The writer among residents of Umm al-Khair, in the southern West Bank, December 2024. (Khadija Toufik)
Growing up in the American Orthodox Jewish world, spending a post-high school year studying Torah in Israel was simply what one did. I chose to attend a "mechina" - an Israeli military preparatory program -- unaware that what I considered my "year in Israel" would actually place me on occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank.
"Mechinat Yeud" operated from Efrat, an illegal settlement in the Gush Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem. Our days there were largely split in two: the first half was spent immersed in Torah study, and the other half was devoted to hiking, community service, and Krav Maga training.
I finished that year with little understanding of Israel's occupation. While I noticed more "Arabs" (the word "Palestinians" never crossed our lips) around my settlement than in Israel proper, I remained oblivious to their reality of living under foreign military rule, with no citizenship or voting rights.
The first time I recall hearing the word "occupation" was when my rabbi -- a resident of the illegal settlement Alon Shvut -- grumbled about Israelis having restricted access to the Temple Mount. "Israel," he declared, "is occupied by Arabs."
Five years later, while studying at Hunter College in New York, a Palestinian student from Bethlehem spoke at our Hillel club. Having lived a short distance away from him during my time in Efrat, I naively thought of us as "neighbors." But when he explained that attending university in New York required him to first secure Israeli permits just to cross into Jordan for the right to board an international flight, the stark contrast between our lives became impossible to ignore.
Seven years after my time in the mechina, I returned to Israel-Palestine -- this time with a working understanding of the West Bank's occupation and the responsibility that came with stepping onto this land. I knew I had to engage in concrete anti-occupation activism. That's how I came to join All That's Left, a grassroots, non-hierarchical collective of diaspora Jews committed to direct action against the occupation.
Through All That's Left, I began traveling regularly to the West Bank with a perspective wholly different from my 18-year-old self. I joined Palestinian farmers in their fields, accompanied shepherds grazing their flocks, attended protests against Israeli state violence, and eventually spent nights -- then weeks, then months -- in Palestinian villages. As part of protective presence activism, my fellow activists and I documented settler attacks and military incursions, hoping our privileged status in the eyes of the state might deter violence.
This work led me to September 2024, when, after joining Rabbis for Human Rights as a field coordinator, I decided to move full-time to Masafer Yatta -- a cluster of Palestinian villages in the South Hebron Hills whose people have endured relentless settler and military violence aimed at driving them off their land, as recently depicted in the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. By moving there, I hoped to strengthen my ties with the community, improve my Arabic, and offer protective presence.
As a Jewish Israeli citizen -- part of the demographic driving settlement expansion -- I wanted to ensure my presence in Masafer Yatta, living alongside Palestinians, would actively resist the occupation rather than perpetuate it. Through conversations with locals, and my work with initiatives like Hineinu, I came to understand that it was both welcomed and valued by the Palestinian residents.
With no timeline, no institutional backing, and not even a Jerusalem apartment to return to if things turned awry, I put every belonging I owned into my car and set off south toward Masafer Yatta.
For six months, I lived alongside those I'd been relentlessly warned would kill me at first opportunity. The truths I learned there must be shared, especially with others raised on the same fears. These lessons carry urgent weight because Masafer Yatta is once again facing a campaign of demolition that threatens to erase its people from the only land they know.
During my year in mechina, our director would invariably point to the bright red signs marking entrances to Area A -- the West Bank territory officially under full Palestinian control. The Israeli-installed warnings declared entry "illegal" and "dangerous to your lives" for Israeli citizens. "That's the real apartheid," our director would claim, lamenting Israelis' supposed exclusion from these areas. Only later did I come to understand that Palestinians neither intended to exclude me nor possessed actual authority over these spaces.
In reality, the ban against Israeli citizens entering Area A exists more on paper than in practice. These restrictions aren't aimed at protecting Israelis, but at reinforcing a system and culture of apartheid through psychological barriers. Where checkpoints and walls end, fear and self-policing take over as tools of separation.
