Author’s Note
I witnessed the events described in this article in November 2024. By the spring of 2025, I finally had confirmation for a fact I spent months trying to track down. Yet I still did not publish.
I was not emotionally ready. What unsettled me was not only what I had witnessed that day, but what the investigation revealed about my own assumptions as a journalist. I still feel some anxiety in publishing this. But enough time has passed. The story deserves to stand on its own.
Since then, I continue investigating how organisations document and report “settler violence.” That work has reinforced for me that large statistical databases and international reporting deserve careful scrutiny. Yet that does not change the value of investigating individual events on their own merits. This article is not based on aggregate statistics or advocacy reports. It is based on what I observed and what I learned after months of trying to verify the facts about one specific place.
What follows is the piece as I wrote it last summer.
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I could pretend I was never there. I could pretend I don’t know.
But if pretending is not consistent with who I am, do I really have to write this up?
I wonder if my poor heart will act up at some point during the editing and rewriting as it did on the field trip in which I played undercover journalist.
Over the years I have investigated cases of alleged settler violence against Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank). When able to get enough material, I found that the Arabs or their Jewish activist partners instigated the violence and then just recorded the Jewish settlers defending themselves.
But I was never there in real time. I could only research in retrospect and second-hand.
Therefore, one Friday morning in November, I boarded a bus with 45 volunteers with the NGO, Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR), pretending to be one of them. I wanted proof that I was right – that settler violence was a reaction to incitement.
I was certain that the olive groves we set out to help harvest were on Israeli public land in Area C, where Israel has exclusive control under the Oslo Accords, meaning that the Arabs have no legal right to cultivate it unless granted a license by Israel’s Civil Administration. I also expected that violence – if there was any – would likely be incited by RHR activists with settler response being documented as aggression.
The day started out quietly enough.
As our bus pulled over to the side of the road, I saw two vehicles standing alongside each other up the hill across the valley, facing us, as if awaiting our approach. While I found their presence curious, I gave them no further thought.
Most of the volunteers were directed to work in the grove down a slope next to the parked bus. I was in a smaller group that was sent by foot a few hundred meters back to the other side of the road.
As we were walking, the settlers in the two vehicles came down from their perch in the hills and drove past us; they soon made a U-turn and came back to drive past us again, one taking videos with an arm stretched out the car window. Directly ahead of me, a volunteer muttered something in disdain as he knocked the phone out of the settler’s hand.
I picked up the phone and handed it to the young man as he opened the pick-up door. The other car stopped and members of the RHR group and three of the four young settlers were standing with their Smartphones in each other’s faces, videotaping each other. To me, it was a ridiculous sight.
Instead of trying to listen to them, I walked around to the driver’s side of the pick-up and took a video through the car windows. I wanted to talk with the driver and began to ask him a journalistic question but he just told me he was not interested in anything I had to say.
After this unpleasant but not threatening altercation, the two vehicles drove off. I went with the others to the olive grove. Reaching the trees meant scaling a high rock terrace. The hilly region is dotted with rock terraces that enable farming on land that would otherwise erode away with cultivation.
I am 73, overweight, with two artificial knees and a fear of falling. Once, I would have bounded up like a gazelle. Now, to my shame, I needed two people pulling me and one pushing from behind.
As I made sure of my footing on the now-level ground, two Palestinian women spread plastic sheeting under the trees to collect the olives as they fell from the branches. A few farmers and younger members of our group climbed into the trees to get olives higher up. Others had long poles to beat the branches and ‘encourage’ the olives to let go and fall to the ground. And the rest of us were given a kind of comb with prongs that were smaller than the olives’ circumference so that we could pick them off like I used to comb lice from my kids’ hair decades ago.
A short time later, we noticed a commotion in the larger grove down the road. We were told to abandon the harvest and go higher up the hill as some of the young settlers were running toward us. I tried to see what was happening but only got a quick video between two trees of men running along the road near us.
Then I heard the rustling whooshes of stones in the nearby trees. I was there to document whether settler violence was instigated by the settlers or the leftist NGO and here was the violence. I stood still for a moment debating with myself: move to where I had a clear view of the stone-throwers or run away? Not relishing the thought of a stone in my head, I ran away.
Tried to run away. I would have had to climb more unstable terraces. There was nobody near me now and I had to manage on my own. I did not go far before sitting to rest on the largest rock.
I do not remember feeling fear. Just feeling physically uncomfortable. It was hard for me to breathe and I felt pressure in the middle of my chest. Nothing hurt. Only pressure and shortness of breath. Two days later, I discovered that what had looked to me and others as trying to catch my breath had actually been a mild heart attack.
