Last week, on a dusty road in the West Bank, I received a phone call from the office of the spokesperson of the Israel Defense Forces to schedule a meeting the next day. “Hello,” I said. “It’s difficult to talk right now. I am being menaced by two men with knives.”

“Are they Jewish or Arab?” he asked. He sounded concerned.

“Jewish.”

His level of concern didn’t change. No one ever said being a spokesperson for Israel was an easy job. “Do you want me to talk to them?”

About a minute earlier, these two young men had driven their beat-up white car in front of my Mazda and screamed at me in Hebrew, gesturing for me to pull over and get out. They wore IDF-style olive-drab pants, although their tops were civilian. On their waists they had long, fixed-blade Nimrav-style combat knives, and on their heads, the style of kippah and the sidelocks of hair, payot, common among West Bank settlers.

I had paid for an upgrade at the Hertz counter and figured I could run them over faster than they could stab me. So I declined the spokesperson’s help, prepared to shift my foot over to the accelerator, and yelled back to them that I was a journalist.

“Who are you? What do you want?” they asked. In this case the classic American theory that if you yell loud enough in English, foreigners will reply in English turned out to be correct.

One of them came up to my window. “This place is dangerous,” he said. “Terrorist people. Don’t come here.” I said I’d be fine. The other guy was photographing me and my car. “Don’t come back,” the first one said. He made sure I saw the knife. “Your last warning.”

More than two weeks have now passed since Hamas’s attack on Israel, and nearly as much time has passed since Israel vowed, in response, to destroy Hamas completely. Everyone understood that to mean an invasion of Gaza—a ground campaign that many thought would have commenced as early as a week ago, and that as of this writing remains postponed indefinitely. But another campaign, in the West Bank, is already under way.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government is more aggressively pro-settlement than any in recent memory, and when it came to power in December, Israeli settlers stepped up efforts to establish their outposts and drive out the Palestinians living nearby. After October 7, that process accelerated dramatically, and violently, and some Palestinian communities that existed just two weeks ago are no more.

In mid-September, I visited Wadi al-Siq, a herding community east of Ramallah and a mere 25-minute drive from central Jerusalem. One of Wadi al-Siq’s residents, Abu Bashar, 48, told me that the village’s roughly 30 families had moved there in stages, with most arriving in the 1990s. The community is Bedouin, and it retained traces of its ancestors’ wandering ways. The most permanent dwellings were trailers. Male social life focused on a large wooden-framed tent, with tarps and dusty mattresses on the ground inside.

I watched the men recline on the mattresses, smoking, drinking sludgy coffee, and playing on their phones. (One man had a lock-screen image of the manosphere influencer Andrew Tate.) Whenever they heard a car, they’d stand up and walk out of the tent, to see whether friend or foe was coming up the dirt road. The friends were other Bedouins on social visits, and sometimes an Israeli activist who wanted to document the settler incursions.

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The principal foe, Abu Bashar said, was an Israeli settler who less than a year previous had pitched a tent just up the road, then encouraged others to join. They established a ma’achaz, or settler outpost. A ma’achaz (the word is from the Hebrew for “stronghold,” or “grasp”) is distinguished from an ordinary Israeli West Bank settlement because it is wilder and rougher, and because it is illegal. Israeli law generally forbids construction of new outposts. The Palestinians of Wadi al-Siq complained that Israel had hardly let them build so much as a new shack in recent decades, whereas the ma’achaz structures sprang up fast, and the Israeli military—which governs the land—seemed not to care.

Even Abu Bashar appreciated the irony that this settler and his friends had “adopted the lifestyle of the Bedouin communities,” as he put it. They brought their own livestock. They built shacks and pitched tents. Then, around the time when the current right-wing Israeli government came to power, Abu Bashar said, they got aggressive.

Netanyahu’s allies consider the West Bank an inseparable part of greater Israel, and quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) cheer on the building of Jewish settlements that would aid the digestion of the land into the Jewish state. The settlers at Wadi al-Siq blocked a road that the Arabs used to reach the highway to Jericho. They tampered with the Bedouins’ rainwater catches. They stopped at the camp, broke windows, and harassed men and women. Nearby is a charming little European-funded schoolhouse; I peeked in after hours and saw spelling lessons in progress on the boards, as well as some light Palestinian-nationalist sloganeering painted on the walls (“My nation! My soul!”). Abu Bashar said the settlers visited the schoolhouse, too, and scared the hell out of the children.

Then came October 7. Hamas’s level of savagery seems to have licensed a new level of settler aggression. One settler WhatsApp group passed around a threat intended for distribution to Palestinians too stubborn to have left their land yet. I saw the Arabic version. “You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba!” the settler message said, referring to the permanent displacement of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war. It invited them to seek refuge elsewhere. “We’re giving you a chance to flee to Jordan now in an organized fashion, because we will exterminate the enemy and expel you by force from our land.” The message ended: “You better get packing quickly. You’ve been warned!”

