A destroyed chicked coop on Palestinian land, where settlers recently planted trees and erected an Israeli flag, Umm al-Khair, Hebron, March 8, 2025. All photographs from the West Bank by Adam Rouhana for Harper’s Magazine © The artist
Six years had passed since I had last been to the West Bank, and ten years since I had lived there. A lot had changed in my absence. Ramallah had once felt like a small town. When I returned last November, it was, without doubt, a city. Whole neighborhoods had materialized, and the streets seemed denser, packed with more and flashier shops offering varieties of high-end Western consumer goods that would have once been unobtainable: cappuccinos and croissants, designer sunglasses, North Face jackets and Timberland boots. There was a fancy new pastry shop called Crumbs, and the joke was almost too obvious: this is what the Palestinian elite was settling for.
For the first few days, I found myself disoriented. The map I held in my memory no longer matched the streets around me. It wasn’t that so much was new, but that I did not know what was gone. Old houses had surely been demolished, and empty lots filled in to make way for new construction. That was clear. But I did not remember what had been there before, and this destabilized everything.
I had moved to the West Bank during the brief season—we could not have known how brief—in which it was possible to believe that even the cruelest regimes might be toppled by people filling the streets and squares and, without weapons or the need for violence, demanding a life of dignity. That moment had passed by the time I left, but the movement limped on, growing closer to death while other approaches gained momentum: spates of solitary stabbings and car rammings. In 2015, the year after Israel’s previous war on Gaza, rammings increased by a factor of six. Over the next seven years, settler assaults on Palestinians jumped ninefold. The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers began to rise dramatically in 2021, and in the years leading up to the October 7, 2023, attacks, armed groups of Palestinians started to reappear in the cities of the northern West Bank.
Elsewhere the months rolled by, but whenever I returned or checked in with friends, Palestine seemed stuck in a rut: years of passivity and despair followed by giddy weeks of chaos in which it felt like everything might change, until despair settled over everything again. The repetition was hard to bear. People I had come to care about gradually disappeared. Those who could left. Others died or went to prison or suffered some slow internal death invisible to those who didn’t know them. Their absences haunt this story, but they also add up to a different kind of absence: the missing voices of people who have devoted their lives, at great cost, to speaking out, and who now find themselves too afraid to speak.
IDF soldiers guard a bus stop outside Huwara, October 16, 2024
It is painful to consider the defeat that this entails. I am talking about people, some of whom I count as friends, who for years staked the entirety of their existence on refusing to be quiet. People who—for now, at least—have decided to accept silence as their fate. I cannot mention their names or tell their stories without endangering them. From a distance, the sound of people being broken is all but inaudible, but it was the loudest thing I could hear in the West Bank, louder than the wind or the traffic at checkpoints, louder than the hum of drones above the refugee camps or the buzz of jets on their way to and from bombing Gaza and, while I was there, Lebanon too.
The autumn rains had not arrived on schedule. The hills out the taxi window were bare, the earth a brownish gray as we crawled along. I was making my way to the Aida refugee camp, on the edge of Bethlehem, a couple of days after I arrived in Ramallah. Few of the activists I knew who had spent time in Israeli prisons since October 7 were willing to speak on the record, but Munther Amira said he didn’t mind. I had met him just once before and knew him only as a familiar presence, calm when no one else was, at demonstrations around the West Bank. Now fifty-four years old, bearish and bearded, he met me in the shadow of the twenty-six-foot-high concrete wall that severs Aida, and all of Bethlehem, from Jerusalem.
We sat in plastic chairs in a sunny spot in the courtyard of his home. His grandson toddled over, climbed into his lap, accepted a kiss with a screech of delight, and scooted off again. Like many activists of his generation, Amira was jailed as a teenager during the First Intifada. When Israel began building the wall in the early Aughts, during the Second Intifada, he and his neighbors in Aida began holding protests and inviting foreign activists to join the demonstrations. “For our protection,” he explained. They were following a model set by villages farther north that also fell in the path of the wall, which was cutting them off from their fields, orchards, and neighbors. While others responded to Israeli assaults with suicide bombs or armed attacks, the “popular resistance”—as it is known among Palestinians—took hold as an alternative. The movement, as Amira understood it, wasn’t just about demonstrating or throwing stones at the soldiers’ jeeps, but about organizing, creating a fabric of mutual assistance, building support networks that allowed Palestinian life to persist despite the brutality of the occupation. “We announced ourselves,” Amira said, “as a nonviolent movement.”
Some version of what has come to be called nonviolent resistance dates back more than a century, but the distinction between armed and unarmed struggle became increasingly significant—to Westerners, at least—as Israel positioned itself as an ally in the U.S. war on terror. The idea is simple: to stand together, to refuse the fate chosen for you by your oppressor, and with your courage inspire others to do the same. That was the basis for mass mobilization during the uprising of 1936, throughout the First Intifada in the late Eighties and early Nineties, and in the early weeks of the next one, in the fall of 2000. As the Second Intifada dragged into its third year and the losses piled up, nonviolent tactics regained their appeal.
