MUKHMAS, the occupied West Bank – Only a few days after Israeli settlers killed 19-year-old Palestinian American Nasrallah Abu Siyam, they were once again wandering the hills of Mukhmas, holding clubs and intimidating Palestinian residents.
Youssef Abu Ali owns a chicken farm on the outskirts of Mukhmas, a Palestinian village with a significant American population, located just a few kilometers from Ramallah, the administrative center of the occupied West Bank.
His farm lies on the border between Area B, under Palestinian civil and Israeli military control per the Oslo Accords, and Area C, which is under the complete control of the Israeli military.
Because of this, Abu Ali’s farm has been repeatedly targeted by Israeli settlers as they seek to make living conditions so untenable that he is forced to evacuate. With the help of Israeli and international protective presence activists, he has remained. But as settlers become more violent, more brazen, and more emboldened, Abu Ali and the activists who help support him fear their tactics are no longer enough.
A 25-Year-Old Tactic
Just before the start of the Iran war, I spoke to Torat Tzedek activists on the ground in the occupied West Bank. Torat Tzedek was founded in 2017 by American Reform Rabbi Arik Ascherman, who has made it his life’s work to combat the settlement movement in the West Bank.
In the villages of Mukhmas and Duma, I joined Torat Tzedek activists to get an inside look at the state of protective presence activism in the West Bank, amidst what appears to be a steady stream of headlines alerting the international community to the unmitigated expansion in settlement activity and settler violence.
While settlers wandered the hills a few hours before the end of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, Abu Ali attempted to count how many settlers were approaching his farm. “I count six,” he said anxiously, adding, “If any more join them, we’re going to be in trouble.”
Youssef Abu Ali looks out over Mukhmas. Photo by Theia Chatelle Soldiers are also often present. Akram Abu Ali, Youssef’s cousin, who witnessed the killing of Nasrallah Abu Siyam, noted the Israeli military had surrounded the area.
“They want to keep us just trapped. They trap us. They control our movement,” he said. “They control where we are allowed to go. If they close a checkpoint, for example,” he added, a trip to Ramallah, just less than 10 miles away, turns into a six-hour trip.
For more than a year, activists have traded shifts sleeping in the Abu Ali chicken farm in the hope that their presence will deter settler attacks, or, if settlers do decide to invade, that they will be less likely to injure or kill Youssef or damage his property.
Their presence, according to activists with Torat Tzedek, an Israeli human rights organization, who I spoke to in the weeks ahead of the latest escalation between Israel and Iran, is more important than ever. At the end of February, a Bedouin community located just beyond the village limits was forcibly depopulated with the assistance of the Israeli military, with Palestinian residents packing up what they could and fleeing.
The premise of protective presence activism is simple. If foreigners and Jewish Israelis put their bodies in the way of Israeli settlers seeking to invade and commit acts of violence in at-risk Palestinian communities, mostly located in Area C, they will be less likely to do so.
The tactic was pioneered by the International Solidarity Movement during the First Intifada nearly three decades ago, when they escorted Palestinian ambulances through checkpoints and cleared roadblocks. Now, much of their work focuses on settler violence in Area C.
Activists block a road during a protest against settlement expansion in Bethlehem on August 8, 2024. Photo by Jacob Lazarus/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images The logic of protective presence activism largely held until Oct. 7, 2023, according to Yotam Wiseman, a coordinator with Torat Tzedek who has been working as what he described as “something of a full-time protective presence activist” for the past few years. But after October 7, increasingly emboldened settlers became more willing to set off a drumbeat of expansion, and the limited privilege activists once had to help Palestinians has largely vanished.
The growing consensus among protective presence activists I spoke with is that the peaceful tactic is no longer working. And the numbers offer the same conclusion: more than 50 Palestinian communities in Area C have been forcibly displaced since Oct. 7.
Before Oct. 7, the displacement of a Palestinian community in Area C was a rarity. Now it is a common occurrence, to the point that both Israeli and American Jewish establishment figures have acknowledged that unmitigated settler violence in the West Bank calls into question the rule of law in Israel itself. Last month, the Israeli Ministry of Defense announced that an entire battalion would be diverted from fighting in southern Lebanon to rein in settler violence in the West Bank.
