In August of last year a video was posted on X by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem in which four masked settlers, three of them wielding clubs, can be seen walking onto a Palestinian man’s land. One settler, wearing a sheet of white cloth tied around the lower part of his face, is recorded insisting that the land, and therefore the home and the herds on it, had been bequeathed to him by his forefathers to whom God had given it millenia earlier. The Palestinian owner of the land and the home and the sheep says, in English, “What do you want?” The settler replies, also in English, “I want to dance with you, man.” The Palestinian says, “I’m not your bitch.” The settler replies, “You look sweet. You are my bitch. And you look sweet. You look so sweet.” And then he walks menacingly around the man in a circle before saying “I would be happy to sit with you in jail someday. I would be happy. You know Sde Teiman? Sde Teiman!” And he continues, in Hebrew, “Rape in the name of God, as they say. Understand? Rape in the name of God.” And then he makes a kissing noise before the video goes black. The settler was referring to the violence committed by Israeli prison guards against inmates in the detention center at Sde Teiman, an Israeli military base in the Negev. One of the horrors perpetrated was systematic rape. (B’Tselem published a report which revealed that detention centers were used as “a network of torture camps for Palestinians.”) The settler speaking in the video is named Shemtov Luski. The Palestinian he was threatening is Hamdan Ballal. You may have heard of him. Earlier this year he stood on stage at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles to accept an Oscar for the documentary film No Other Land, which he co-directed. You may have also heard that on March 24, 2025, Ballal was brutally beaten by an Israeli settler and some Israeli soldiers. The settler kicked his head “like a football” while attacking his village. That settler was Luski. After the attack, Ballal was charged with “throwing stones at Israeli soldiers,” arrested, and held for twenty hours blindfolded on the floor beneath blasting air conditioning. Luski was not charged with any crime of any kind. Ballal told CNN that each time new soldiers rotated onto guard shifts, they would kick, punch, and beat him with a stick. Ballal doesn’t speak Hebrew, but he could hear them saying his name and the word “Oscar.” From this he surmised what anyone who has been in Israel since the Academy Awards ceremony has seen for themselves: Israelis are extremely angry about the movie that he made. “I realized they were attacking me specifically,” Ballal told reporters after his release. No doubt he was right in his assumption, but that doesn’t mean that the treatment he received was rare or unusual. After all, he didn’t have to win an Academy Award for Luski to attack him the first time. 
On the day that Ballal was released — his face marked with bruises and his shirt spattered with blood — an Israeli activist named Dafna Banai had driven to Palestinian villages in the West Bank delivering food and water to Palestinian shepherds and their families so that they would have something with which to celebrate Eid al-Fitr. (Owing to crushing poverty, exacerbated by conditions since October 7, food is hard to come by in the West Bank, and water even more so.) After she returned home, Banai told me that “every single family I saw had at least one person in it who was severely injured by settlers. Every single one. I saw cracked skulls, I saw broken arms.” Israeli settler terrorism is hardly a new phenomenon. Banai, for instance, has been going into the West Bank for over two decades to protect Palestinian shepherds from Israeli settler violence. And as soon as she started regularly practicing this form of activism it became evident to her and her colleagues that Israeli soldiers and police officers were not interested in doing anything to stop the settler violence. “Our job is to protect Jews, not Palestinians,” one soldier told Banai in the early 2000s. But over the past few years, and accelerated dramatically since Donald Trump won the American elections in 2024, the Israeli government has been using settler terrorism as a tool to push Palestinians off land in the West Bank. The government has been pioneering a new strategy for Palestinian displacement, utilizing what they call “agricultural farms” or “shepherding outposts.” The strategy is simple and effective. The Palestinian shepherds live in the open fields of the Jordan Valley because their herds require grazing lands. As a consequence of the requirements for raising their livestock, they control more land than just the land on which their houses were situated. Settlers, in collaboration with the Netanyahu government, realized that they could do the same thing: they could construct these shepherding outposts next to Palestinian shepherding villages and force out the Palestinian inhabitants through terror tactics while also controlling the land radiating out from their outposts. Before this strategy was implemented, the primary tool for displacing Palestinians in the West Bank was what we now call lawfare, organized by right-wing Israeli lawyers and often funded by their American allies. The subject of Ballal’s film was precisely this kind of legal oppression: the film details the past twenty years of legal disputes about Masafer Yatta, a village in the West Bank which the Israeli government claims can be legally destroyed to use the land as a live-fire military training zone. In a country in which the highest law in the land is written by and for Israelis, the Israeli court system hardly ever results in legal victories for Palestinians against the Israeli government. But why waste years litigating the case in court and incrementally destroying the villages when one can simply employ “shepherds” to
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