An abandoned military outpost with graffiti, Sa‘ir, Hebron, March 8, 2025
Palestinians were clearly outgunned, but nonviolent protest could, theoretically at least, turn this asymmetry to their advantage. Images of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators being tear-gassed, shot, and otherwise brutalized spread around the globe. Nonviolent resistance made the violence of the occupation visible. If the world had a conscience, it would pressure Israel from without. Israel’s dependence on billions of dollars of military assistance from the United States and Europe made it uniquely vulnerable. That was the gamble, anyway.
Aida would remain a locus of nonviolent resistance for the next two decades. The camp’s residents opened their doors to foreign activists to get the word out to the rest of the world. They had stories to tell: military assaults on young people living in the camp were routine. In 2017, researchers deemed Aida the most heavily tear-gassed community on the planet. But since October 7, Amira said, not a single demonstration had taken place there. Almost immediately, Israeli forces began arresting Palestinian activists.
That December, Israeli soldiers came looking for Amira. They went first to his mother’s, where they beat his brother unconscious. Eventually they found the right house. They broke through the door, handcuffed Amira and his two sons, and began hitting him in the legs with their rifles. Later they put him in the trunk of a car and took him to one prison and then another, where the beatings would continue, on and off, for almost three months.
Amira was never formally charged. His crime, as he understood it, was “incitement”: he had posted a few lines by the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani on Facebook. (“O mad people of Gaza,” Qabbani wrote. “The age of political reason / Has long departed / So teach us madness.”) He was held under “administrative detention,” a long-standing Israeli practice that allows the authorities to detain Palestinians without trial or the possibility of appeal. Since October 7, physical and sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners has effectively become systematic. An August report by the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem concluded that since October 2023 the Israeli prison system had come to function, for Palestinians, as a “network of torture camps.” Dozens have died in custody.
The conditions Amira encountered in prison were far worse than anything he had experienced before. Windowpanes had been removed, and the cells were frigid and overcrowded. Beatings, he said, were constant and routine. At one point, he recalled, guards piled prisoners on top of one another. One guard “started passing a long stick along my body till he reached between my legs, and then he started playing with it, and then he hit me: boom!” The stick had come within millimeters, he said, of crushing his testicles. The cell adjoining Amira’s held prisoners from Gaza, whose torture was unending. He could hear them screaming through the walls. One day he caught himself pleading with a bird that settled on a window ledge, begging it “not to leave, to stay and speak to me.” The bird flew away. Rations were nearly inedible, and so meager that he lost more than seventy pounds. He began to pee blood. “I was very close to being dead,” he said. After ten and a half weeks, he was released. He never learned why.
Other activists Amira and I both knew, strong people who had spent years in prison in the past, were broken by their most recent detentions. Friends of his were staying home, Amira said, avoiding the roads and Israeli checkpoints. They told him he was crazy to stay active and risk encountering soldiers, but Amira couldn’t bear the alternative. He didn’t want to spend his life in hiding.
Top: An olive tree, Burqa, Ramallah, October 2, 2024
Bottom: Olives being harvested, Bethlehem, October 16, 2024
Early the next morning, Amira picked me up in Ramallah. We were heading to the village of Burin, about thirty miles to the north, to help with the olive harvest. He seemed tense, and barely spoke until we reached a corridor of Highway 60 dense with Israeli settlements. As we drove, Amira ticked off the losses. “Here,” he said as we passed Sinjil, “they want to build a wall around this village.” The Israelis were confiscating land to establish “buffer zones” and insulate their settlements from the Palestinians around them, cutting the age-old fabric of towns and villages into a patchwork of isolated ghettos. “Here,” he said, as we passed Turmus Ayya, settlers “burned more than twenty houses and killed a young man.” But here, Amira added, gesturing as we passed al-Lubban al-Sharqiya, “We had a success story.” Soldiers and settlers had been preventing Palestinian students from walking on the main road to get to school, so Amira and other activists began accompanying them. “The army attacked us more than once, but in the end we succeeded.” The harassment stopped. That was three years ago. There were, he admitted, “very few stories like that.”
We passed the town of Beita, where since 2021 at least eighteen people have been killed by Israeli soldiers, most recently the young American activist Ay?enur Eygi. Beita was one of only two communities in the West Bank still holding regular protests, but “the movement is not just going and demonstrating,” Amira said. It was, perhaps more importantly, about “helping the people to stand fast.” For the moment, anyway, that was all that was left. This was why we were going to Burin for the olive harvest: to be present in the all too likely event that Israeli soldiers and settlers would arrive.
