Afternoon shift. The sun is racing toward sunset. Naif comes to say hello and chat. He’s very shaken by what happened last night, just a few minutes’ walk from his home. A family that originally lived in the village had moved out to the ‘Auja townlet down the road; they couldn’t take the endless harassment and violence. Ironically, it was this same family that was attacked last night by some 20 masked, armed settlers. They did what settlers do best:  turned the house upside down, smashed whatever was smashable, and viciously attacked the father, his wife, and several children. The father was covered in blood, with a gaping hole in his skull. He’s in hospital in Ramallah. The others are in hospital in Jericho.

Naif:  “I can’t understand it. I can’t understand how they are allowed to do this. No one is there to stop them. How can they do that to children? I have seen settlers throw boiling tea on a child’s face. What human being would do that?”

It’s the intense and endless hatred that drives them, I say.

Naif:  But who would want to live with that hatred inside himself?

I ask him how the young bride and groom are doing—some of you may remember that we were at the wedding last month. Naif says, “They are here in the village, they are fine, but what kind of life will they have?”

He must have been watching my face, I can’t hide the pain. Then he says, “You give us the breath of life. You are our souls. Because of you, we are still here, still alive.”

He means all of us, the activists sitting in the madafeh, and all the others.

Zak and Martin return from a three-hour shift in the field; they are ready to be relieved. T. and I take over. T. knows the drill, has a supremely noble heart and a sharp mind. At first we patrol the main road outside the village, near the dried-up aqueduct. Things seem quiet, but then we see the far-too-familiar adolescent settler who goes by the false name of David, or sometimes Shmuel—not his true name—with his herd of black goats and sheep. I’ll call him the settler. He seems to be heading home to the outpost. But no: why miss another chance to inflict terror?

He drives the herd into Abu Talib’s compound; he ties his donkey to a tree; he keeps the herd moving toward Abu Talib’s sheepfold. Abu Talib, his wife, sister, children, nephews hover in fear around their house; they have been through this dozens of times. T. runs, skipping over the rocks, toward the settler, camera turned on, ready to block him. I’m a few steps behind her (can’t run that fast any more). Then the weird choreography takes over. He comes face to face with her, pushes her, shoves his cellphone in her face, hard; she stands her ground. They whirl around, back and forth, over the rocks; she’s shouting “Al tiga bi, Uf mipoh”—Don’t touch me, Get out of here.” When he tires of this, he closes in on me, his face millimeters from mine. There is something physically disgusting about him, like all his settler cohort; but to me he seems lost, hollowed out, nothing inside but a bitter meanness. “So you like hurting innocent people,” I say, and he answers with what is perhaps the only word in his vocabulary: “Shtok! Shut up!”  He says it over and over, as we, too, perform the ritual dance, as we have many times in the past. What else can I do?  But the eerie thing is that his face is blank, a grimly rusty machine, and his eyes are dead.  I’ve never seen eyes so dead.  They are the scariest part of the whole episode. They haunt me now as I write.

His trainers have taught him only one thing—to inflict suffering, and to kill.

While all this is happening, for maybe half an hour, maybe closer to an hour, young Palestinian boys are playing soccer just a few yards away, as if they are by now so habituated to these invasions that they hardly notice them. But when the settler finally unties his donkey and leaves, Abu Talib comes out to talk to us. We know he has to live through this several times each day, also at night.

And the horror is that his children, now huddled around T., drawing in the paper notebook she has brought—a car, an airplane, a tree– are targeted, endangered, like the family that was assaulted last night in ‘Auja. By now the sun has set and it’s really cold and dark. Hot tea appears. The soccer players have gone home. The adults sit with us outside. We even manage to laugh a little. This is the stuff that deep friendship is made of. All of us know what will happen tomorrow and the day after and the next day, too, until the people of Ras al-‘Ain are driven away.

Text: David Shulman © 2025. Photographs: David Shulman © 2025, except where otherwise credited.

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