One August afternoon not long ago, as the sun dipped over the hills of the Palestinian town of Beit Jala in the occupied West Bank, a group of religious Jewish men faced the valley and sounded their shofar. They wore kippot and tzitzit, and stood next to a cluster of makeshift tents that had been erected hastily a few weeks before.
With the rapid expansion of illegal Jewish outposts across the West Bank under the shadow of the Gaza war, it would be fair to assume these men were hilltop youth settlers. But they were, in fact, members of Hamidrasha Haemonit, a group of religious Jewish activists committed to resisting the Israeli occupation. They had come to Beit Jala to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian Kisiya family, who had set up a female-led resistance camp to protest settler theft of their land. …more