I had spent time in Burin years earlier, and remembered the almost impossible greenness that surrounded its narrow streets of old stone homes. Now the hills and fields were brown. We parked Amira’s car on the outskirts of the village and squeezed ourselves into an impressively battered Suzuki Samurai driven by a gruff man named Nimr Issa. It took us, bouncing and groaning, up a steep dirt track to Issa’s olive groves.
It should have been a bucolic scene. There is perhaps no activity more essential to Palestinian identity than the olive harvest. Traditionally, it is a joyful occasion. People who have long since moved to the cities often return to their villages to take part, and families spend whole days in the groves. But that morning the mood was far from festive. Only Issa and his son, a quiet and solidly built teenager, had come along, joined by seven activists: three Israelis and four young women from Mexico, Italy, and the United States. They worked quickly and in silence, tugging at the branches, raking off the green and purple olives with their fingers, and letting them fall onto the tarps at their feet. Amira got out of the car, grabbed a plastic rake, and got to work.
Top:
IDF soldiers approach a Palestinian family to stop them from harvesting
olives on their land, Al-Sawiya, Nablus, October 2, 2024.
Bottom: An
olive tree that was damaged by the IDF to make way for a road in
Sinjil. The owners of the tree bandaged it in an attempt to repair it.
Sinjil, Ramallah, March 16, 2024
I knew one of the Israelis well: Jonathan Pollak, a veteran activist who has been arrested countless times at protests in the West Bank. Dressed, as always, in faded black, he pointed to the ridge above us, about two hundred yards away. “We are right beneath Yitzhar,” he said, his voice low. “You can see the houses there.”
Of the more than 370 Israeli settlements and outposts in the West Bank, Yitzhar may be the most notorious. Its residents have burned Palestinian olive groves, cars, homes, and mosques, and rampaged through villages in deadly attacks that even some Israeli officials have felt comfortable calling pogroms. (Israeli soldiers, it should be said, have often been present during these assaults, intervening only on behalf of the settlers.) Yitzhar’s security coordinator, Yitzhak Levi Filant, known locally as Yakov, was among the seventeen settlers singled out for sanctions by the Biden Administration last year. Issa’s last attempt to reach his olive trees ended with Yakov pointing a gun at his head and threatening to kill him if he saw him there again.
The ground between the trees was overgrown with thistle. The surge of settler and military violence since October 7 meant that olive groves had been abandoned throughout the West Bank. “Last year’s harvest wasn’t catastrophic,” Pollak told me. “It didn’t happen.” Which was why he and the other activists were here, to make sure that neglect did not become the status quo and the olive harvest a thing of the past, another painful entry in the long catalogue of Palestinian losses.
Amira and Pollak had just walked down the hill to meet another activist when the soldiers arrived. Issa’s son sped off with most of the olives, and I managed to slip on an armored vest labeled press before they saw us. At first there were three of them. They were reservists who appeared to be in their thirties and forties, bearded, with pierced ears, their rifles slung casually over their shoulders. One ordered Issa down from the tree, shouting in Arabic: “Forbidden!” Issa kept picking. Another soldier, pudgy and silent, filmed us with his phone, and the Italian activists filmed him in turn. The third soldier, whose name, he said, was Matan, explained to me that the area had been closed by military order and that Issa, by picking olives from his own trees, was “making a provocation.”
He asked where I was from.
“America,” I answered.
“Oh, nice,” he said.
I asked him to show me the order. “It’s coming,” he said. He told me he had been stationed in Yitzhar “since the beginning,” by which he meant October 2023. “We need to be here to deal with this nonsense,” he said. “Why? Because they’re doing provocations.”
Pollak soon reappeared. “Guys,” he said, “there’s no order here. Keep working.”
They did. Two more soldiers arrived, and then three more, all carrying M4s. The unit’s commander, a black gaiter pulled over his face, shouted: “You need to stop, right now! You need to take your things and go.” The soldiers shoved Pollak and an older Israeli activist to the ground, then pulled Issa from the tree and kicked his feet out from under him. On his phone, the commander showed me a copy of the official order, which declared the hillside off limits to civilians until the New Year. In the end he detained Issa, Pollak, and the other Israeli. Everyone else had to leave. We packed up the remaining olives, the tarps, and a ladder, and trudged to the bottom of the hill, where Amira was waiting for me, impatient to get moving.
We drove back in silence, passing one billboard after another advertising new homes in the settlements. We had almost reached Ramallah when Amira received a text. The soldiers had released Issa and the other Israeli but not Pollak. It wasn’t until later that evening that I heard from him. They had kept him blindfolded and handcuffed for six hours at their base before letting him go, but no one had been imprisoned, injured, or killed. The day counted as a victory.
The following day, I rented a car and drove to the far south of the West Bank, to Umm al-Khair, which is flush up against a settlement called Carmel. The village is minuscule, and every time I visit things are a little worse: more homes demolished and more land lost as Carmel slowly grows. This time the difference was cataclysmic.
