Eid Suleiman
Sam Stein (left) confronting a settler who is grazing his sheep on Palestinian land in the village of Umm Al Kheir on March 12, 2025.
For the past five years, I have engaged in an activist strategy known as “protective presence” in the West Bank. The premise is absurd, but simple: When more privileged people are around—particularly white, Jewish Israeli citizens—settler and military violence towards Palestinians is less likely to happen.
Whenever something does happen, we put our bodies in between Palestinians and violent actors while filming everything. All of our footage is then used for legal documentation and to raise awareness through NGOs, news publications, and social media.
A poll conducted by the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel shows that this activism works. Ecumenical Accompaniers (EAs) affiliated with the program offer a protective presence by witnessing the daily struggles of people living under occupation.
More than half of Palestinians surveyed at Israeli checkpoints said they benefited from the presence of EAs during inspections. Anecdotally, the stories of settler and military brutality that my Palestinian friends and colleagues have shared with me are much more extreme than what typically occurs in my presence. However, I recently briefly experienced a tiny taste of what it is like to be Palestinian in the eyes of Israel.
On March 12, I went to the village of Jurat al-Khail as a field coordinator for Rabbis for Human Rights, which brings volunteers into protective presence networks in solidarity with Palestinian communities. The community there had fled rampant settler violence in October 2024, but later received a warrant from the Israeli Supreme Court allowing them to return to their land with the assistance and protection of the military. I went to join the villagers of Jurat al-Khail, but was quickly ordered by the army to leave. Because of the various checkpoints, gates, and road closures I encountered on the way there, my car was far away, and it was a long trek back.
Just as I was approaching my car alongside an American volunteer from Rabbis for Human Rights, two soldiers approached. I had inadvertently parked near a military pillbox, and the soldiers demanded that I identify myself and explain what I was doing. I complied, but the soldiers quickly became aggressive, and one began filming and stuck his phone in the volunteer’s face. I began filming in response, and one soldier immediately yelled, “Oh, you just wasted six hours of your life,” referencing the fact that military detention can legally last up to six hours.
Sam Stein
Sam Stein shows an injury sustained to his eye during his detention by Israeli forces on March 12, 2025.
He threw me to the ground and began beating me while accusing me of attacking him. He stole my phone and tried to open it through biometric locks, which I do not use. He told me to give him the code, and when I replied that a warrant is required to search a phone, he threatened to kill me. Under duress, I complied: Legality does not matter if the legal body itself does not care.
The volunteer and I were both brought into the pillbox, where we were further threatened and abused, and one of the soldiers threatened to rape the American volunteer. We were zip-tied, blindfolded and forced to kneel on the ground. But when the soldiers realized that I am Jewish and an Israeli citizen—I heard one say, “He’s Jewish, apparently. His name is Shmuel [the Hebrew version of Samuel] and he speaks Hebrew”—the abuse became significantly milder. They berated me and called me a traitor while looking through my Instagram account on my phone, but only hit me once or twice more. The commander even loosened my zip ties and blindfold, and I could feel my heart rate slowly return to normal. I no longer feared for my life.
After a few hours of kneeling on the ground blindfolded and zip-tied in the military pillbox, I was placed under arrest. The American volunteer was released with no charges. While the police station was an overall safer environment, they continued violating my civil liberties there.
I was deprived of my right to privacy with my lawyer, as the officers refused to walk away while I was on the phone with her. The police also interrogated me in Hebrew and failed to provide me with a translator during the interrogation, as is legally required. Eventually, I was released on probation with a fifteen-day ban from the location of the incident.
The roughly fifteen minutes during which the soldiers thought I was Palestinian were the scariest of my life. Having had extensive legal training, I know the rights of both Palestinians under military law and non-Palestinians under Israeli civil law. It did not matter: If the state has no interest in enforcing its own law, those laws effectively do not exist.
This was nothing I did not already know, but I have now internalized it on a deeper level. Even with my status as an Israeli Jew, it was clear during my interrogation that if the police wanted to break the law, there was no way to stop them—as I saw again less than two weeks later, when No Other Land co-director Hamdan Ballal was beaten by Israeli settlers and then detained by police in the West Bank.
This is not a uniquely Israeli problem: In the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) illegally arrested and detained Palestinian solidarity activist Mahmoud Khalil, even though he is a lawful permanent resident with a green card. Amnesty International has accused Japan of abusing inmates. India has a documented record of oppressing religious and ethnic minorities. The list goes on and on.
Many or all of these human rights abuses violate the legal codes of the countries committing them. But the expectation that these states will hold themselves accountable is absurd and farcical. Whatever systems of checks and balances we may rely on inevitably fail when powerful governments refuse to play by their own rules.
These abuses are a symptom; the disease is hierarchy. And as long as we conform to systems that afford state forces unequivocally higher status than civilians, we are tacitly agreeing that cases like mine—and the much more severe ones that happen every day, in the West Bank and throughout the world—are part of the deal.
I would not wish my experience on anyone, and yet, in some ways, I’m glad it happened. I am glad to better understand what Palestinians go through every day. I am glad that when Hamdan Ballal and two of his neighbors describe spending an entire night on the ground in a military base, I have a tiny bit of context for what that experience feels like.
I hope that this experience helps me to become a better ally and activist; in line with the internal logic of protective presence work, the sad truth is that more people will empathize with this story when it happened to an Israeli Jew instead of to a Palestinian. For about fifteen minutes, I was effectively Palestinian, and I now know better than before: Protective presence works.
Editor’s note: The Progressive and others are calling for an immediate investigation into Stein’s forceful detention and full accountability for the actions of the soldiers involved. On March 15, The Progressive sent a formal letter to both the Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli Ministry of Defense Complaints Unit raising concerns about Stein’s treatment and requesting a written response. As of press time, no response, nor any acknowledgement of these letters has been received.