The rock throwing was over and, when I felt better, I went down to the road where volunteers, farmers, and soldiers loitered seemingly aimlessly. I sat on the metal barrier that marks the edge of the road’s shoulder, next to a woman about my age. Two young soldiers approached; in a friendly manner, they asked the other woman where she was from. With a disdainful look, she replied, “It’s none of your business.”
The soldiers’ faces fell and they moved back. I tried to smile and call out in a warm voice, “I’m from Haifa.” But they were no longer interested in engaging.
Part of me wanted to shake her and say: “Don’t you realise these young soldiers risk their lives for our safety?”
Instead, I said nothing. I was shocked by the venom in her voice but did not want to bring attention to myself as someone who opposes the group’s political views. Later, however, I thought that this had nothing to do with politics; it was a matter of decency and respect for those who put themselves at risk for all of us. And as RHR likes to say, silence in the face of injustice is acquiescence.
The soldiers soon received a virtual document declaring the olive groves a ‘closed military zone’ and three members of RHR were arrested -- for arguing with the soldiers, I think. The rest of us got onto the bus to return home. The farmers and the settlers each went their separate ways. That was a quiet finale to the chaos of military orders and arrests.
Both sides shared their versions of events.
The settlers’ perspective was reported on X by a journalist in direct contact with them; he wrote that dozens of activists and Arabs had come to harvest olives as cover for provocation against settlers. He showed a photo of the phone broken by an activist and claimed that Arabs threw stones.
I did not see any Arabs throw stones; rather, it was settlers who did. And if the screen was broken on the phone I handed back to the settler, I did not notice. Was harvesting olives provocation? That depends on who owns the land.
RHR posted a report claiming that about 20 settlers “attacked Palestinian farmers and our volunteers with stones and poles” and that “several Israeli volunteers and a Palestinian farmer were lightly injured and received medical treatment at the scene.”
Our small group was definitely attacked with stones and the other group harassed by settlers, one with a pole in hand. There were nowhere near 20 of them, as far as I could see. I also saw nobody injured or receiving medical treatment at the scene. When I asked the RHR spokesman how I missed seeing any injuries, I was amused when he told me I was one of them. I knew about the heart attack only two days later and of course they learned of it after I did but their post went up before that. He told me that a Palestinian RHR staff member was seen by a doctor back home for a bruised shoulder.
I oppose vigilantism. The settlers were wrong for attacking the farmers and activists whoever owned the land. If the groves were on Israeli public land and the Palestinian Arabs did not have a license to farm there, some would justify the settlers’ actions as protecting Israeli property. If not, they were criminal trespassers on private property who should have been arrested, and not the activists.
The Missing Piece
I had my story and could have written it up as is. It would have made compelling reading with which neither side would be happy, I think. But I felt it was incomplete without knowing who actually owned the land on which the olive groves grew. That was the missing piece.
It took over five relentless months of unanswered queries and with referrals from one person to another before I finally tracked down a source willing to tell me the truth on condition of anonymity: the land is, in fact, privately owned by the Arab farmers, he said.
I stared at the screen, frozen. “What do I do with this?” I asked myself. “Can I even write the article now?” “Will I lose the trust of at least some, if not all, of my sources from the nationalist camp?”
I would have preferred it to have been public Israeli land. And had that been the answer I got in my stubborn pursuit for the truth, my research would have ended there. I would have had everything I needed for my report.
But knowing that it was private land was not enough for me: was it theirs according to Ottoman Land Laws (cultivating land makes it yours) or was it part of the land parcels Jordan handed out when she occupied this region? Can I see the deed to the property? And questions arose that I would like to address to RHR, nationalist NGOs, and Israel’s Civil Administration.
It hit me hard to realise that my digging would have stopped had I received confirmation of my bias; I would have had no more questions. It was only the unwelcome truth that pushed me into the deeper, more comprehensive investigation that I am now pursuing. I am disappointed in myself.
According to official Israeli statistics, the great bulk of the violence in the region is committed by Palestinian Arabs against Jews and some of the Jewish violence is in response to that. But that is not what I saw that day in the olive grove. I witnessed unambiguous settler violence that I cannot condone. I saw what I did not want to see.
My heart attack was the kind called “Takotsubo,” colloquially known as “broken heart syndrome.” I found it condescending when a friend called it that. But now, looking back, I recognise that my heart did break to see Jews throw rocks at us and to see the scorn of the Jewish volunteers toward soldiers who could have been their brothers or grandsons. Later finding out that the land was owned by the farmers, something I suspect the settlers knew and that should have prevented the harassment, at least in that instance, was the final blow to my shattered confidence in what I thought I knew. A harsh reckoning.
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Sheri, thank you for your article. If there’s one thing we are lacking in all the noise, it’s the truth, and the courage to tell it. Today, you showed courage. ❤️
Thank you for your honesty and courage. An unpalatable truth is sweeter than a comfortable lie. Your integrity is what keeps the light shining.