My arrival was marked by an unsettling introduction to the prevailing sentiment. The young man hired to escort me through airport customs, anticipating potential scrutiny from Israeli border agents, greeted me with a chilling vision. “Rachel, you are going to love it here,” he assured me, his Slavic accent thick. “We are going to be 80 percent very soon. We will be 80 and they will be only 20 percent. That is the plan and you will love it here.” “We,” he clarified, meant Jews. “They” were Palestinians. His words painted a disturbing picture, one where ethnic cleansing was presented with the casual optimism of a vacation brochure promising idyllic beaches. During the short car ride within the airport, he repeated this 80/20 ratio aspiration half a dozen times, his enthusiasm unwavering. When I inquired about his origins, he simply stated, “Kosovo,” and that he had left in 1999. The context was clear. The “here” he envisioned as welcoming was, in reality, a war zone, albeit one where the mechanics of conflict were largely hidden from the everyday lives of Israelis, thanks to the strength of the IDF. His buoyant numbers reflected the success of this insulation.
The following morning, I joined my delegation – a group of seven writers from across the globe – to meet with Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of Breaking the Silence (BtS). Shaul provided background on himself and the organization, which gathers and publishes testimonies from former IDF soldiers. BtS aims to expose the reality of Israel’s fifty-year military occupation of the West Bank to the Israeli public. While I had encountered criticism from US-based activist circles who viewed BtS as potentially sanitizing the image of the Israeli military by focusing on “good soldiers” versus “bad,” Shaul preemptively addressed this. He emphasized that BtS’s mission was “not about good soldiers versus bad. We want to end the occupation, period.”
BtS’s analysis revealed a stark reality: the IDF’s objective is to instill in every Palestinian – man, woman, and child – a constant feeling of being hunted. A former soldier’s testimony underscored this point: “I never met a Palestinian growing up,” he confessed. “We don’t learn Arabic in Israeli schools. We don’t learn anything about Palestinian culture or history. For many of us, the first time you engage with a Palestinian is through your rifle scope.” Over the ensuing week, we listened to accounts from former soldiers detailing disturbing practices: tear gas canisters thrown at a 4-year-old eating watermelon (deemed “conducting surveillance”); homes raided and occupied purely for training exercises; the killing of a man smoking on his balcony by a sniper (identified, without intelligence, as a possible scout); a man blindfolded, handcuffed, and abandoned miles from his village (for alleged retribution orchestrated by a Shin Bet officer). These were presented not as isolated incidents, but as standard operating procedures. The sniper we spoke with was explicit about having killed innocent individuals, and his current life was dedicated to grappling with the profound personal, religious, and national implications of his actions.
The deeper one delves into these soldiers’ experiences, the more profound their existential crisis becomes apparent. Shaul, a former IDF commander during the Second Intifada, highlighted that the occupation’s tactics are rooted in Israel’s own policies from 1948 to 1966. This historical continuity blurs the line between nation-building and expansion, even for those whose Zionist identity is deeply ingrained. These soldiers often find themselves isolated. A robust political left critical of the occupation, a natural ally for BtS, is virtually absent in Israel. Even the Labor party, historically considered left-Zionist, presided over significant losses of Palestinian land and restrictions on movement during its periods in power.
Later that morning, Palestinian scholar Bashir Bashir offered a critical perspective: “The settlement project is not the sinful baby of the right.” He was in conversation with his colleague Hillel Cohen, whose nuanced historical analyses of Zionism present complex, often contradictory, narratives from both Jewish and Palestinian perspectives, defying simplistic moral judgments. Yet, even Cohen, who stated, “I like to hear Bashir talk because it reminds me how deep my Zionism is,” acknowledged the complexities. He summarized the founding of Israel in 1948 as a project of saving Jewish lives. However, he also pointed out that if US immigration laws hadn’t changed in 1924, many Jews might have chosen America, their preferred destination, instead. In his work on the 1929 riots at the Wailing Wall, Cohen distinguishes between Zionists and non-Zionists in pre-state Israel. When questioned about this, he explained, “Non-Zionist Jews were so impressed by the sophistication of Zionism, they were basically overpowered. They joined history, became Zionists.” Bashir then introduced the concept of binationalism, advocating for a shared land in his writings. He suggested Palestinians should consider the trauma of the Holocaust, and Jews should similarly confront the Nakba. Despite potential jetlag clouding my judgment, Bashir’s proposal for restorative justice moved me to tears. Palestinians bore no responsibility for the Holocaust, while Israelis were directly responsible for the Nakba.
