Haifa is one of Israel’s largest cities, but as I walk down its streets on a late night in March, the typically bustling industrial area, home to one of the Mediterranean’s major seaports, is almost unnaturally still. At 4 a.m., the low hum from power lines is the only constant sound, while streetlights cast a dull orange glow over empty lots and warehouses. I nervously check the map on my phone every few minutes.
Navigating an unfamiliar city is challenging enough, but Haifa presents an additional hurdle. Located in the north of Israel, about twenty miles from the Lebanese border, it has been a frequent target of rocket attacks by Hezbollah since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel. The Israeli government is now implementing GPS spoofing in Haifa, which causes apps like Google Maps to display false locations—in this case, the map is inexplicably marking my location across the Israeli border in neighboring Jordan. The 3:30 a.m. bus should have brought me to my destination in plenty of time, but I had missed my stop, unable to accurately track my position on the map. It’s a forty-minute walk from the next stop to the pickup point; I make it just in time.
At 4:45 a.m., a small car pulls up into a turnout on the edge of town. The passenger window rolls down to reveal two friendly faces—David and Naomi, both members of an organization called Jordan Valley Activists, who are on their way out of Israel to the West Bank. I get in, and we drive along quiet roads in the northern Israeli countryside, stopping halfway at an empty service station to pick up another activist and switch cars before setting off again.
Outside, the sky begins to lighten, and the steep mountains of the Jordan Valley are now visible. After more than an hour on the road, one of the activists points out a checkpoint in front of us. But when we reach it, the soldiers wave us through without taking much interest. “Israeli number plate,” the driver says by way of explanation. We enter the West Bank just as the sun rises over the Jordanian Highlands.
It’s a regular trip for David and Naomi. “We come once every two weeks; it’s very fixed,” Naomi explains as we park near the small Palestinian community of al-Farisiya. Every other Sunday for the past two years, the couple leaves their comfortable life in Haifa, where they are both academics, and makes the same journey before dawn to engage in direct action in support of Palestinians. “Once we started,” Naomi tells me, “we never looked back.”
David and Naomi, both in their sixties, are part of a relatively small group of like-minded Israeli citizens who have decided to take action against their country’s occupation and systemic oppression in the West Bank. Most of their work there consists of what activists call “protective presence,” a community protection strategy in which activists with Israeli passports simply keep watch and accompany Palestinians, in the hopes of deterring attacks by Israeli settlers and authorities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several of his cabinet members have repeatedly called in recent years for Israel to annex Palestine’s Jordan Valley—a large, arid region of the West Bank that stretches along its eastern border with Jordan. President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has only fueled concerns that they will act on this proposal. The region is home to about 60,000 Palestinians, but is witnessing a wave of displacement as they are forced to leave due to military pressure and harassment by Israeli settlers.
Jordan Valley Activists focuses on aiding the Palestinian shepherding communities in the Jordan Valley, who are frequent targets of Israeli settler extremists. “All these NGOs come and go,” Naomi says, “but once we were here, we really felt this is more efficient than others.”
The couple still takes part in protests against Israel’s policies, but they feel their direct action makes a bigger impact. “You really feel like you’re physically stopping the occupation,” she adds.
Farther south in the Jordan Valley, just a few miles from the city of Jericho in the West Bank, the conditions in Ras Ein al-Auja are much like those in al-Farisiya. Most residents of this Palestinian community rely heavily on shepherding, but have been subject to recent Israeli settlement expansion and settler harassment.
That’s what Andrey X, an independent journalist and activist, is here to document. Andrey works with an Israeli activist organization called Looking the Occupation in the Eye and has spent the night in the group’s base camp in Ras Ein al-Auja along with Thea and Estee, two fellow members from Tel Aviv. After an early breakfast courtesy of their Palestinian host, Mohammed, we set off just as the sun starts to color the barren landscape.
John McAulay
Journalist and activist Andrey X walks past an Israeli settler’s camels in Ras Ein al-Auja.
A short drive takes us to the outskirts of the sprawling village, where we stop by a canal that is piled up with large rocks. Andrey explains that the settlers frequently block the Palestinians’ water source and have also been known to cut pipes leading from the stream into Ras Ein al-Auja. “This was one of the last places with unrestricted access for Palestinians to get water in the West Bank. Most others have been taken over by settlers, and now this one too.” We remove the rocks from the canal and head back to the village.
Thea is not surprised. “This is the usual,” she says. “A couple of days ago, a settler threw a rock at a school bus with children inside and nothing happened.” Andrey nods. “All of this,” he says, “is part of the increasing pressure on this area to get people out of the village.”
Andrey has been publishing social media content from Ras Ein al-Auja and other threatened areas of the West Bank for nearly a year and has amassed a large following. On his channels, Andrey documents the daily toil Palestinians face, from settler attacks and military operations to land theft and legal hardships. “There’s a lot of stuff happening here, but there isn’t nearly enough coverage,” he says.
