meanwhile in the West Bank...

In the village I stay in every year for olive harvest, the village is almost constantly closed by army jeeps, it is nearly impossible to get to the fields, so the harvest will not be gathered this year, the settlers who surround the village physically attack the farmers regularly, the army arrests villagers in the night.

A few days ago leaflets were distributed overnight onto cars telling residents to move to Jordan ‘otherwise we will come to you and make another Nakba’. These are friends I buy bread from; these are people who invite me to eat in their houses, who sit around an evening fire with us drinking tea.

Only the leaflets are new, but the level of violence, threat, damage and fear are long familiar to villagers and to us who try to stand with them.

Largely unreported, all these problems have escalated dramatically right across the West Bank. 120 West Bank Palestinians have been killed since this began. Keep an eye out for the tiny amount of reporting on this and read between the lines of mainstream media: ‘violence’, ‘clashes’, ‘two peoples who cannot live next to each other on the same land’: it is actually nearly all shootings and intimidation by the army and the settlers, who surround Palestinians on all sides, who have been doing this for decades now, and who are further emboldened by what has been happening in these last weeks.

My thanks to Channel 4 for this report on two villages in the South Hebron Hills. One village has completely evacuated in the face of threats. The other, Susiya, holds firm. I visited in 2017 staying with families overnight to try to prevent the village being demolished by Israeli bulldozers. The bulldozers held off that day although the makeshift dwellings are regularly destroyed. At dawn I ate the best bread I have ever eaten in Palestine…

Here is what I wrote at the time.