“Everything is changing,” Bilal al-Hathalin exclaimed almost immediately upon my arrival. “Everything except God. As soon as it is morning, it becomes night, and then another day. Nothing is certain but change.”
“We are falling from a cliff,” his cousin Mo’atassim told me. “The question is what happens next.”
We were sitting on cushions in the ruins of the community’s tent—a rough brown cloth that had been held up by steel posts over a concrete slab. The village was small enough that the tent had been more than adequate for receiving guests and gathering in the evenings. But it was also mere yards from the fence that separates Umm al-Khair from Carmel, so it was the first structure the Israeli soldiers demolished when they showed up with bulldozers months earlier, on June 26, the day of “the big massacre of homes,” as Mo’atassim’s brother Eid called it. Afterward, the men in the village had pushed aside enough of the rubble to clear a space that measured about four square yards, where they now sat talking and drinking tea, until the sun sank and they excused themselves to lay out their rugs and kneel for the evening prayer.
The next morning I met up with Eid. “I want to show you how they squeeze us,” he told me. He took me to the edge of town and pointed to the arid hills to the west, which his grandfather had purchased in 1952, after the Nakba. All the land we were looking at, Eid said, had been stolen a few years earlier by one settler, Isaschar Manne.
In 2021, Manne (who also made the Biden Administration’s sanctions list) built a barn on the south side of Carmel. Immediately, the hundreds of acres that he said his sheep required became off-limits to Palestinians. Shortly thereafter, Shimon Atiya, another settler, did the same on the north side of the village. For as long as I had been coming to Umm al-Khair, the residents of Carmel had been seizing the village’s land by gradual annexation, building a few houses here, a new neighborhood there. By claiming they needed vast swaths of land for grazing, Manne and Atiya achieved overnight what the settlers in Carmel had been working toward for decades. The village was being erased.
In Umm al-Khair, nonviolent resistance had never been as ritualized as it was in the northern villages along the path of the wall, but it was no less a conscious strategy, and was in many ways more representative of the movement as a whole. The people of the village simply stood fast, as Amira put it, calling on their neighbors, sympathetic Israelis, and foreign activists to stand with them. To this end, Eid had flown to Washington more than once. He had been there the month before my arrival, meeting with State Department officials and congressional staffers. Without these efforts and years of local organizing, Eid knew, the village would already have been wiped from the map. But the constant grind of violence from Israeli soldiers and settlers alike was slowly killing nonviolent resistance, Eid said, and with it Umm al-Khair itself.
In the days after October 7, the Israeli government had mobilized what it called “regional defense units” composed of settler reservists. The line between settlers and the state, always fuzzy, disappeared. Within weeks, a group of local settlers showed up in Umm al-Khair wearing Israel Defense Forces uniforms. They rounded up the men of the village and threatened them at gunpoint. Other uniformed Israelis—soldiers, settlers, and police officers—continued to visit Umm al-Khair, stopping cars, harassing residents, searching houses. Settler shepherds, sometimes disguised in masks, grazed their flocks in the center of the village. Last February, soldiers ransacked Eid’s home and, on finding his life savings in cash, turned him over to the police under suspicion of selling guns or drugs. After a barrage of phone calls from Israeli allies, NGOs he had worked with, and even the American Embassy, he was released a few hours later. That June, the bulldozers arrived. Soldiers gave Eid thirty minutes to empty his house. After the demolition, only one jagged piece of wall was left standing. It had been the corner of his daughters’ bedroom. You could still see the little flowers the girls had painted on the wall in turquoise, purple, and pink. Ultimately, his house was one of eleven buildings that the soldiers destroyed. Since then, he and his family have been living in an uninsulated, windowless shed that his brother had been using to store barley.
The next stop on Eid’s tour was his father’s grave. I had known Hajj Suleiman al-Hathalin as a tiny man with fiery eyes and tremendous strength. He had not hesitated to stand up to armed soldiers or politicians, and traveled the length of the West Bank to show up for other communities. He had been, in a way that did not become clear until his death, the soul of resistance in Umm al-Khair.
A gate installed by the IDF at the entrance to the town of Sinjil. Such gates are generally kept locked, and hundreds of these gates and barriers have been erected throughout the West Bank. March 6, 2025
In January 2022, Israeli police officers appeared with a tow truck to impound unregistered cars. (Registration fees are prohibitively expensive for many West Bankers who depend on their cars.) A crowd gathered. Hajj Suleiman stood in front of the tow truck. It didn’t stop. The driver hit him hard, dragging his body for more than thirty feet and leaving him bleeding on the ground. When he reached the hospital in Hebron, the doctors said that the only thing still working was his heart. He died twelve days later.
Hajj Suleiman’s grave, on a barren hill, was covered with a pile of stones and fenced with razor wire to keep settlers out. “We can’t hold it anymore,” Eid said. “We’re tired, man. We’re so, so tired.”
