Protective presence in the West Bank

I traveled to Israel from Sept. 14–24 to participate in protective presence efforts.

In response to a call by Israeli human rights activists for international volunteers, I traveled to Israel from Sept. 14–24 to participate in protective presence efforts. Protective presence involves the placement of Israeli and international citizens in vulnerable Palestinian communities in order to deter and document illegal settler violence. Since the current Israeli government coalition came to power in December 2022, the West Bank has experienced a sharp increase in settler attacks. More than 50 Palestinian communities have been driven off their land according to Kerem Navot, an Israeli civil society organization; dozens more are on the verge. My field work was organized by Torat Tzedek, an Israeli human rights organization founded by Erie native Rabbi Arik Ascherman.

Settler efforts to expel a community often start with the establishment of an illegal outpost by “hilltop youth” in the vicinity of the target. This is followed by encroachment on Palestinian property to graze settler flocks. The harassment escalates with verbal abuse, property damage, beatings and occasional killings, until the community decides it is too dangerous to stay.

Over the course of my trip I alternated through four Bedouin communities in the West Bank: Mukhmas, East Taybeh, Duma and Jaba. The Bedouins are a distinct ethnic group making up about 10% of the Arab population in Israel and less than 2% of the population in the West Bank. Their cultural heritage is one of nomadic pastoralism, and many families continue to base their livelihoods on sheep and goat herding. Originally from the Negev region around Beersheba, some were displaced to the West Bank during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

On my first day in the field, I was stationed in Mukhmas with another American activist when we started to get urgent reports of a settler attack a few towns over in Taybeh. Neriya ben Pazi was reported to be there with 20 settlers throwing stones, beating residents and stealing sheep. Ben Pazi is a well-known instigator of the settlers’ ethnic cleansing strategy. He was put under sanction by the Biden administration, who described him as a “violent settler activist” responsible for having “expelled Palestinian shepherds from hundreds of acres of land”.

An elderly man named Yousef, the patriarch of a large shepherding family in East Taybeh, was severely beaten and his wife was also injured. One of his neighbors, Falah, was also attacked and robbed. (Falah was a refugee from Mughayyir al-Deir, a nearby Bedouin settlement whose expulsion was completed following a large settler attack only a few months earlier in May 2025.) The Palestinian ambulance that came to retrieve Yousef and the other injured was blocked by Israeli forces for about 90 minutes, during which time the settlers pelted it with rocks.

I spent a lot of time with Yousef’s family while he was hospitalized. This was a large family including the grandparents, adult sons, their wives, and their toddlers and young children. They lived in partly open shacks with intermittent electricity, water tanks and very rudimentary sanitation. Just down the hill were the animal pens for the sheep — empty by the time I got there after the theft. Despite the poverty, the children I saw were happy and playful, growing up with their extended family and cousins within arm’s reach. I brought a little squeaker ball to play with, and the kids were delighted. After a few tosses it bounced away, and the games shifted back to the usual entertainment, like filling empty paper tea cups with dirt.

We spent a lot of time in the immediate aftermath of the attack figuring out exactly what had happened. Some accounts said dozens of sheep were stolen; others said it was 250. The theft of the sheep was recorded on video; you could watch it on Facebook within a day of the events. The exact number of sheep wasn’t important for legal purposes, since there was no chance the Israeli authorities would investigate and retrieve them, even though the identity of the settlers who took them was widely known. A few months earlier, in May 2025, an Israeli activist I met in the field was beaten by settlers during the expulsion of the community of Mughayyir al-Deir. The police closed the investigation into the incident with no arrests, even though the activist provided the name of one attacker, photos of others and access to the location app on his stolen laptop.

My presence in Bedouin Taybeh, and that of the other activists, provided a small sense of security and support as the family dealt with the shock and economic devastation of the attack. Rav Arik and his Israeli and international volunteers helped the family interact with the police, file a theft report and continue to monitor settler trespass. Groups of at least two activists would spend daytime or overnight shifts at the compound to watch for any return by settlers and document their activities. The family always wanted us to stay the night, but we often didn’t have enough volunteers to be there 24/7, given all of the other communities facing the same risks that needed presence.

One of the most unexpected and gratifying aspects of the experience was the opportunity to build relationships with the other volunteers and activists. I was surprised to discover that volunteers with Torat Tzedek and other field organizations were motivated by a wide variety of political and religious backgrounds. There were Israeli citizens and internationals; secular, Reform and Modern Orthodox Jews as well as non-Jews; Zionists and anti-Zionists; one activist who had fled to Israel from persecution in their home country; and veteran Israeli activists — one of whom, I later discovered, had fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. The long, mostly boring hours we spent stationed in different communities left a lot of time for interesting, respectful conversations. I’m glad that volunteering with Torat Tzedek gave me an opportunity, in a very concrete and interpersonal way, to work for a vision of Israel that opposes the acts of violence and brutality that dominate the international media in these times. PJC

Rebecca Mayer is a data scientist based in Pittsburgh since graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.