As a liberal Zionist who has long regarded Israel’s settlement movement as both a moral and a political disaster, I spent the month of June doing protective presence in the West Bank — going out with human rights groups to serve as a buffer between Palestinians and the settlers who harass them. One thing I learned is that the relatively low-level harassment in the West Bank is just as effective at ethnic cleansing as the war in Gaza.

I volunteered mostly with Rabbi Arik Ascherman’s organization Torat Tzedek, in a small Bedouin village whose inhabitants have been told to leave by nearby settlers. On most days, settlers harass the villagers largely by bringing a flock of sheep to graze on their land or eat the fodder stored in their sheds. Sometimes, the settlers hold a loud prayer service in the village at 5:30 a.m. or enter the villagers’ homes and sit in their chairs. Occasionally, they just drive back and forth through the village. Once, in another village, I saw a settler come and stand in the main square for hours, in front of a crowd that included many children, with his gun prominently displayed down the length of his body.

Our task, in all these cases, is to film the settlers and call the army and police. The point of the filming is twofold: to limit the harm that the settlers do and to provide evidence of it. As nonviolent activists, we never used force on the settlers, although they sometimes used force on us. At one point during my stay, settlers broke open the rabbi’s head with rifle butts when he showed up after they had fired guns at the feet of women and children in a playground.

It took a while before I began to understand what, overall, these settlers were doing. Many of their actions seem fairly innocuous. Holding a loud prayer service at 5:30 a.m. is obnoxious, but is it really worse than a prank? What about driving one’s car back and forth through a village? Grazing one’s flock on Bedouin lands is of course theft, but it may seem a minor offense. Even standing in the middle of a village square with a gun could be seen this way, given how many people hang around with guns in Israel.

But the point of all these tactics is to answer the question around which the extreme right-wing Israeli leader Itamar Ben-Gvir ran his last electoral campaign: “Who is the homeowner here?” Ben-Gvir and the settlers think the answer to that question is obvious: Jews own all of the land. Not Palestinians, not Bedouins, not non-Jews of any kind, even if they have full property rights in the homes they’ve built. Jews get to enter those homes whenever they feel like it. That’s what is shown by holding early morning prayer services in the middle of a village. That’s what is shown by coming into someone’s home and sitting in their chairs.

Now even these seemingly minor actions are backed up by violence. Sometimes, the settlers burn cars, shoot at the feet of women and children, or break open people’s heads. Over the past few weeks, they have also killed Palestinians.

They are also backed up by the Israeli police and army. The army rarely came when we called, and the police almost never did. And the police and army generally arrest Palestinians or activists, not settlers, if there is a confrontation over the settlers’ behavior. The settlers who beat Ascherman were arrested — but released. Yinon Levi was also arrested, after he allegedly killed the beloved Palestinian peace activist Awdah Hathaleen — but released on house arrest.

All this makes clear that even the settlers’ “pranks” are not really pranks — they are threats. But the relatively minor impact makes it hard to get the press, or the law, to attend to them. This, however, makes them an excellent tool, better than open violence, for ethnic cleansing.

The horrors of Gaza have rightly aroused international outrage. But the more subtle settler campaign to drive Palestinians out of the West Bank flies mostly under the radar of world opinion. It, too, deserves outrage.

____

Sam Fleischacker is an LAS distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He is the author of nine books, including “A Short History of Distributive Justice.”

___

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.