A shepherd resting while his sheep graze, Al-Sawiya, Nablus, March 6, 2025
Nearly every Friday morning, when I was living in Ramallah, I would catch a ride roughly fifteen miles north to the village of Nabi Saleh. I hadn’t seen Manal Tamimi for years, but when she picked me up in Ramallah’s central square, she greeted me as if only a week had passed. Her son Hamada sat slumped in the seat beside her. I hopped in the back. Manal’s laughter had lost its nervous edge. Perhaps she was just sadder. Road closures and checkpoints stretched the drive, which should take around twenty-five minutes, to more than an hour. Finally, we sped past the gate the IDF had installed outside the village and, a few yards farther down, the spot where, two summers before, an Israeli soldier opened fire at an idling car, killing a two-year-old boy, then motored around the bend, where twenty-eight-year-old Mustafa Tamimi had been shot in the face with a tear-gas canister thirteen years earlier, becoming the first martyr of the village’s nonviolent resistance movement.
Nabi Saleh smelled different than I remembered. In response to the demonstrations, which for years took place every Friday, the IDF often brought out an armored “skunk truck,” which sprayed pressurized streams of an unidentified malodorous liquid at demonstrators, and sometimes through the windows of people’s homes, soaking their carpets and furniture. The stench, which lay somewhere on the spectrum between dog shit and rotting corpse, would linger for months, delivering its fetid message to anyone who drove past the village. Now Nabi Saleh smelled like everywhere else: of dry hills, dust, and car exhaust.
The Tulkarem refugee camp, which has been almost completely destroyed and depopulated, March 10, 2025
Manal parked in front of her house. In the old days, it was often filled with activists—foreigners and Israelis, as well as Palestinians. The first time I visited Nabi Saleh, soldiers had locked Manal’s husband, Bilal, in the back of a jeep, and a group of activists sat down in the vehicle’s path. An Israeli officer methodically lifted each activist’s chin so he could pepper-spray their eyes. In spite of the risks people faced there, the resistance in Nabi Saleh was strangely joyful in a way that I hadn’t encountered elsewhere. I kept coming back, staying in the village for weeks at a time—walking, and often running, alongside Bilal and Manal at dozens of demonstrations, dodging stun grenades and choking on tear gas. Both of them had been arrested repeatedly, as had their two eldest sons. But now the village was quiet, the house almost empty.
The protests in Nabi Saleh began in 2009, after settlers seized a small spring on the hillside and began chasing off any Palestinians who tried to reach it. The village had fewer than six hundred residents, but more than anywhere else in the West Bank, it became a symbol of nonviolent resistance for much of the outside world. Reclaiming the spring turned out to be a secondary motivation. Their more immediate goal was simply to preserve their dignity by standing up, and in so doing make the world see the cruelty of the occupation and inspire other Palestinians to join them in resisting it.
The timing worked in their favor. Social media, which had hardly existed during earlier rounds of popular resistance, was by then ubiquitous. Bilal served as unofficial village videographer, uploading footage of the demonstrations every Friday. For a while they were famous. I saw the faces of children I knew from Nabi Saleh pasted on walls in London and New York, and on protest signs at demonstrations half a world away. By standing unarmed against one of the best-equipped militaries on the planet, and filming it, they had transformed their weakness into strength. But the losses still piled up. Mustafa would be the first of ten Palestinians to be killed by Israeli soldiers there. Hundreds more were injured. The leaders of the movement, and many young people, lost months and years to prison. Momentum slipped away. The demonstrations got smaller and smaller until, in the summer of 2016, the village decided to stop.
Manal and I had been talking for an hour or so when Bilal came home. His hair had gone white since I last saw him, but he was as stoic and good-humored as ever. I asked them both if they missed the demonstrations. Bilal took his time in answering. “It’s not easy to stay silent and sit in your house,” he said. Manal did not have to think. “I miss the feeling of resistance,” she said. “You feel that you’re not useless, that you’re not dead but alive.” The hardest thing to bear was the helplessness. “When we think back,” Manal said, “sometimes we’re surprised that not all of us were killed. Now everyone is afraid.”
In the years after the demonstrations ended in Nabi Saleh, Israeli responses to public displays of dissent grew more lethal. During the 2018 and 2019 Great March of Return protests in Gaza, soldiers injured more than 36,000 Palestinians, killing at least 214. In Beita, where protests are still active, almost twice as many people have been killed over the past four years as have died in Nabi Saleh over the past fifteen. Since October 7, immediate recourse to deadly force against Palestinian protesters appears to have become official policy. “We no longer contain demonstrations, we annihilate them,” a high-ranking IDF officer boasted to an Israeli news website last spring. “There’s almost no use of crowd-control measures anymore.” Soldiers in the West Bank are “deliberately executing Palestinians who posed no apparent security threat,” Human Rights Watch reported last May, “at a level without recent precedent.”
