Violent attacks by Israeli settlers have accelerated across the West Bank in recent weeks, adding to what has already been a horrifying year for Palestinian communities in the territory. (The United Nations found that, as of early August, Palestinians in the West Bank had faced more than fourteen hundred attacks from Israeli settlers that resulted in casualties or property damage in 2026.) And now, in the lead-up to October’s elections, the Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, has suggested that the country’s police forces take control of the area. (The police are overseen by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister of national security, who is himself a settler and is famous for celebrating and encouraging deadly attacks on Palestinians.)
Some Israeli organizations have tried to prevent violence against Palestinian communities. Doron Meinert, a retired colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, was arrested earlier this month while trying to protect a Palestinian community in the West Bank that was under attack from settlers. I recently spoke with Meinert about his work with the group Looking the Occupation in the Eye, and about how the situation in the West Bank has deteriorated so rapidly. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Can you tell me about your background and career?
I’m sixty-six years old. I was in the army for about twenty-five years. I’ve been a colonel in the army. I’ve been a brigade commander, and then a staff officer. But, about fifteen years ago, I retired. And then I started work as a volunteer protecting Palestinians in the West Bank.
How did you decide to do this work that you’re doing now? What caused you to make this decision?
All my life I believed that the Palestinian problem and the occupation problem were the deepest and most serious problems Israel had. And when I retired from the I.D.F., I decided to see what I could do about it. At first, I mostly tried to protect Palestinian olive harvests. But later I joined an organization named Looking the Occupation in the Eye, whose main issue is to move this subject to the front of Israeli discourse. We are doing it in a few ways. One of them is working in the West Bank. And we try to get a lot of media attention to this issue, and protest inside Israel. What we are doing in the Palestinian villages in the West Bank is trying to protect them from the settlers, but also to take pictures and video and bring it back to the Israeli people. They need to see someone like me talking about it and showing it to them.
What does protecting Palestinians in the West Bank entail for a group like yours?
The settlers are trying to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in lots of ways, and one of them is with violence. There are other ways they are trying that have to do with the Israeli legal system, but when the government cannot do things legally, the settlers try to expel Palestinians from their villages and their homes. So what we are doing is coming to these communities or villages—and we aren’t big enough to go everywhere—and we are staying there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and when the settlers attack, we try to stand between them and the Palestinians. Sometimes we call the police or the army. They don’t help all the time. Sometimes they do O.K. We also try to take the settlers to court. But we try to place our bodies between them.
So the hope is just that settlers won’t commit as much violence with a Jewish Israeli like yourself present?
Their main aim is to expel the Palestinians from their villages. We want them to stay and not let the settlers expel them. We know, and the Palestinians know, that they will start by attacking people on the outskirts of the village, rather than the center of the village. And if those people run away, the next houses will be the ones closer to the village. So we try to protect them and stop them from having to run away, and we do what we can. But the first thing is to protect them. And we set up cameras. We also try to help with water and electricity.
Have you or members of your organization faced violence?
Yeah. Yeah. About five years ago, we went to plant trees in a village close to Nablus, and about fifteen settlers came and caught a group of us that got separated and beat us very badly. I was sent to the hospital with broken bones and had surgery. But that kind of violence is not an everyday story. Most of the violence against us—I am not talking about what happens to the Palestinians, which is more crucial and worse—is to make us angry and make us feel, I don’t know, embarrassed.
Like pushing you or spitting on you?
They spit on us, they push us, they kick us. Sometimes they spray tear gas in our faces.
You said things were different five years ago. What has changed?
The change started in the last election when this government came to power. And then it changed again after the start of the war in Gaza, in October of 2023. Things became much more serious and much more violent. Most of the instances in which Israeli settlers expelled Palestinians in the West Bank from their homes happened after October 7th.
Right, the election was in November of 2022, which saw the most right-wing government in Israeli history come to power. So that was a change, and then settlements further accelerated after the Gaza war began?
Yeah, it’s getting worse and worse and worse. But especially in the last few months. I feel like every time I get asked, I always say it’s getting worse. But it’s really true now, in the last two or three months. This is a new step. And that’s because of the next election coming up, in October. It could be that another government will come to power. So they are trying to achieve as much as they can, because they want to prevent any hope of a two-state solution.