Atalya here. I’m a refuser who objected to military service in 2017 and spent 110 days in jail. This olive harvest season, Palestinians have faced the deadliest harvest in recent memory at the hands of Israeli settlers and the military, working in unison to maim and kill Palestinians while displacing them from their lands and livelihoods. Earlier this fall, I was in Beita, a town well-known in the West Bank and in the world for their struggle against settlement expansion as part of Zaytoun 2025, which connects Palestinian farmers to activists. As I picked olives, a massive group of masked men appeared. These were settlers, and they often cover their faces despite the army’s willing participation in their terror. The sight of them is an image Palestinians and activists are very familiar with, the sign of a possible pogrom. Before we knew it, 8 cars had been burned, more than 20 people were hospitalized and one was shot. The next day, a 13-year-old child from Beita, Aysam Mualla, fell into a coma after he inhaled tear gas fired by the Israeli military. Two weeks ago, he died. The genocide may be declared over in Gaza by some, but we know that the violence has only expanded, albeit in a different form. The call is clear: we have no choice but to bring more people into protective presence work in the West Bank, just as we did with war refusal by bringing it into the mainstream over the last two years. We need your support, and are asking you, << Test First Name >>: tell your communities to follow our updates from the ground by signing up at this link. We need to expand our global circle of supporters, now is the time for solidarity.

I was in Beita as part of a Palestinian campaign called Zaytoun 2025, which helped connect activists to Palestinian farmers tending to their land. I was regularly faced with the reality that I was also in danger. While Palestinians are the main targets, solidarity activists doing protective presence work are also the targets of settler-military violence at unprecedented levels. Risk has always been part of this work, but we knew that our presence helped to deescalate. But as photos of bloodied activists circulated the internet in recent months, their skulls fractured by armed settlers’ rocks in the presence of soldiers, it became clear to me that we need to expand current efforts. We need more people, local and international, showing up, in the olive grove and in villages, where most people’s only line of defense are their cameras.

If we are to launch a real challenge to the settler-military enterprise, we need to widen our ranks and grow our camp. That is why right now, RSN is focused on shifting our work beyond just war refusal: we are starting to work with the very same people to invite them into other realms, notably solidarity work in the West Bank. We cannot allow more Palestinians to be killed while picking olives, let alone stand idly by as they are pushed off of the lands they’ve lived on and tended to for generations. We hope you can support us: help us begin to expand our work into the West Bank. Tell your community to sign-up for our updates at this link or by forwarding this newsletter.