When I was here last, everything was green. You’d walk into the village on a hilltop, and right away you could smell the goats and sheep. There was full sun, and already, in early April 2022, it felt like the beginning of summer. I was there to accompany the shepherds, because, since the spring of 2021, Yinon Levi and his gang of settlers had been harassing the men and their flocks, preventing them from accessing their fields. The land between Hebron, in the West Bank, and the Negev, in Israel proper, is not a desert, but rather a semi-arid region, and the fields flourish in the spring following the wet winter. This is how my acquaintances in Khirbet Zanuta, like Suleiman and Asir, and their ancestors going back generations, were able to sustain themselves here.

I returned to Zanuta in July of this year on a tour led by Becca Strober, a guide with Breaking the Silence. But now the village was empty—completely depopulated. On October 26 Levi and the other settlers had rounded up the villagers and, pointing guns in their faces, threatened to kill them unless they packed up and left forever. I had written about the ethnic cleansing of Zanuta for The Guardian this spring, after Levi and his accomplices were sanctioned by the US administration as well as several European governments. But I don’t think I actually understood what this settler takeover meant until I climbed up the hill from Highway 317 and into the village and I saw an Israeli flag flying from a pole erected at its entrance.

As I walked in, I saw how the settlers had spray-painted blue Stars of David on the half-demolished walls of what had been the homes of the families of Suleiman and Asir. Not a single soul was left. Just the hot dry wind blowing through the dead grass. I spun around, searching for some landmark that I could recognize, trying to get my bearings. Ah, I suppose that this is where the sheep pens were, but now the wire fence is gone, as is the corrugated steel roof. This is where Suleiman and Asir sat with my friends and I after shepherding, cajoling us to stay and eat labneh (strained yogurt), some tomato slices, tea, maybe eggs, and bread baked in their taboon oven. (Whenever you’re in these villages in the South Hebron Hills region, you almost always can smell the taboon oven, which looks like a small stone shed with smoke billowing out of it. The bread is baked, usually by women, on hot stones. The fire is fueled by dung; hence the unmistakable smell that I didn’t think that I would ever miss. But now I long for it, like one longs for the scent of the laundry from one’s childhood home. You don’t realize how much you have been missing the fragrance until you smell it again.)

The village itself feels like an illusion to me now. Because Suleiman and Asir and their families are gone. And I berate myself: What did I think was going to happen? I knew from the day that I met them that every day of the villagers’ lives was a struggle—a struggle to survive, to remain on their land, to resist expulsion by the settlers and their accomplices in the army. But I guess that I had some inborn hope in me, an unstated sense that the struggle would continue as long as it needed to, and they (we?) would inevitably prevail. But they didn’t prevail and we didn’t prevail. The settlers did! And where is Asir? Asir, who is such a sweet man. Asir, who one day turned to my friends Sally and Katie and me, and unprompted, said that we reminded him of his own children. Asir, who just wanted to earn a living and stay in his home. Where are you now, Asir?

I returned to Israel and the West Bank last month to lead a couple of solidarity study tours for young people from around the world who belong to the New Israel Fund’s NewGen (New Generations) communities.  No longer the participant, I was now a leader, a guide. In Zanuta, I had a group that I was supposed to be teaching about this place and what happened. But how can you lead when you yourself are overcome by emotion? How can you teach when, despite intellectual understanding, what is happening does not make any sense? As Becca, our guide, explained to the group that Zanuta was just one example of the dozens of Palestinian villages in the West Bank that had been forcibly displaced by settlers and the army during the war, I wiped away tears.

Zanuta wasn’t the only lachrymose stop on the tour—we also visited Ofakim, which was attacked by Hamas on October 7th; we spoke about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza resulting from the Israeli assault and siege with experts from Physicians for Human Rights and Gisha, an NGO dedicated to protecting Gazans’ freedom of movement; and more—but we also had moments of, dare I say, hope and inspiration. And not just hope like a feather floating in the breeze, but hope like the fire that burns inside those bodies fighting for systemic change, to overthrow oppressors, and to affect a nonviolent revolution in their society’s values.