Before going there myself, I had heard this phrase, open-air prison, and figured it was not literally a prison.
In the afternoon, our tour took us to Silwan, where settler schoolchildren are transported in armored vans – private security provided by Israel’s housing ministry. These vans passed the construction site of the controversial “City of David” archaeological dig, its fencing adorned with photomurals of fair-skinned children playing joyfully, marketing a future tourist destination seemingly devoid of Palestinians. We entered Palestinian homes fractured by deep cracks, sunlight piercing through, and met Jawad Siyam, a community organizer facing the threat of losing his home. The “City of David” excavations had rendered these houses uninhabitable, and now they were slated for demolition by the Israeli government, the construction project conveniently providing bureaucratic justification for clearing the area. The 80/20 ratio goal from my airport escort resurfaced in my mind. We visited the remnants of the community center Jawad Siyam founded in 2007, now just a foundation, bulldozed by the IDF under a vague “cleaning order.” Adjacent to this stood a settler home, a large flag proclaiming: “I’m that Jew.” Two armed private security guards patrolled the driveway of the house.
The next day, we journeyed to Nabi Saleh, a small village in the central West Bank. We met the Tamimi family, central figures in weekly protests against settlers seizing the village’s natural spring, vital for irrigation. The Israeli military response to these protests included tear gas, sound cannons, “skunk water” sprayed into Palestinian homes, and live ammunition. The Tamimi family, icons of international solidarity, are known for their bravery, intellectualism, philosophical nonviolence, and commitment to women’s emancipation. Ahed Tamimi, who gained prominence at age 11 for videos of her confronting IDF soldiers arresting her mother, with her long blond braids, bore a striking resemblance to a character from The Sound of Music. Tragically, several members of the extended family have been killed by Israeli soldiers.
On the bus from Nabi Saleh to Ramallah, a debate ensued regarding the comparison of the West Bank occupation to apartheid. Yehuda Shaul of BtS recounted escorting Barbara Hogan, a former ANC member and South African political prisoner, through the occupied territories. Hogan concluded that apartheid was an insufficient comparison, finding the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank far more extreme than her experiences in apartheid South Africa. Regardless of the label, the reality of the occupation becomes undeniably clear upon witnessing it firsthand. The idea of a democracy maintaining an open-air prison for 2.7 million people becomes profoundly disturbing. Before this trip, the term “open-air prison” seemed metaphorical. However, everywhere I looked – guard towers, concrete barriers, razor wire – it was a literal open-air prison. The stark contrast was the settlements, with their manicured Beverly Hills-style landscaping, delicate flowers blooming, and guard towers relegated to the distant periphery.
In Ramallah, we met Sam Bahour, a Palestinian businessman with American citizenship and a Tel Aviv University degree. Since the Oslo Accords in 1995, his West Bank residency stamp prevents him from visiting his alma mater, severely restricting his movement within Israel. After a walking tour with Sam, we met Fadi Quran, who as a child, in protest, placed bags of rocks along roads to resemble IEDs. He later earned a scholarship to Stanford University. At Stanford, seeking to understand his perceived “ontological enemy,” he visited the campus Hillel, falsely claiming to be an Iraqi Jew. He was welcomed warmly and educated about pogroms and the Holocaust, experiences he found deeply sorrowful. He gained a profound understanding of how trauma, fear, pride, and indoctrination could affect individuals on both sides of the conflict. Like many young Palestinians I met, Fadi expressed disillusionment with political leaders, nationalism, and religion as solutions. When asked about the Palestinian Authority, he simply replied, “I was imprisoned by them last week.”
Our itinerary included a visit to Yasser Arafat’s tomb, guarded by stoic PA officers. Before reaching the tomb, we toured the Mahmoud Darwish museum, where a filmed interview with the poet played. Darwish discussed his vow of celibacy, a detail that overshadowed his poetic legacy for the writers in our group.
Dinner that evening was with author and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh and his wife, Penny Johnson. Raja spoke of the 2002 siege of Ramallah, their home. I had read his book, When the Birds Stopped Singing, detailing the siege. Yehuda Shaul of BtS, seated next to me, remarked to Raja, “I was a company sergeant stationed there in 2002, occupying the homes of Palestinians.” Shaul’s need to confess, his commitment to honesty, was poignant. Uncomfortably positioned between occupier and occupied, I attempted to lighten the mood with a clumsy joke: “Yehuda, I hope you weren’t the soldier inside Raja’s brother’s house.” The joke fell flat.
