Protective Presence: Accessing the Settler Mindset

The trepidation starts the day before. Depression. Tummy tension. Nausea. I sleep badly, waking often as body fluids erupt from various orifices, in protest at my current life.

FFS. What a Drama Queen I am. Tons of Israelis do this every week, for years. The Palestinians live this. I’m doing it for a few months.

“Is this what you choose?” I ask tough, principled, dumb Anat. “To forsake joy for the sake of justice… for years of your life?”

Our shifts overlap, I am coming for my 24 hours and she is leaving after a night here. I desperately wish it were tomorrow, and I was the one leaving.

We stand in the shade outside Ahmed’s house, watching a laidback settler we call Dopey lounging against his donkey, rolling a cigarette as his camel herd eat the olive trees.

Ahmed and Yosef live beside Husni and Fatima. Ahmed is a bright 16-year-old Bedouin who speaks Hebrew. He is gentle and frightened. “My family served in the Israeli army,” he once said. “I don’t understand why they are doing this to me.”

Anat doesn’t get my question, so I clarify: “It’s impossible to be happy, doing this. You’re sacrificing happiness.”

“What the fuck you talking about?” she asks, sinking onto a rock and rolling her own cigarette. She gestures at the beautiful view, at the mother camel suckling her calf two feet away from us. “I’m totally happy.”

Dopey is now stretched on the ground, exhaling sky-wards. I light a cigarette and sink to the ground too. “OK, so there are a few good days. But when they break fences and cut water lines and hit us? Those days are crap.”

Anat shrugs contemptuously. “All you gotta do is film. They don’t hit hard. I don’t give a shit.”

I’ve seen her on multiple shifts. It’s true; she doesn’t give a shit. She curses every settler to hell with relish.

Fine, I’m a fucking Drama Queen and it sucks but I can’t *ignore* the fact that I’m expelling my innards into the toilet before every shift. Do I really have to emulate those lucky morons who don’t suffer? Anat doesn’t even care about the climate!

Walking towards the bus stop, eyeing the normal people around me who don’t realize that their race is torturing a minority. ‘We are the victims!’ they ludicrously insist. Well, we were the victims for 2000 years. No wonder we’re in denial about mutating into perpetrators. Give us some TIME, FFS!

Sitting in the bus on my way to Taybeh, trying to breathe calmly. Outside my window, Jerusalem, filled with people leading normal lives, seamlessly transforms into a surreal nightmare where the strong hurt the weak without compunction.

I don’t *want* to do Protective Presence. What am I achieving? Delaying one family’s expulsion by a day that I experience as a nightmare? Clearly, the “achievement” doesn’t warrant the pain.

But they experience this nightmare every day and they can’t leave.

SO?? It’s like the kid in the novel “Room”—he didn’t know any other life, so he was OK. And most people have thick skins like Anat anyway…

SO?? The fact that you’re a Drama Queen means you should coddle yourself like a precious, selfish baby instead of contributing to the world…

You’re right. I need to push myself. I need to do more! God, there are people starving in Africa while I’ve stuffed my face my whole life. That’s so unfair! Shouldn’t I be helping them too? Perhaps I could grind my body up into meatballs—that could feed a whole village for a month! I’m so privileged—it’s the least I can do!

Nobody has signed up for this shift, so a leader we’ll call Eytan steps in when Anat goes home mid-morning. He paces constantly, glued to his phone, juggling legal, outreach, and delegation issues while parrying calls from nervous Palestinians who see settlers on the horizon.

Late afternoon, Dopey is replaced by Satan and another two settlers with a herd of beautiful black sheep. Like a magnifying glass in a horror movie, Satan’s body zooms in as he approaches, then his face, and finally I’m inspecting his predictably pus-filled pimples. Unlike most settlers, who focus on getting into the Palestinian compounds, Satan always makes a beeline for us. Why destroy fences when you can indulge your sadistic streak?

Now Eytan is on his phone to the police and the army, explaining that we’re being threatened, asking them to come, demanding an event number (evidence when they don’t).

But when he’s on the phone, he’s not filming. And since he’s not filming, Satan begins his old game of kicking when I film his face and hitting when I film his feet.

And I begin my old game of asking “Why, why, why? Look in my eyes; this is crazy. How can you hurt someone who is old enough to be your mother? Someone who can’t hit back?” (One of the rules of Torat Tzedek is never to escalate violence.)

They never respond. They have been told not to talk to us. But I persevere, as the miserable minutes tick by: “Perhaps I believe in ישראל השלמה too—but not by terrorizing innocent people! Why do you do this? How can you justify it?”

A seemingly infinite number of miserable minutes later: “If you explain, I will listen. If there is some logic to your actions, maybe I’ll stop opposing you. Maybe I’ll come even over to your side!” I’m not even lying. It’s important to me to understand the perspectives of others—the more alien they are, the more I want to understand. They think they’re right. I think I’m right. If I want them to listen, I have to listen.

And finally my trump card: “We’re Israelis. Isn’t your goal to recruit more Israelis?”

“Turn off your phone.”

I stare at him.

“I’ll answer if you turn your phone off,” Satan repeats.

Surprised, delighted, I do. Then he says, “God wants us to be here. In the Bible it is written: ‘And you shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land and dwell in it’.”

I wish I could counter with Bible quotes advocating for peace but, alas, I’m ignorant. “How does that justify hurting a middle-aged woman?”

“Whoever stands between me and my goal must be removed.”

“No goal justifies the strong oppressing the weak. It’s always wrong. That’s why democracies condemn us. Just like they condemn Russia invading Ukraine. You can’t hurt people who aren’t hurting you.”

“Other countries are irrelevant. God is on our side. The Arabs have 49 countries; all of them bigger than Israel. They can go there. This is all we have.”

“But…but this IS their country. They can’t just go to another country.”

“They can stay if they accept that it’s our country and they are subject to us. Or they can go. Or they can fight and be killed.”

“So give them the option to stay in your country! Do you think poor Ahmed wouldn’t leap at the chance to live in peace?”

We talked for over an hour. If I wrote it all here this would be a book, not a blog. I argued that the Bible proves that God likes peace and God wasn’t on his side. He said that Israel’s successes proved God was on our side. I said those successes were because of our army. He said the successes were miraculous, aka God. The army was against him, and he would never serve while women could. I asked why God hadn’t helped during the Holocaust if he was on our side. He said God would only help if we were in our land, where He wanted us to be.

We progressed from political and theological arguments to goats—a subject I know a bit about because I raised goats in Canada. He knew the name of every goat in his herd.  I felt grateful that he’d opened up to me. Surely we will have a different connection, now?

But as he left he turned and said, “If you are here next time, I will hurt you again.”