In Tel Aviv, for example, our group cheered on a segment of the weekly Saturday night protest demanding that the Israeli government accept the ceasefire-hostage deal on the table. After the main demonstration of tens of thousands of protesters on Kaplan Street, two hundred activists blocked an intersection near Dizengoff, linking arms and sitting down in the road, as megaphones blared with their demands (“Deal now!” “Bring them home!”) and a bonfire burned a few meters beside them. A dozen or two dozen police tried to forcibly remove them, as we in NIF NewGen shouted our support from the sidewalk. Many of us had our phones out documenting. The police roughed up the demonstrators. I watched a few cops carry a man by his limbs from the road and then drop him on the curb. Falling a foot or two, his hand flew to his shoulder and he cried out in pain. I turned and I observed a couple of our fellows slowly inching forward toward the fracas in the street with their phones raised, like moths to the flame, and I gently pulled them back, like I had been pulled back by my program leader when I was a little moth at one of my first protests in Israel back in 2018.

Earlier that night, on the walk over to Kaplan, I made a point to check in with Gefen*, one of the American fellows, because I had seen her crying after one of the educational sessions the day prior. Gefen told me that after October 7, she had nightmares that she herself was being held in Gaza by Hamas. Gefen is Israeli-American with lots of family members still living in Israel. After our session on Gaza—which was absolutely devastating—she had gone to have dinner with her cousins. Gefen had shared with them what she’d heard that day (about whole families wiped off the population registry, polio outbreaks, people displaced for the third, fourth, and fifth time, tens of thousands dead and more unaccounted for), and her cousin, who had been on reserve duty in Gaza, excoriated her. “My friends and I are risking our lives fighting in Gaza. Meanwhile in Tel Aviv, you and your group sit in air conditioning and criticize us? You should be ashamed.”

If that’s not tough enough on its own, know that Gefen had clearly taken it upon herself, to continuously remind everyone of what many Israelis are thinking and feeling, which is not about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, or the prospect of a two-state solution, but their own existential fears and concern for their own safety and security. She had taken on the responsibility to be a mediator between the perspective of her progressive diaspora peers and her center-left Israeli family.

“I’m sorry, Gefen,” I said, touching her on the shoulder. Her eyes welled up.

“You have a big heart.” She started to cry.

“You are taking on a lot of responsibility. You’re feeling a lot of other people’s feelings and internalizing a lot of other people’s perspectives,” I said to her. “You don’t have to hold on to it all if you don’t want to.” Something I have started saying to myself more often in recent years (with mixed results).

“This is my life’s work,” she said, brushing her cheek.

I smiled.

“I know. And we’re in it for the long haul.” And I saw a twinkle behind the tear drop.

~~~

The day after the trip ended, I crashed on my friend Elly’s couch at her apartment in Jerusalem, which overlooks the Old City from the west. I was exhausted. And, honestly, after three weeks of looking into the shadow of this country and seeing some of the worst of humanity manifest before my eyes (I haven’t shared the half of it), I didn’t have an ounce of hope left in my body. I’d done what I needed to do emotionally to care for the group, to forge new bonds, to teach, but now, released from work, the feelings flooded out of me, and I found myself enveloped in a wet blanket of despair.

Thankfully, Elly came downstairs and brought me out of it. She asked, in terms that I’m paraphrasing, What does despair matter? What’s the value of hope, as feeling (as opposed to a deeper spiritual orientation)? To my acquaintances from Zanuta, or the demonstrators on Dizengoff, the commitment to their struggles is a fact of life, a fact of being, and being there. They are deeply rooted in this place. To fight or not to fight is not a question. Feelings come and go, like clouds across the Levantine sky, but the people on the ground remain steadfast.

For my part, and for the part of others around the world committed to the movement for justice and equality for all people who call the land between the River and the Sea home, Israelis and Palestinians, we too must be steadfast, embodying what they call sumud in Arabic. Because we are not fair weather fellow travelers or overnight activists. We feel this fight against the war, for the return of all hostages and political prisoners, and towards a just peace as our own personal fight—our life’s work, the fight for our families right to be, the fight for our people writ large, the fight for humanity itself—or we feel it because we are in solidarity, not primary stakeholders, but those willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings as they take on authoritarianism, ethnic supremacy, and perpetual war. But those struggles are our struggles too, wherever we are in the world today.

So, as it stands, Zanuta may be empty. The taboon oven might be cold. But the fire burns on. In me. In Asir and Suleiman. In the demonstrators on Dizengoff. In our NIF fellows. And now also in you, inshallah, b’ezrat HaShem.

*The name of this fellow has been changed due to sensitivities of discussing private family matters

Update: Recently, residents of Zanuta, accompanied by solidarity activists, returned to their village for the first time since their displacement. The Palestinian villagers were able to graze their flocks and clean up some of the debris.