These days, only a nominal presence was turning out in Beita and in Kufr Qaddum, the other village still staging weekly protests. The youth of Nabi Saleh, who continued to greet Israeli military vehicles with stones for years after the demonstrations ended, had given up even this largely symbolic form of self-defense. The army nonetheless still raided the village two or three times a week, Manal said. But perhaps more than anything happening locally, the news coming out of Gaza—the reduction of entire cities to rubble, the mass graves, the endless images of dead and dismembered children broadcast on nearly every television, laptop, and mobile phone—had made demonstrating seem futile. “Each one of us knows,” Manal said, “that what’s happening in Gaza is going to happen in the West Bank.”
No one seemed to be talking about nonviolence anymore. How could they? “It’s all lies,” one veteran activist told me. “Human rights, international law, justice, all of it.” The governments of the West had not blinked in 2018 and 2019, when Israeli soldiers mowed down thousands of unarmed protesters in Gaza, and they were not blinking a year into a war that has resulted in the deaths of as many as 70,000 people, at least 14,500 of them children, that human-rights groups, U.N. experts, and dozens of scholars of the Holocaust and mass violence have characterized as genocidal. if it isn’t a genocide in gaza, then what is it? ran the headline of a Haaretz column written last year by the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. The Biden Administration’s official statements of concern continued, but so did the arms shipments to Israel, the intelligence sharing, and the unwavering support at the U.N. Security Council and virtually everywhere else. Well before Donald Trump dreamed of taking a “long-term ownership position” in Gaza, the war there belonged to the United States as much as it did to Israel, with most of Europe providing cover.
All of this revealed a fundamental miscalculation. In colonial India, in the Jim Crow South, and in Palestine, the goal of nonviolent resistance was to leverage one’s sacrifices, to use one’s courage when faced with the repressive violence of the state as a tool for moral awakening, to move people of conscience to act. To that end, it had worked. Over the past decade, sympathy for Palestinians in the United States has grown steadily, particularly among the young, while support for Israel has plummeted. But last year’s campus demonstrations were almost everywhere repressed by the police, and the fact that a majority of Americans supported putting conditions on military aid to Israel found no reflection in either party’s platform.
Manal, Bilal, and others in Nabi Saleh had done everything they were supposed to do. The moral awakening occurred as planned. It just didn’t make a difference. What they hadn’t counted on was the utter lack of real democracy in the West.
I kept thinking about a story that another activist had told me years earlier. She had been attending a demonstration when two soldiers pulled her away from the crowd and beat her. After they’d finished, she couldn’t help but fantasize about strangling and shooting them. While their backs were to her, she stared at the rifles they had left unattended and at their necks, exposed above their bulletproof vests. She wondered if she could move fast enough, but quickly banished the thought. She understood, suddenly, that she did not have to be as cruel as they were. She felt a sense of triumph in this realization that she could be stronger than her oppressors. Nonviolence, in her description, was not just one tactic among others. It had shown her the dimensions of her own humanity, and had helped her to preserve it.
I saw the same activist again not long before I visited Nabi Saleh. For weeks, the Israeli military had been hitting the northern West Bank cities of Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarem, killing dozens. Settler pogroms had become commonplace. Hundreds had been killed in Gaza in the preceding days. She sat tense at the end of the sofa, her gaze fixed. She was not talking about nonviolence anymore. Every single Palestinian, men and women, young and old, she said, should learn to fight, to use a gun. Everyone should take up arms.
She didn’t say this in anger. This was not about revenge. She was thinking only about survival.
This past August, the IDF launched a massive assault on the northern cities of the West Bank. The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, promised to confront “Islamic-Iranian terror” in the West Bank, “just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza.” Tulkarem and Jenin got the worst of it. The IDF bulldozed shops and streets, blockaded two hospitals in Tulkarem, set Jenin’s central produce market ablaze, and cut off water and electricity in both cities. In Jenin, residents were trapped in their houses for ten days as local militia fighters attempted to repel Israeli soldiers. At least three dozen people were killed, many of them non-combatants.
Near the end of my trip, I drove to Tulkarem with two other journalists, a Palestinian and a Canadian. We had arranged to meet with fighters from the Tulkarem Brigade, one of several militias that had emerged in the northern West Bank cities. The rains had finally come. As we approached the Tulkarem camp, it fell in blinding sheets. Earlier in the year, the IDF had bulldozed the main road to the camp, along with much of its water and sewage infrastructure. In the downpour, the road became a brown river of uncertain depth. I steered through it slowly and parked at the edge of the camp. The rain, I hoped, would keep the soldiers in their bases and the sky clear of drones.
We stopped first at the house of Abdel Fattah Salah al-Din Jabara, who was shot to death in June on his way to attack an Israeli military checkpoint. His mother was expecting us. She had made cookies. Her son had joined the armed resistance without telling her. It was only when she learned of his death, she said, that she discovered that for the previous seven months he had been a fighter in the Tulkarem Brigade.
