“The fate of thousands of Palestinian shepherds and farmers on the West Bank looks grim,” writes David Shulman in the Review’s Holiday Issue. “Neither the government nor the army has done anything to stop rampaging Israeli settlers who are hell-bent on driving these people…off their lands.” Since the Hamas murders of October 7, heavily armed Israeli settlers have carried out hundreds of attacks—“beating people; breaking anything breakable; stealing; torching cars and homes; destroying food, water tanks, and solar panels; and shooting in the air—and sometimes not in the air”—against Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley, often with the tacit or explicit support of the Israeli army and police. With no legal recourse available, and food running low because “soldiers and settlers have blocked the access roads to nearly all the villages,” Palestinian families in the West Bank are being forced out of their homes en masse. “We are seeing the beginning of a second Nakba, accelerating day by day,” Shulman warns.

A poet, Indologist, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and peace activist who in 2000 cofounded the Israeli–Palestinian human rights group Ta‘ayush, Shulman has been a contributor to the Review since 2009. Below, alongside his newest essay, we have collected a selection of his writing from our archives.

David Shulman
A Bitter Season in the West Bank

The war in Gaza has provided Israeli settlers fresh opportunity and impunity. I see entire villages fleeing in panic.

Heading Toward a Second Nakba

“It is a regime of state terror whose raison d’être is the theft of Palestinian land and, whenever possible, the expulsion of its Palestinian owners. I have seen this system in operation over the course of the past twenty-odd years.”

The Bedouins of al-Khan al-Ahmar Halt the Bulldozers of Israel

“Since Netanyahu’s bulldozers tend to come at dawn, some of us have slept at al-Khan al-Ahmar, just in case. None of us thought we could prevent the demolitions with our bodies, but all of us knew that, whatever the risk, this crime had to be documented and witnessed for the world.”

A Hero in His Own Words

“It is one thing to say that the Jews needed, and probably still need, a state, and that the history of the first half of the twentieth century proved this theorem.… It is another thing to claim that the Zionist enterprise necessarily involved the subjugation, disenfranchisement, and potential expulsion of that other people still living on their lands to the west of the Jordan River. Shimon Peres, let it be said, did not share the latter view. But he lived inside, indeed in some sense embodied, the romantic tale of Jewish rebirth, including some of the darker aspects of that tale.”

Decency Without Hope

In Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad’s powerful film Omar, innocence and complicity are unnervingly intertwined in the mind of a person struggling to maintain dignity in conditions where there is no longer any hope.

Hope in Hebron

“On March 16, I joined some twenty-five children…who had gathered with Palestinian peace activists in a house in Hebron to write letters to President Obama on the eve of his visit to Jerusalem. March 16 was the start of the third Selma-to-Montgomery march, led by Martin Luther King, in 1965, a defining moment in the history of the American civil rights movement, and the children—Palestinians who were mostly from the H2 area of Hebron under direct Israeli military control—had come to learn about Martin Luther King and nonviolent resistance.”

‘And No One Wants to Know’: Israeli Soldiers on the Occupation

“Particularly ominous is the far-reaching interpenetration of the army units and the Israeli settlers who, in report after report, are said to give the soldiers their orders. The editors of Occupation in the Territories describe the settlers’ special status: they are ‘not merely Israeli citizens entitled to protection by the Israeli army and rule of law: in practice they are also partners in the military rule of the Palestinians.’ As a soldier says in one of the interviews, ‘You don’t want to get into a confrontation with a Jewish settlement. They are the people that are closest to you, they are like your operations branch officer, that’s how it works.’”

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