent attack on one of the villages the army arrived in a helicopter and were quickly joined by settlers from a nearby illegal outpost who proceeded to completely ransack the village, tearing down walls, spilling the contents of homes out onto the ground, slaughtering animals and terrifying all the residents. 

Settler land theft has had such an impact on grazing that many families are being forced to sell sheep and goats in order to buy feed for the rest of their animals – at a time of year when those animals should be consuming the crops that were planted for them ini the preceding months. 

The incidence of arbitrary arrest and detention of shepherds has also risen greatly, making every workday a potential nightmare, and Army incursions have made it impossible to rest at night.  Young men have been kidnapped from their homes, cars and fields by settlers who turn them over to soldiers, or by the soldiers themselves.  Friends have texted me heartbreaking photos of their injuries, and descriptions of the mental distress of relatives who were beaten and humiliated, threatened by dogs, held blindfolded, urinated on by soldiers and told that their families would be arrested.    Finally freed for huge sums of money in “bail” at great cost to their families they’ve needed hospitalization for broken arms, smashed hands, head wounds and internal injuries from beatings.  Some have been dumped by soldiers on settler roads at night without phones or money or shoes.  None of them will ever be whole or feel safe again.  

All of this terror is aimed at driving people from their land, and in fact multiple communities have been forced to leave their lands.  One village in which I spent time only a year ago is now completely gone – its residents driven off their land by repeated violent night raids, and endless harassment by settlers who chased their sheep day after day.  The removal of villages by terror is happening throughout the West Bank.  

The great majority of young men in these villages are now unable to work:  road closures, new settler outposts and new army checkpoints have made it impossible to drive in and out of their villages, and many of the jobs that they had are gone now because all businesses are also facing the same impossible conditions.  And for all of the Palestinians who were working in 48, their jobs ended with no warning.  At the same time the cost of food and basic necessities is rising so fast that no one has any idea how they will continue to buy what their families need.  I know men in their 20’s who had just begun to dream of marrying and starting families, only to find that they have no way to make a living, or care for their parents or their children.

Friends of mine lost an entire extensive and well-established garden that once supplied many families with food and the promise of olive and pomegranate trees after settlers used heavy earth moving equipment to destroy it while soldiers looked on.  Several of the villages have lost access to water after the roads, under which ran the pipes that supplied their villages were destroyed by bulldozers and their water cisterns wrecked and broken by settlers.  Settlers have stolen donkeys and sheep and goats, thousands of shekels and personal possessions and most devastatingly all sense of safety.  Soldiers have established a new military base on land stolen from the family and incursions into the village are constant.  All of the men in the family have been arrested and detained multiple times.

Friends in the city of Al Khalil/Hebron are equally devastated.  My friend Laila, who runs a shop selling embroidery that should be supporting a dozen women, has been unable to re-open the shop since she fled the city in October.  She and an elderly shopkeeper spent hours and hours dodging settlers who were shooting at anyone who moved – finally managing to get to the edge of the city and finding someone to help them.  Settlers destroyed the car of the elderly man, who has sold sweets in the old city of Hebron for as long as I can remember, and he also has been unable to re-open his shop.  These are people who were the primary breadwinners of their families.  My friend Laila is the main support of a household of 16 people, most of them children.  Both of her sons are now unable to reach their jobs, and the entire family is surviving on the embroidery that Laila manages to ship here for sale in the US.  When I talk with her I can sometimes hear the F-16s and F-35’s over her house on their way to Gaza, about 11 miles away.  The doors in her house shake in their frames and she can hear the bombing.  None of her children or grandchildren are sleeping, and all of them are hungry all the time. She tells me she feels her mind will explode from the stress.  Dozens of people have been rounded up and kidnapped by soldiers from her village, and she is desperately afraid for her sons.

And throughout all of this, everyone I know there is grieving Gaza.

So really, I don’t know what to tell you.  I could talk for hours and hours about the hell that people I love are living in, but it changes nothing.  This is ethnic cleansing and genocide, minute by minute, day by day, happening in our name, with our support, in real time.  I have no idea why we are not more outraged.