Through his reporting, Andrey hopes to raise international awareness about the treatment of Palestinians throughout the West Bank, which he became more aware of after fleeing to Israel from Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. “There are definitely people who became activists because of our outreach programs, because of what my colleagues and I have been working on to bring more activists with Israeli passports here,” he says. But even if more Israelis get involved in these resistance efforts, Andrey believes the key lies in depleting Israel’s foreign support.
“I have no illusions in regard to convincing Zionists to stop being Zionists,” he says. “And I don’t think that’s how this conflict will be resolved. It will be resolved only through international pressure, through cutting off the supply of infinite cash for the occupation and genocide.”
Back up north in al-Farisiya, David and Naomi keep watch in the hills under the shade of a thorny bush, scanning the landscape for movement. Settlers often appear unannounced, harassing the Palestinian locals and their livestock. Sometimes their tactics are more extreme—they have been known to steal and even kill the locals’ sheep.
Ahmed, a resident of al-Farisiya, watches over his herd from a distance. He recounts how settlers once drove into the village in the middle of the night, honking and making loud noises. The next morning, residents woke up to find several Israeli flags planted at the entrance to the community, as if to claim the land.
“Their ultimate goal is to make the Palestinians leave,” David says as he peers over his glasses. “Here, this is done through low-key harassment.”
The harassment has been happening in al-Farisiya for years, but it has gotten worse as of late. A few months ago, its Palestinian residents asked Jordan Valley Activists to establish a presence to protect the community and document settlers’ attacks, which Naomi says has helped with their security. The stakes of this work could be a matter of life or death: The settlers may be willing to shoot the locals if there were no one else around to witness it, she says, “but they won’t shoot at us.”
Someone then approaches us from behind, and we turn sharply. It’s just Barakat, one of Ahmed’s cousins, trudging up the hill astride his donkey with lunch in hand. As we sit in the shade of a large tree, Barakat says the group’s presence has made a difference in keeping the locals secure.
“There are other communities that didn’t have this protection from activists, and when the settlers arrived, the Palestinians fled to larger towns,” he says. Barakat admits to us his fear that this may also happen to them, but he recognizes the role Jordan Valley Activists play in protecting the local communities from forced displacement. “Without you,” he tells David and Naomi, “it might be the end for Palestine.”
John McAulay
David of Jordan Valley Activists looks on as Barakat, a cousin of Ahmed, arrives for lunch in al-Farisiya.
Pressure had been building for months across the West Bank, including when I visited for the olive harvest in November 2024. Far from the Jordan Valley is the town of Deir Istiya, home to several thousand Palestinians. Many of its residents were employed in Israel until the government suspended work permits after the October 7 attacks. Since then, they’ve relied on local jobs such as farming and livestock work. Deir Istiya is surrounded by a cluster of rapidly expanding Israeli settlements—the largest, Ariel, is a settlement of 20,000, planted in the very heart of Palestine.
In a field on the outskirts of Deir Istiya, a local resident named Ibrahim and several of his relatives harvest olive trees together. The day I visit, they are joined by a few dozen activists who have made the trip from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem through an activist organization called Rabbis for Human Rights, ready to help tend to the trees.
Suddenly, we hear rustling in the nearby trees, and four soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) appear in full military gear. They tell us we’re too close to the nearby Israeli settlement, and that we need to leave, but the activists point out the military is lacking the necessary paperwork to force us out. We’re allowed to continue harvesting for another hour under their attentive watch. Eventually, the commander shows us a photo on his phone of a document declaring the field a “closed military zone,” which makes our presence illegal, and we leave.
John McAulay
IDF soldiers order Palestinians and Israeli activists to halt the olive harvest in Deir Istiya.
After we depart, a Rabbis for Human Rights field coordinator named Sam Stein (also a contributor to The Progressive) says that our encounter “was actually one of the most reasonable interactions with the military I’ve had in a while.”
Ibrahim credits the activists for the fact that the soldiers were less aggressive than usual. “The presence of Israelis in solidarity with the just Palestinian cause stops them from attacking us,” he says. “What they do to us, they don’t do to their own people.”
Lately, however, Palestinians and Israeli activists have noticed what Stein calls a “stark escalation.” Andrey agrees. “A lot more activists have been attacked lately,” he says. “I can’t count how many times I’ve been physically assaulted by settlers, soldiers, and police at this point.” Stein and Andrey, who are both Jewish and Israeli citizens, have each been arrested in the past year while engaging in peaceful activism and reporting. Each was physically assaulted, blindfolded, and tied up for hours before being taken to a police station, and was ultimately released without charge.
In fact, Stein wrote about Andrey’s arrest for The Progressive in January, just two months before enduring a nearly identical ordeal himself. Still, Andrey believes he is significantly better protected from violence as a Jewish Israeli citizen than Palestinians in the West Bank. “I know Palestinians currently held at military bases without charges,” he says. “They’re kidnapped, blindfolded, held at military bases, beaten, insulted, and then just thrown in the middle of the road somewhere.”
“Things have gotten harder and worse for us,” adds Stein, “but bottom line, we still face less violence than Palestinians. No matter how much things escalate, it’s always clear that we enjoy a privilege that they don’t.”