By: Daniel Sokatch, NIF International CEO
Earlier this week, Zak Witus, NIF’s director of young leadership, was detained in Ben Gurion airport on his way back from Israel. He had been leading a group of Jewish young people, participants in the NIF’s Global Activism Fellowship (including NIFC’s Naomi Chazan Fellows), on a tour full of learning and action in Israel and the West Bank. As Zak waited at the gate, security pulled him aside. They had gone through his suitcase and found some t-shirts produced by NIF grantee organizations. One was in Arabic and Hebrew. It said “Khalas”—or “enough”. He also had a poster that said “Only Peace Will Bring Security.”
Zak conducted himself admirably, and, less than an hour later, was on his plane home. But his experience was unnerving, especially since just a week earlier, two American Jewish women—one aged 57, and another aged 18—were not only detained and deported after participating in a Rabbis for Human Rights olive harvest with Palestinians, but banned from entering Israel for ten years. This is egregious.
Let’s be clear: the Israeli government has crossed a new line, and it is recasting Israel’s relationship to Diasporic Jews. The women in this case are non-violent, loving critics of Israel, not radical anti-Israel activists.
The message the Israeli government is sending to Jews around the world is a stark rebuke to the entire Zionist enterprise as it was once understood: Diasporic Jews are not welcome in Israel if they dare protest what the self-described Jewish State does in the name of the Jewish people.
One of the women, 18-year old Leila Stillman-Unterbach, whose mother is a rabbi, was on a gap year with a program called Achvat Amim, or “Solidarity of Nations” which NIF also partners with. She wrote this in the Forward (I recommend you read the whole piece):
I was not wearing a kaffiyeh; I was wearing rings etched with the words of the Shema prayer. It did not seem to matter what I had said in my many interviews that day nor did it matter that I kept Shabbat, could speak nearly fluent Hebrew, and knew where to find the best falafel in Jerusalem. All that seemed to matter is that by showing up as a Jew to aid Palestinians, I was the wrong kind of Jew.
Leila was simply doing what we all ought to be doing—being the “wrong kind of Jew”, the kind who refuses to indulge in supremacy, who refuses to stand idly by as Palestinians face violence by settlers and the Israeli military, and who, instead, stands alongside Palestinians as they nonviolently face the forces of expulsion and annexation. We should all strive to be that “wrong kind of Jew”.
That’s exactly what protective presence activists like Oded Yedaya are as well. Protective presence is a practice that involves accompanying Palestinians shepherds and farmers, who are constantly at risk of harassment from settlers and the army, to their fields. And over the weekend, Oded—a 76-year-old photographer and the father of Ella Yedaya, an NIF staffer in Israel—joined a group of other Israeli activists who gathered together to harvest olives alongside Palestinians. When settlers began throwing rocks and beating people with sticks, Oded was chased down a steep hill and struck with at least two stones. The second one knocked him out cold, leaving a 2-inch gash in his forehead. The photos of him in the wake of the attack are difficult to look at—the blood from his head covered his whole body.
The U.N. called 2025 the worst year for settler violence since they began keeping track of incidents in 2006, counting an average of eight violent settler attacks per day in the West Bank. Settlers have set up outposts inside Palestinian villages. They are stealing herds. Torturing and killing livestock. Cutting down or burning mature olive trees. And attacking Palestinians wherever they see them. Can you imagine living under such a reality?
Earlier this month, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy named Ayssam Ma’ala, described by the New York Times as a “happy-go-lucky eighth grader,” died after inhaling a large quantity of tear gas that had been shot at his family by Israeli soldiers while they were on a picnic. His family thinks that they were being dispersed preemptively because the day before settlers had attacked Palestinians in the same area. But they can’t be sure.
The reason for all this violence couldn’t be clearer: There are extremist settlers, backed by leaders in the government, who are seizing a fragile moment—after two years of war in Gaza, and as the ceasefire there hangs in the balance—to intimidate and terrorize Palestinians in order to push them off their land.
Don’t take it from me, take it from Ziv Stahl, the executive director of Yesh Din, an NIF grantee (which is also funded by NIFC) that compiles statistics on settler and military violence against Palestinians and works to bring the perpetrators to court, who said as much on a webinar we hosted a week and a half ago. You can watch the whole thing (and I do recommend it) here.
The statistics also don’t lie: Under Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir—himself a militant settler convicted multiple times for incitement to terrorism—the police have opened nearly 75% fewer investigations into settler violence than in 2023. And according to Yesh Din, only 6% of investigations into settler violence between 2005 and 2024 ended in indictment. Only 3% have resulted in full or partial convictions. The level of impunity is wild. And we must do what we can to stop it.
That’s why NIF is working strategically to help Palestinians on the ground more than ever. Through the protective presence of people like Zak, Leila and Oded, and so many more like them whose stories we don’t hear, we are working to enable Palestinians to stay on their land. But there are more ways that NIF and our grantees are working to deter settler violence.
Through a rapid response grant to Legal Aid for Palestinians (or L.E.A.P.), we are offering Palestinians legal recourse—a way to bring civil lawsuits for damages incurred by settler violence. This new organization’s goal is to make extremist settlers think twice before burning a Palestinians’ car, throwing a rock through their window, or worse. And with another rapid response grant we are helping install security cameras in over 100 Palestinian villages to capture settler violence in real time.
Finally, with a third rapid response grant, we are directly rebuilding Palestinian homes demolished by Israel in the South Hebron Hills area known as Masafer Yatta. With assistance like this, Palestinians who might otherwise consider giving in and packing up can stay. What’s more, they know that there are Jewish people, in Israel and around the world, who stand with them and support them, and that they are not alone.
Leila—the 18 year old gap year student now banned from Israel for 10 years—wrote at the end of her essay in the Forward that she was taught to love her neighbor and repair the world. That’s what she was trying to do in the olive fields that day; that’s what we are trying to do at NIF. She ended her piece with one of the most determined, NIF-y messages I’ve heard in a long time:
“I am not done with Israel,” she wrote, “not done with Judaism. I am not giving up, and neither should any leftist American Jew. I believe that if there is hope for Israelis and Palestinians, it’s in the place of struggle. It does not serve us, as those who want a future of shared society, security, and justice in this land, to give up on this land.”