The brigade was founded in 2022. It emerged largely from a local branch of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s armed wing, but had come to function as an umbrella organization for militants of all factions. Abdel Fattah had been affiliated with the secular Fatah movement, but such allegiances often had more to do with whom you knew and who your friends were than ideology. The brigade had launched a small handful of offensive operations—the drive-by killing of an Israeli outside a nearby settlement in May 2023, a few outings to shoot through the fence into an Israeli town bordering Tulkarem. (After the latter attack, the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, threatened to turn the city into “an island of ruins, like we are doing in Gaza.”) Mostly, though, they turned out in defense of Tulkarem’s two refugee camps. Whenever Israeli troops conducted raids, they set up ambushes with gunfire and IEDs, in an attempt to maintain the camps as liberated zones.
Abdel Fattah had kept his activities a secret from everyone in his family except for his brother, Mustafa, who sat at the far end of the room, the spitting image of the young man in the martyr’s photo propped up on the end table. Laughing, Mustafa said that whenever he heard that Israeli soldiers had entered the camp, he would try to lock his brother in his room. But Abdel Fattah always found a way out.
Mustafa understood why his brother had joined the brigade. He had seen too many of his friends die, and everyone knew what was happening in Gaza. “What could he do?” he said. “Just pick up a gun and fight.”
His mother, though, did not conceal her anger. Abdel Fattah had a family: a wife and four kids. The wide-eyed boy in the Captain America sweatshirt who was playing on the floor at her feet was the eldest of them. “May God forgive him,” she kept saying. Not for taking up arms against Israel, but because he had left them and wasn’t coming back.
Word arrived that the fighters were ready to meet us, so we said our goodbyes and found them waiting outside the house. They brought us to the intersection of two narrow alleys. One stood guard on each side. The tallest of them had an M16 concealed under a long fake-sheepskin coat. The one who had agreed to speak with us identified himself as Ghaith. It wasn’t his real name, he said, but that of another fighter, who had been killed in an air strike six weeks earlier. The original Ghaith had been meeting with other militants in a coffee shop in the middle of the camp. (Israeli military and intelligence sources described the group’s commander as “a ticking time bomb” working with “terror operatives” to plan an imminent attack.) The strike had taken out an entire residential building, killing eighteen people, three of them children.
This Ghaith was twenty-six and handsome. He wore an oversize green parka. His eyes darted right or left at any sound. He had first seen someone killed in front of him when he was eight, he said, and dropped out of school at fifteen. He worked odd jobs in Israel for years, at one point in a hotel in Tel Aviv, and experienced the disjuncture between that shiny reality and the world he knew as a humiliation. He realized, he said, that “we were living in a shadow.” Not long after October 7, he joined the Tulkarem Brigade. When I asked if any specific experience had pushed him to take up arms, he shrugged. “I’ve seen children, infants being killed, the elderly, women,” he said. As he saw it, nonviolent resistance and years of official negotiations had only added up to more losses. “The day has come for us to be free,” he said. “We fight for that.”
From left to right: A poster for a martyr in the rubble in the Jenin refugee camp, March 10, 2025; a memorial for Shireen Abu Akleh in the Jenin refugee camp before it was destroyed, August 5, 2022; road signs in Hebrew, erected by the IDF, in the Jenin refugee camp, March 10, 2025.
That past January, during a two-day Israeli incursion into the Tulkarem camp, Ghaith had been shot with four bullets in the abdomen. “I literally picked up my intestines” and ran, he said. One of his friends died beside him. Six others were killed that day. I pointed out that armed resistance also had only sown losses, that the camp’s fighters were outmatched and outgunned in every way possible, but I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. He couldn’t leave the alleys of the camp for fear of assassination from above. Most of the time, he said, the brigade wasn’t battling human beings, just drones. Their resources were threadbare at best. It didn’t matter. “The point,” he said, “is to fight.”
Before we left him, Ghaith complained that no matter what the fighters in Tulkarem did, it was Jenin that got all the glory, and he was right. More than anywhere else in the West Bank, Jenin has become nearly synonymous with armed resistance. A week before leaving Palestine, I traveled there with three other journalists to meet with militia fighters. We saw martyrs’ photos almost everywhere—on walls, in shops and cafés, printed on the windscreens of mopeds. Market stalls sold photos of fallen fighters attached to black cords. Once, such amulets would have been worn only by grieving mothers, but the martyrs of the Jenin Brigade now belonged to everyone. A vendor selling hot corn called me over with a perfectly American-accented “Hey, bro!” He pushed paper cups of spiced corn into our hands and wouldn’t let us pay for them. His stall was papered with photos of young men he had known. Many of them had been his customers, he said. They had all been killed since 2022.