The morning after Ramallah, I awoke at 4 AM to visit Qalandia checkpoint, the primary entry point to Jerusalem for northern West Bank residents. Arriving at 5 AM in the cold darkness, I found Hanna Barag, an octogenarian activist, already present for an hour, making calls to assist men denied entry. A bureaucratic error had invalidated thousands of work permits. By 4 AM each day, thousands of men queue at Qalandia to reach their Jerusalem construction jobs by 7 AM. The atmosphere is tense, chaotic, and overwhelmingly male. Fights are a daily occurrence, I was told. The minimum age for passage was 23, subject to change. Men also needed to be married, have children, possess proof of Israeli employment, and not be blacklisted. Hanna Barag estimated 300,000-400,000 West Bank men were blacklisted.
Men waited for hours, packed into narrow, caged lanes resembling cattle chutes. Low wire mesh overhead forced taller individuals to stoop. Men declined entry, despite presenting magnetic cards, West Bank IDs, work permits, and fingerprints, had to push back through the congested lanes. Job loss was a likely consequence of even one day’s absence. Hanna explained another common practice: Israeli employers could simply call the Civil Administration (a military unit) and cancel a worker’s permit, avoiding any owed wages. “How do you find a new employer when you have no freedom of movement?” Hanna asked rhetorically. Bewildered, I watched the men patiently await the next turnstile opening. When the turnstiles clicked, soldiers shouted “Wahad, wahad!” – one by one – as men surged forward. The turnstiles slammed shut, and the next group waited in their cages. These grueling jobs paid an average of 60 shekels ($16 USD) per day. Challenging the authorities at the checkpoint resulted in permanent blacklisting. Illegal passage meant family work permits were revoked.
At 6 AM, the “humanitarian” checkpoint opened for women. A couple appeared, the woman carrying a masked man who appeared terminally ill. An elegantly dressed woman passed, introducing herself as a Palestinian engineer with a PhD, commuting to her Jerusalem firm.
Hanna Barag’s checkpoint vigil began in 2001 with Israeli women activists advocating for Palestinian men’s rights. “At first,” she said, “we just stood there, as witnesses, but of course it is not enough…so I decided to use my contacts to try to help people.” Her contacts stemmed from her time as secretary to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, from 1958 to 1965. I asked if she could have imagined Qalandia, this Israel. “No,” she replied. “But I could not have imagined 1967, either. This can’t be sustained. It can’t go on forever. Change will come from outside. And however it happens,” she predicted, “it will come in a vroom. All at once.” Checkpoint rush hour ended at 8:30 AM, and I departed for the next stop on this tour of suffering.
“Imagine if the US State Department decided to put 400,000 American citizens in Afghanistan, to live, and told the US military to guarantee their safety,” Gerard Horton of Military Court Watch explained as we approached Ofer, the military prison and court for West Bank residents. “That’s the analogy to the security situation for Jewish settlers that the IDF has been assigned to manage.”
One management tactic is mass arrests, including children. Settler killings by Palestinians are rare due to collective punishment and intimidation. After fifty years, Israel has a vast network of informants, recruited through bribery and blackmail. Eroded trust within Palestinian communities further suppresses resistance. IDF raids target anyone, shops are shut down, and villages are left to determine innocence. Night raids are particularly effective for intimidation. Soldiers ram doors open if not opened quickly, or increasingly, torch doors silently. The fear of soldiers entering homes in the night is a potent tool of control.
Detainees, sometimes children, are zip-tied and blindfolded as standard procedure, placed on the metal floor of IDF vehicles and held in shipping containers until interrogation centers open at 8 AM. Soldiers wait elsewhere, smoking and drinking coffee. By interrogation, a child may have endured ten hours blindfolded, hungry, thirsty, sleep-deprived, and in pain, with parents unaware of their whereabouts. Interrogators, speaking Arabic, ask not “Did you throw stones?” but “Why did you throw stones?” Initially, children often deny wrongdoing. Soldiers then present photos of their homes and families, threatening ruin if they don’t confess. Eventually, children confess to any stone-related incident, real or imagined. Confession documents are in Hebrew, signed by the child, often without knowledge of their right to silence or legal representation. “Most children do not carry the name of a lawyer in their pajamas,” Horton noted.
