Portside

First the Bedouin shepherd family spotted the truck, then the five armed men dressed in white. Then the gunfire started.

Israeli settlers, drawn to another shepherd’s flock grazing in the valley 200 yards below, fired what appeared to be M16 rifles in the air and toward the shepherd.

Only weeks before, the Al Araareh family was driven off their land and lost half their possessions. On Saturday, perched up the hill from the skirmish, it looked to them like they would have to pick up and move again – fast.

To prevent the settlers, whom they’d encountered before, from recognizing them, Al Araareh brothers jumped into their cars and hid them behind the hill. Mohammed Al Araareh yelled at his grandson to push their sheep hurriedly into their pen.

As the gunshots moved closer, 5-year-old Shahid ran to her father, Ali, and hid behind his legs. She tugged at his pants.

“Daddy, let’s go. Let’s move from here,” she says trembling, tears streaking her cheeks. “Let’s move again before they get us. They will get us.”

From atop a rock, Nayef Al Araareh monitored the approaching clash.

“We can’t relax for a single second,” he says, eyes trained on the gun-toting settlers and an Israeli army jeep idling above them. “They just won’t leave us in peace.”

Three months earlier, after the eruption of war in Gaza, deadly attacks by far-right Israeli settlers shook the West Bank, prompting concern from President Joe Biden and assurances from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel would rein in the violence. While the attacks have decreased in lethality, they have slowed only modestly, and targeted more people.

Having driven most of the nomadic Bedouin from their land, the extremist settlers are increasingly targeting Palestinian towns and villages, encroaching on densely populated areas and inciting larger-scale brawls.

With fresh green grass heralding the West Bank winter grazing season, extremists are seeking to prevent village-dwelling farmers and herders from grazing their flocks or reaching their farms – sparking an economic and security crisis.

Gone are the settlers’ makeshift checkpoints and roving patrols of jeeps of masked gunmen. Yet the harassment continues.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, settler attacks have dropped from their peak of seven per day in October and November to four, still above the previous record high of three per day before the Israel-Hamas war.

The U.N. reports that the ongoing violence since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack has so far displaced “at least 198 Palestinian households” from 15 Bedouin communities.

Village violence

Haroun Kahaleh, a community leader in the town of Rammun, 8 miles east of Ramallah, sat with his grandchildren in his guest room, the semi-automatics rattling and ambulances blaring nearby.

He has hosted the Al Araareh family on land behind his house at the town’s edge since they were displaced from nearby Wadi Siq in October. Now he wonders if he, too, will be displaced.

“This is the war that no one knows about. Not Biden, not [U.S. Secretary of State Antony] Blinken,” he says between crackling gunfire. “This is [Itamar] Ben-Gvir’s war,” referring to the far-right Israeli security minister and settler activist.

Last summer gunmen pushed Mr. Kahaleh off his grazing lands; in the fall they prevented him from reaching his olive groves. Now they were a stone’s throw from his house.

“They want to displace us from this land entirely, not just from one place to another,” says Mr. Kahaleh. “They want to displace us from Palestine and push us into Jordan.”

Two hours after the skirmish, Rammun youths gathered in a coffee shop smiling, having successfully repelled the armed settler attack with sticks, a success they attribute to their large numbers.

Although three Palestinians were injured by rocks, one hospitalized, no one was killed. Most importantly, the youths say, they returned sheep seized by the settlers to the shepherd.

“We are protecting our homes and our family,” reasons Mohammed, the cafe owner. “They are at the edge of our village. If we don’t intervene and stand up to them today, tomorrow they will be in the heart of the village.”

They say they fear the settler violence will lead to Israeli military incursions.

“We no longer leave our village, and we don’t dare go out at night,” since the post-October rise in settler violence. “All we do is sit in our home and they are still coming after us,” he says. “As young Palestinian men, we know our future will be dying as martyrs, because the violence follows us.”

Palestinian officials and Western diplomats describe recent attacks as a natural progression they have been warning of for several years: a systematic campaign to push Palestinians off West Bank lands and into urban centers – a de facto cantonization.  

“We warned the villagers, if you do not stand with the Bedouin today, tomorrow the settlers will come after you,” says Abdallah Abu Rahmeh, director-general of the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, an official Palestinian organization that provides legal and financial aid to residents threatened with displacement. “The Bedouin were the line of defense for villages; they have fallen. Now settlers are at the edges of villages. They will be inside villages next.”

Attempts to contact settler outposts for comment were unsuccessful.

Economic costs

Unable to graze their flocks, Palestinian shepherds are relying on fodder for feed, or selling off their livestock. They do not expect their underfed flocks to produce milk this year.

In recent photos shown to Monitor reporters, cows in the Jordan Valley are gaunt, their ribs protruding.

A plan by the Palestinian Authority and the international community to distribute one month’s worth of animal feed to Palestinian shepherds has been delayed and is not seen as a sustainable solution.

“The grass is right there in front of them, and Palestinians can’t reach it,” says Allegra Pacheco, head of the West Bank Protection Consortium. “This is about breaking them as communities.”

Israeli activists say government-funded regional settler councils and far-right extremists are confiscating Palestinians’ flocks of sheep and cows at gunpoint – claiming they trespassed – charging Palestinians tens of thousands of dollars to reclaim them.

The Monitor viewed documents purporting to show council-issued fees ranging from $20,000 to $200,000.

It is not just Bedouins and farmers facing losses, but also urban Palestinians. On Tuesday, settlers set fire to a car dealership in Baytin on the eastern outskirts of Ramallah, destroying 12 cars.

Western diplomats trace what they say is settlers’ “widespread impunity” to post-Oct. 7 – when the Israeli military allowed settler reservists to serve as the bulk of forces patrolling the West Bank – saying these reservists are reluctant to stop fellow settlers. 

When asked about the army’s inaction in the face of settler violence against Palestinians as observed by the Monitor Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit said “any claim that the IDF supports and permits settler violence is false.”

“The IDF soldiers operate as needed against attempts to harm all civilians, both Palestinian and Israeli,” the statement said, reiterating a quote by the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, from last July that “an IDF officer who stands by seeing an Israeli citizen planning to throw a Molotov cocktail at a Palestinian house cannot be an officer.”

Saturday, with the gunmen gone, the Al Araareh family debated where they could relocate when the settlers return.

They yearn for Wadi Siq, where they were born and raised, in view but out of reach, for now.

“If this war ends and the situation changes, we will return home immediately,” says Nayef Al Araareh. “But we can never return if these settlers are still there.”

Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.

Taylor Luck took the road less travelled from the Midwest to the Mideast, where he is now a Middle East North Africa correspondent for the Monitor.

For the past 14 years, Taylor has reported from the Arab world - from Morocco to the UAE, and most places in between -  living among communities as well as reporting on them. More often than not you can find him in his adopted home of Amman, Jordan.

Fatima AbdulKarim is Special Contributor to the Christian Science Monitor.

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