Unlearning this conditioned racism, I soon learned, required immersion in spaces where Palestinian culture remains the dominant one. I've visited Bethlehem's historical sites, trained in Ramallah's martial arts studios, and shopped at Yatta's markets. Nearly every time, locals discovered I was both Jewish and Israeli, and yet I never felt threatened. The only genuine anxiety came when leaving Palestinian cities, sitting in endless checkpoint traffic, a daily reminder of the occupation's overwhelming weight.
If you grew up as a typical Modern Orthodox Jew in America like I did, you'll find no common cause with those who spend Shabbat afternoons driving around and using phones to coordinate attacks on Palestinians.
Unlike the more "moderate" settlers of places like Efrat or Alon Shvut who at least maintain a facade of religious observance, even as they prop up the occupation, the violent outpost radicals are entirely alien to your world.
If you encountered the typical hilltop youth at school, you wouldn't see a peer, you'd see an at-risk youth in need of intervention. And the older men who run these outposts? They're nothing like the rabbis who taught you in day school -- these are ideological extremists who weaponize our tradition while trampling the very halacha you were taught was paramount and immutable.
Like most Jews and Israelis, I was raised to view the IDF as infallible. But when I say the army lies, I'm not talking about spin or selective truth-telling. I mean they fabricate reality wholesale -- creating fictions devoid of any factual basis.
I've personally witnessed events, only to later read military accounts that completely contradicted reality. I've twice been assaulted by soldiers and settlers, only to then be arrested on the absurd claim that I had attacked my assailants.
This pattern of deception isn't new: long before these past 18 months, Israel has repeatedly retracted its official stories, as the world witnessed following the assassination of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Yet even Zionist government critics still reflexively give the military the benefit of the doubt. Today, as Israel commits genocide in Gaza behind a wall of censorship, we must start from the opposite assumption: that every official word from the military is a lie.
A fellow Hineinu activist once described responding to violence in Masafer Yatta as "playing whack-a-mole." Each morning's emergency call -- settlers attacking here, soldiers invading there -- launched another day of sprinting between hotspots and documenting atrocities.
I adapted to this rhythm of crisis: sleeping with my ringer set to pierce the night, a change of clothes always within arm's reach, honing the niche skill of dressing in seconds while half asleep. To this day, a ringing phone sends my heart racing.
It quickly became clear that my mere presence there profoundly unsettled the Israeli soldiers. They would invent pretexts to drive myself and other activists away -- detaining me for photographing a civilian car, falsely accusing me of entering Area A, or targeting our vehicles with petty traffic violations.
But while this constant harassment wore me down, it paled in comparison to what my Palestinian neighbors endured daily. I know that even on so-called "quiet" days, the violence hadn't stopped, it simply meant others were shouldering the burden instead of me.
Integrating into a Palestinian community revealed to me the occupation's relentless grip. When I began driving my neighbors to run errands, each checkpoint transformed from observed injustice to something that affected me personally. These experiences taught me that the most powerful antidote to propaganda is to be in true community with the oppressed and disenfranchised, not based on a false notion of "coexistence," but on a shared commitment to justice and liberation.
The occupation persists precisely because it doesn't inconvenience Israelis, which is why allies must consciously share Palestinian suffering. This doesn't require moving to Masafer Yatta, only forging connections so deep that others' pain becomes your own. Witnessing abuses there didn't just disturb my conscience, it enraged me, because people I loved were being harmed. That anger persists even now that I've left. Multiply this by thousands, and the system will crumble.
This is how an hour of truly listening to a fellow student speak in college was the first stop towards opening my eyes to the Palestinian experience. Now, by sharing my experience of my six months alongside Palestinians in Masafer Yatta I hope to help others who were raised like me break through that same wall of deception. Only then can we heal not just from these devastating 18 months, but the 75 years before them, and build a future worthy of our shared humanity.