After confession, children are imprisoned without bail. Lawyers from NGOs, the only legal aid available, pressure guilty pleas, as 99.47% of trials result in conviction. An anecdote illustrated the rarity of acquittals: the translator lacked an Arabic word for “acquitted.” Children emerge from this process angry and disillusioned, realizing truth and trust are meaningless.
Gerard Horton’s briefing preceded our entry into Ofer military court, reeking of sewage from the surrounding open canal. A trial concerned a Bedouin farmer whose tractor strayed onto a temporarily restricted road. The IDF impounded and dismantled his tractor. He sought its return but faced fines for the road infraction. The proceedings were entirely in Hebrew, without translation.
The kid said to the soldier, “What are you gonna do, detain me like I’m an Arab?” The soldier let him go.
The day continued with a tour of the 25-foot separation wall around East Jerusalem, led by architect Alon Cohen-Lifshitz. This wall cost $2 million USD per kilometer, built with materials from quarries in occupied Area C, meant for Palestinian transfer under Oslo. Ali Ayyad, a retired hotel worker from Abu Dis, bisected by the wall in 2004, joined our tour. His family’s Cliff Hotel, strategically located, was seized by the military, stripped of its roof, and then returned.
“Like, I marry a wife, and they take her, and then give me back the legs of the wife,” Ali Ayyad joked. He recounted the military’s “payment” offer: “They say, we will give you a ring as payment. But in order to give it to you, we need to cut off your hand. Then, we will put your hand in a freezer for one hundred years. If you ask, where is my ring, they say: We are still preparing the ring.” His family lived on the other side of the wall. Visiting them, a former one-minute walk, now cost an hour and $20 in taxi fare. Could he call to them? “Yes,” he said, “from the roof we can shout hello.”
“I want to live in peace,” Ayyad pleaded. “I want to take my family to Tiberius to swim in the sea…Instead, no one has pleasure. We are afraid and the Israelis are afraid. We are all the sons of Abraham. We have only one God. There is no paradise. This place is paradise, but we are wasting it…So what is the point. We all need peace.”
Hebron, the next day, with its Palestinian-exclusion zones and the memorial to Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians in 1994, is often portrayed as an extremist outlier. However, the property acquisition and Palestinian displacement in Hebron mirror practices across the West Bank where settlements exist or are planned. Settlers are key agents of expansion and fragmentation, undermining a two-state solution. Settler aggression was palpable, from jeering from 4x4s to harassment by settler children echoing parental hostility. When one child threatened Yehuda Shaul, an Israeli soldier intervened. The child retorted, “What are you gonna do, detain me like I’m an Arab?” The soldier relented.
After a week, I pursued my own plan: Shuafat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem. This one square kilometer camp, enclosed by the separation wall, is estimated to house 85,000 people. Technically part of Israel, the PA is barred, and Israelis only enter for raids. Yet, taxes are collected from residents, Jerusalem residents with Jerusalem residency. Infrastructure is nonexistent – few roads, no legal utilities, no police, no security, no laws. Despite garbage fires and dead cats, I felt safe during my weekend there. Unforeseen was the murder of my charismatic host, Baha Nababta, an organizer and volunteer emergency coordinator, shot dead in broad daylight fourteen days later while paving a road with volunteers.
Leaving Shuafat Camp, I felt strangely hopeful, inspired by Baha and his family’s warmth. Unlike the camp residents, I could simply leave. I walked through the checkpoint and returned to Sheikh Jarrah.
Having seen the Dead Sea from the camp roof, I asked BtS members if someone could take me. A young BtS testifier from a religious family volunteered. At the Dead Sea, facing Jordan, we drank wine and floated. She described feeling her religion stolen and used for subjugation, yet it remained her understanding of goodness. Questioning Zionism, for her, was destabilizing.
We covered ourselves in mud and lay in the sun. She said I reminded her of Sarah Silverman, perhaps for my irreverence, a freedom she lacked as a repentant soldier. Her testimony forced her into hiding, endangering her family, and making her unemployable in Israel. We washed off the mud and returned to the hotel.
The next morning, I departed, carrying the weight of what I had witnessed and the urgent need for understanding the ongoing reality of the occupation.