And yet the violence is only intensifying. Last Saturday, a Palestinian man was killed in the village of Deir Jarir, northeast of Ramallah, the latest in a surge of attacks that has left at least 22 Palestinians dead in the West Bank since the war in Iran began on February 28.
Settlers Emboldened
As the theory of protective presence relies on the informal privilege that internationals and Jewish Israelis have over Palestinians, and, in the case of Israelis, on their legal status, it depends on settlers having some respect for Israeli law, Wiseman emphasized. In the West Bank, Israelis are subject to Israeli civil law, while Palestinians are subject to Israeli military law.
“But increasingly, we are being attacked by settlers who would fight the police and the army just the same,” Wiseman said.
These activists face down settlers bent on carrying out what they describe as pogrom-like attacks, torching villages and killing Palestinians with impunity, rarely held accountable by Israeli courts, and in some cases encouraged by Israeli ministers. Since 2020, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 1,100 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, yet no indictments have been filed in connection with those deaths.
Mourners say prayers by the bodies of three Palestinians killed in a reported attack by Israeli settlers during a funeral in Abu Falah, northeast of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, on March 8, 2026. Photo by Faiz Abu Rmeleh / Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images Ranging from 20-year veterans of protective presence activism who watched the separation wall be built and the Oslo Accords signed, to younger Israeli activists who became involved only after Oct. 7, there is an emerging consensus that they have reached the limits of nonviolent resistance in the West Bank.
For Noah Benninga, director of the Center for Research on Dutch Jewry at the Hebrew University, who has been working as a protective presence activist since the COVID-19 pandemic, the limits of nonviolence are especially clear when thinking about activism at an organizational level.
“For the settlers, if they are killed, they are a martyr for their cause, of asserting Jewish claims to land in the West Bank,” he said.
“They really have nothing to lose, these Hilltop Youth,” he added, referring to disaffected young adults who squat on unauthorized outposts across the West Bank.
A Palestinian inspects a broken window following an Israeli settler attack on the Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya village, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, April 6, 2026. Photo by Ayman Nobani/Xinhua via Getty Images There has not yet been a protective presence activist killed by a settler during a shift, but it is only a matter of time, Benninga said. Palestinians, however, have borne the brunt of the violence.
“Nonviolence is not a very good solution when you’re faced with violence, unless you want to be murdered,” Benninga added.
More Manpower Could Make a Difference
Israeli human rights organizations like B’Tselem have criticized the distinction between violence committed by Israeli settlers and violence by the Israeli state, arguing in recent publications that they are effectively the same.
That blurring is visible on the ground. Israeli soldiers have repeatedly been documented standing by or actively intervening on the side of settlers during attacks, and at least one protective presence activist – 26-year-old American Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi – has been killed by Israeli military fire in the last two years.
Sitting with a group of activists in lawn chairs overlooking what had recently been declared a closed military zone outside Mukhmas, Rayy Tidhar, a 20-year-old Israeli activist from Tel Aviv, described how if they walked forward a few meters and the Israeli military saw them, they could be arrested, all while settlers entering the village, subject to the same laws, would be free to move as they wish.
For these activists, witnessing the accumulation of violence that becomes deadly for Palestinian communities, one village after another, has tested their faith in whether their presence makes any difference at all.
“One of the things that is really difficult about doing this is the knowledge that there is just not enough of us to be able to push back against a giant military force in direct alignment with the United States,” Tidhar said.
In Rabbi Arik Ascherman’s view, it is simply a manpower problem. If there were 100 Israelis in Mukhmas standing in the way of settlers entering the village, the story, he said, would be entirely different.
Tidhar put it more bluntly: “Look, there are five of us here right now, including you, and two of us are Palestinian. What are we supposed to do if the army comes?”
In the fog of the war with Iran, Duma, yet another Palestinian community in Area C that Torat Tzedek had been working to support, was destroyed by Israeli settlers after the Israeli military declared it a closed military zone, painting a worrying picture for the fate of their work in the West Bank.
“Duma will not be the last,” Wiseman said.
Theia Chatelle is a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist and photographer covering conflict, human rights, and displacement across the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Her work has appeared in The Forward, The Nation, Haaretz, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Follow her on Instagram @theiachatelle.
Check out more from Zeteo: