For the last three years or so, the pastoral West Bank village of Ras al-‘Ain was my home away from home, its Bedouin people an extended family. Israeli settlers living in illegal outposts adjacent to the village assaulted it daily throughout these years and have now finally overwhelmed it. All the families have taken apart their houses and left.
Ras al-‘Ain was the last large Palestinian village in the southern Jordan Valley. The others, including the twin village of Mu‘arrajat two miles away, had been destroyed and their people expelled in a highly effective campaign of ethnic cleansing backed by the Israeli government. For many decades roughly a thousand people lived in Ras al-‘Ain. They belonged to three Bedouin tribes—Rashaida, Jahalin, and Ka‘abneh—that united in the hope that together they could withstand settler violence. Most of the villagers were shepherds, surviving in a subsistence economy. On the night of March 7, 2025, dozens of heavily armed settlers under the protection of the police and the army invaded Ras al-‘Ain and stole at least a thousand, and possibly as many as 1,500, of the villagers’ sheep and goats. We have excellent video documentation, taken by two remarkably courageous activists, of that raid. The Palestinian owners submitted a formal complaint to the police, with the video documentation, but—as usual these days—within a few hours the police closed the file on the grounds that there was no supporting evidence. A thousand sheep are worth some two million Israeli shekels. The economic foundation of the village was devastated.
Still, most of the families held on. The village was on privately owned Palestinian land that under Israeli law should have been off limits to the settlers. No Israeli official, however, was prepared to enforce the law. The police have been turned into a vicious ultranationalist militia under the command of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the serial criminal (dozens of indictments and several convictions) and hate-monger appointed minister of national security by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There is also no succor from the Israeli civil courts. After the theft of the sheep, those who remained in the village still had to deal with the daily incursions of the settlers, including beatings, curses, threats, harassment, pepper spray, and more theft. Our activists—all of us Gandhian-style nonviolent resisters—did what we could to block the violence, with some success.
In late December 2025, the settlers plowed a large expanse of the village land—plowing in the West Bank is a claim to possession—and created the rudiments of another illegal outpost inside Ras al-‘Ain, not far from an outpost set up earlier a little farther south. The plowing was preceded by a day of particularly savage attacks on Palestinians, journalists who came to report, and our activists. The settlers also besieged several of the houses bordering the plowed field and the outpost, blocking the residents’ access to food, water, and electricity. As our friend Salameh told me, “We have nothing left—no money, no food, no water, no medicines, no rest, and no hope.” Within a few days of this torment, the families began the excruciating business of demolishing their houses. I witnessed it. It was perhaps the hardest day I have known in twenty-some years in the occupied West Bank.
A few families managed to stay on, braving the danger. Settler gangs roamed the village freely, exulting in their victory over what they call “the enemy”—the peaceful people of Ras al-‘Ain. Daily and nightly attacks on Palestinian homes and families continued. By now the village has been emptied of its people. If you’d like to witness human evil at its worst, come with me any day to the West Bank.
The story of Ras al-‘Ain has been replicated again and again throughout Area C in the occupied territories, which is under full Israeli control. By our count, Ras al-‘Ain is the eighty-sixth village destroyed in the last two to three years. No one knows for sure how many brainwashed, hate-driven, sadistic settlers are now active in Area C. Many of them are adolescents trained to hurt and kill; most of them hope for an apocalypse that will herald the arrival of the Messiah. Netanyahu, in his usual mendacious style, recently claimed in an interview that there are only about seventy of them. He knows better than that. The real number is closer to many hundreds, maybe more; they are not subject to punishment or restraint of any kind. If the government wanted to stop these pogroms and the entire project of ethnic cleansing, the army could do so in a few days. So far there’s no sign of the Messiah. However one looks at the situation, we are witnessing a major moral disaster resulting from numberless crimes against humanity. And then there is Gaza.
The army in the territories, like the police, like the civil service, indeed like most of the institutions of Israeli democracy, has been corrupted by Netanyahu’s government. Officers and soldiers at all levels are firmly bonded with the bloodthirsty settlers. The Supreme Court is fighting for its survival in the face of overt statements by the prime minister, as well as several of his ministers, that they will not honor its rulings. Put simply, the government is now the number one enemy of the Israeli state as we have known it.
Elections are scheduled for later this year, but there is every reason to doubt that they will actually take place or that they will be honest and secure. Already the right-wing parties of the governing coalition are advancing bills in the Knesset that would rig the elections in their favor. A new law still pending would bar anyone or any party that has even hinted at support for the Palestinian cause and is thus classed as a terrorist from being elected to the Knesset. For the Kahanists like Ben-Gvir and the wild and thuggish settlers, any Arab person is by definition a terrorist. The goal is to disqualify Israeli Arab parties from participating in the elections, with the result that Arab voters will not turn up to vote. Decisions about disenfranchisement will now rest entirely with the Central Elections Committee, made up mainly of members of the Knesset, rather than with the Supreme Court, which in the past had oversight of such questions. In those days the bar was set very high, as is normal in a true democracy. Not anymore. If the Israeli Arab parties, which won over 10 percent of the votes in the last elections and are likely to win more than that this year, are barred from running, the Israeli right wing will rule for the foreseeable future. As of this writing, the four Arab parties that ran in the 2022 elections are trying to create a single joint list.
Then there is a bill, tailored specifically for Netanyahu, that would declare (probably retroactively) that fraud and breach of trust are no longer criminal offenses. He is charged with these crimes, along with bribery; the court that has been hearing his case for the last six years is setting a world record for indolence and delay. So far the bill has not been passed into law. Another law in process would subordinate the committee responsible for the appointment of judges to the mercies of the extremist right-wing politicians. The attempt to eviscerate it is the keystone in the government’s demolition of the rule of law. The coalition is also trying to take over the body that regulates Israeli universities; if this succeeds, it will be the death knell for the country’s world-class academic system. More legislation along these lines, initiated by the fanatical justice minister, Yariv Levin, is in the works.
Recently I made a list of prevalent assumptions that provide the underpinnings for much of Israeli society and politics. I’ll mention four (there are more), all of them either obsolete or clearly unethical or both.
1. The Land of Israel, from the Jordan River to the sea, belongs to the Jews and only to the Jews.
2. The state is a metaphysical entity worth dying for, if necessary, rather than a pragmatic framework meant to make life livable for its citizens.
3. What was initially an explicit drive to create a Jewish majority in Palestine—a goal realized in the course of the 1948 war and the Palestinian Nakba—has morphed into an obsession with ensuring Jewish supremacy throughout the land, and specifically in the occupied territories. To that end, Israel needs a harsh apartheid system in the West Bank.
4. An Israeli proverb: “If force doesn’t work, use more force.” Not even Thomas Hobbes entertained such a primitive notion of what constitutes power. International legitimacy no longer counts.
One corollary to these assumptions is the grandiose yet desperate militarism that permeates so much of public life. It dominates the passion and the logic of the Israeli right, especially when meshed with a self-righteous delight in seeing oneself as an eternal victim. There is no room for ethical thought, let alone generosity or compassion, in that kind of mental universe. I will always remember my commanding officers in the first (futile) Lebanon War in 1982 telling us that we had the great privilege of dying for the state.
No one doubts that Israel has serious enemies. But the idea that, as Netanyahu has recently argued, Israel will have to become a super-Sparta—that is, mired in perpetual war—is a sure recipe for self-destruction. Similarly, there is no doubt that there is antisemitism in the world, but criticism of Israeli policies and actions is not antisemitism. The best, indeed the only way to emerge from the present morass and to weaken our enemies is to move toward serious détente between Palestinians and Israelis.
One might ask, especially after October 7, if there are Palestinian counterparts to the Israeli peace activists still working toward this goal. The answer is yes. It’s easy enough to agree that the Palestinian Authority is hopelessly corrupt. Despite that, its security services have cooperated effectively with Israeli intelligence for the last twenty-five years, saving many Israeli lives. On a deeper level, the many Palestinians I have known and worked with over the last decades in the villages and cities hunger for peace. As one of the shepherds from Mu’arrajat once said to me, “We all live for such a short time above ground. For all eternity we will be underneath it. Why do people waste the time we have in hurting and killing one another?” I have also met several prominent “Palestinian Gandhis” committed to nonviolent resistance, not only because they have seen how violence always works against them but also on moral grounds. Nonetheless, Netanyahu continues to do all in his power to make sure that the answer to my question is no, since the mere idea of peace with the Palestinians is anathema to him.
Is democracy, in some imperfect form, still an intrinsic part of the Israeli worldview, as it was in the Scroll of Independence, the foundational text for the State of Israel? It is, I would guess, for approximately half the body politic. The other half applies the term “democracy” to the ongoing attempt to eradicate minority rights and to put an authoritarian, or dictatorial, or perhaps theocratic system in place. Fortunately Israel still has a strong base of remarkable people prepared to struggle for universalist values, as well as for the classic Jewish values of imaginative empathy, kindness, and freedom from slavery for all. But as long as the occupation, with its daily horrors, continues apace, and as long as the extreme Israeli right is in power, democracy in Israel will be sick at the core. It cannot be healed without our recognizing Palestinians as human beings with equal rights, and doing our part to set them free. Meanwhile we have communal violence fomented by the coalition and bordering on civil war, a government that has declared war on the courts and the entire democratic system, moral catastrophes wherever one looks, and ongoing, brutal ethnic cleansing—a second Nakba—as in Ras al-‘Ain.
We are watching the not-so-slow disintegration of the Israeli state. Newton taught that entropy always prevails in the end. But here we have willful, personally initiated and executed entropy in the form of barbarism. Netanyahu and the nonentities around him bear a heavy responsibility. Still, we have to remember that in the most recent elections in 2022, 23.41 percent of the electorate—more than a million Israelis, a large number in this tiny country—voted for him and his Likud party.
Some people think that the present crisis was inevitable because of the flaws inherent in the Zionist program from the start. I don’t accept that deterministic teleology, though the settler colonial enterprise in the occupied territories and the failure to come to terms with the Palestinian national movement were and are cardinal sins. No doubt a long history of collective trauma, bitterly reinforced on October 7, has played a part in the present disaster. In any case the ethno-nation-state is prone to racism and cruelty, as Hannah Arendt saw clearly in 1947 (and she was a Zionist). Perhaps the bottom line is that the Israeli people, like nearly all Palestinians in the occupied territories, are chronically terrified, not without reason. Somewhere in the depths of that fear there may still be a hidden spark of humane caring, sanity, and hope.
—February 12, 2026
English (US) · 