We headed west on Haifa Street, which once led to the city of the same name and to the sea, but now ends at a checkpoint. A cloud of starlings billowed over Jenin’s refugee camp, where more than 24,000 Palestinians, most of them the descendants of refugees from Haifa and the villages around it, were squeezed into an area measuring less than one fifth of a square mile. For years, the entrance to the camp had been marked by twin stone arches topped by enormous black keys, symbolizing the refugees’ dream of returning to their homes. The arches and keys were gone, bulldozed by Israeli soldiers the previous fall. Other monuments remained: fields piled with concrete rubble, the twisted skeleton of a white Kia hit by a recent drone strike. Flowerpots had been placed on what was left of its hood in tribute to the passengers who were killed.
In the end, the fighters from the camp were feeling too paranoid to allow foreign journalists to enter. They would speak only with Palestinians, so my colleague Mariam Barghouti got in a car with them and reappeared about two hours later. They took her, she said, to a narrow alley where a commander of the Jenin Brigade was waiting. She described him as a well-built man with a graying beard, though he was still in his thirties. He sat cross-legged on a mattress, chain-smoking Parliaments as other men stood watch. He answered her questions in formal Arabic and would not veer away from brittle, heroic oratory. “The road to freedom is one of blood,” he told her, promising to continue fighting “until we liberate Palestine from the river to the sea, even if all Palestinians are killed and just one stays alive, so that he can enjoy freedom in this land.” He looked exhausted, she said.
Ten weeks later, in January, I got a text from Barghouti. The man she had interviewed that evening had been killed. His nom de guerre had been Amir Abu Harb. Two days after the ceasefire in Gaza began, Israel launched its largest assault on Jenin since the Second Intifada, emptying the camp and displacing tens of thousands before moving on to Tulkarem and forcing out nearly all the residents of that city’s two refugee camps. Most of the fighters had fled, but Abu Harb stayed to fight.
We drove back to the edge of the camp and parked near the spot where the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot to death by an Israeli soldier in May 2022. The monument erected to her had been bulldozed. Across the street was the new martyrs’ cemetery, built for Palestinians killed by Israeli forces. The earliest graves dated to July 2023, and it was already half full. Bright light fell from a lamppost onto the white headstones. The rear wall was covered with larger-than-life photos of young men, all of them now dead.
A few older men sat in lawn chairs, smoking. Two of them agreed to speak with me, so long as I didn’t need their names. Their sons, the taller of the two men explained, were buried in the row of graves beside us: “We come here to visit them.” He had a white beard and a long, creased face. His friend was thin and didn’t speak. The taller man said that his son had been killed in a drone strike on August 28, the first day of that ten-day siege. He was twenty-one years old.
“An ordinary guy,” he said, “with ordinary dreams.” His son had worked as a baker before joining the Jenin Brigade in 2023. The thinner man pushed his phone in front of me to show me a photo of a young man who might have been sleeping except that his face and shirt were covered in blood. I asked the tall man what had led his son to take up arms. Some of his friends had been killed in an air strike in 2021, he said, one of the first to hit the camp since the end of the Second Intifada. He had seen them literally blown to pieces—“like we see in Gaza,” he said. “What effect would you expect that to have on him?” Not long before he joined the brigade, soldiers had raided their house. “They beat me, his father, in front of him. How would you expect a son to react?” Beyond any individual incident, though, the logic, he said, was easy to understand. The camp’s young men had seen enough to believe that they would be killed whether they fought or not. “So they started asking themselves, ‘Why wait for them to kill us?’ ”
He talked about his two remaining sons. One of them was in prison, held without charges for the past year. He hadn’t been able to speak with him in all that time, he said. He talked about his own life too: how he had been imprisoned for the first time at thirteen, during the First Intifada, and again when he was sixteen, that time for four years, and about how his own experiences had limited the possibilities for his sons, how both dreams and their curtailment passed from one generation to the next. As the tall man talked, the thin man smoked silently beside us, his eyes pooling with tears that somehow never fell.
The tall man paused. He had to be honest, he said. He didn’t have a son who had been killed, and the thin man was not his friend but his brother. It was his brother’s son who had died, his brother’s son who was in prison. All the stories he had told me had been true, he said, but they belonged to the thin man, his brother, not to him. His brother could not tell them himself without collapsing in tears, so he spoke for him. Look at him, he said: “Look at his eyes.”
The thin man nodded. He held out his phone again, this time to show me a video of his son at a demonstration, shouting as the crowd pushed him along. “We are the ones who carry the flag,” the young man said, and one day it will fly in Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre. It wouldn’t be long, he promised. It would be soon.
We had to cut the conversation short. Two lights, one white and one red, appeared in the sky, thirty or forty feet above the cemetery, and stayed there, hovering and gliding with an uncanny steadiness. A drone. We all shook hands, said quick and awkward farewells, and rushed off in different directions, our heads bowed, as though whatever was coming could be ducked.