As the settler attacks intensified, Abu Bashar told me in an interview last week, the Arabs left their little ramshackle community—first sending the women and children away, and then the men. When they returned to collect their belongings, Abu Bashar said, “settlers wearing soldier uniforms met us. They shot in the air and said we had only one hour to get our things, or we’d be killed.”

According to a report in Haaretz, the IDF and settlers visited Wadi al-Siq on October 12 and abused three of the Palestinians. The report showed images of two men from Wadi al-Siq, stripped down, beaten, gagged, and bound. “They urinated on two of them and put out cigarettes on them, and even tried to sodomize one of them,” the report says. An IDF spokesperson told me that soldiers were indeed present at Wadi al-Siq that day, to respond to a report of “Palestinian suspects” at a farm. The IDF did not confirm that torture took place, but provided a statement explaining that “commanding officers believed that the conduct of the soldiers were contrary to expectations and decided to remove the commander of the troops who carried out the arrest.” A military-police investigation is underway, the IDF said, and may be referred to prosecutors.

I went back to Wadi al-Siq on Thursday, or tried to. I started with reconnaissance work, driving to a Bedouin encampment called Maghayer al-Dir, on the hill opposite Wadi al-Siq. Two settlers intercepted me when I turned into the village. I tried to chat them up. But they left without saying even a word.

A Bedouin with his two kids confirmed that Abu Bashar and his community had been displaced. “You foreigners,” he said. “I’ve seen many of you, from many countries. Americans! Spanish! Italians! Journalists, activists. And what did you do? Nothing.” He shooed me away and said he didn’t appreciate the attention, or the heat that would come when the settlers visited again. “You come here, and what happens next? The settlers come. They make trouble, they smack my kids.” He lightly cuffed his son on the ear to make his point.

From Maghayer al-Dir, I could see the remains of Wadi al-Siq, which resembled a junkyard. Abu Bashar later confirmed that those remains had been picked through by settlers, and items had been stolen or vandalized. An Israeli activist sent me photographs of mattresses ripped, corrugated metal strewn on the ground, a general disarray that looked like the aftermath of a riot or a tornado. I also saw photos of the school thoroughly vandalized. The pupils cannot return.

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I drove toward Wadi al-Siq, and that is when the two yelling settlers, the ones with knives, intercepted and threatened me. After they issued their “last warning,” I decided I didn’t need to stick around to see what might happen, but they tailed me all the way to the highway. I pulled onto the median to see if they’d stop again. They slowed down, stared at me angrily, and took more video of my rental car. Then they kept driving and turned off on the dirt road to Wadi al-Siq.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, one of the clearinghouses for data on settler encroachment, reports that incidents of settler violence have more than doubled since Hamas’s attack. Allegra Pacheco, the head of the West Bank Protection Consortium, told me October 7 gave the settlers a pretext to do what they had always intended. “We are talking about large numbers of hostile armed civilians who are using the wartime situation to advance their political agenda,” she said.

This violence might seem like a sideshow, a minor violent episode amid two episodes of major violence: the terrorist attack by Hamas, and the Israeli counterattack in Gaza. (Thousands of Gazans have died already from Israeli rocket attacks, according to Hamas.) But the settlers consider their activities closely connected to all of Israel’s squabbles with non-Jews. The most zealous among them consider their mission sacred—the land was promised to them by God—and they have practical aims as well.

To read them in plain Hebrew or English, see the 2017 plan for “decisive settlement” by Bezalel Smotrich, then a member of the Knesset from the Jewish Home party. “This is not a religious manifesto but a realistic, geopolitical, strategic document,” Smotrich wrote, and it would end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through “victory by settlement.” He called for “establishing new cities and settlements deep inside the territory and bringing hundreds of thousands of additional settlers to live therein.” Smotrich is now Netanyahu’s finance minister, and one of the most influential members of the government.

Under the Smotrich plan, the Arabs of the West Bank, all 3 million of them, would eventually have two choices: to live as politically neutered residents in a Jewish state, or to “receive aid to emigrate to one of the many countries where Arabs realize their national ambitions, or to any other destination in the world.” These terms make the move sound like an all-expenses-paid vacation. But Smotrich’s “decisive plan” provides for the military conquest of those who don’t take the first two options. The threat of force makes this plan an expulsion, an ethnic cleansing.

Wadi al-Siq has been cleansed—not because Smotrich’s plan was blessed by the government, but because under cover of emergency, heinous actions become possible that would have been impossible in calmer times.

Before my first visit to Wadi al-Siq, in the relative calm of September, I permitted myself the hope that the Bedouins and the settlers could reach some uneasy relationship with each other. They were in the same line of work. In rural places, eventually everyone needs a neighbor’s help—to pull a truck out of a ravine, to drive a boy with a crushed foot to town to see a doctor. Often that is how hatred melts, by forced realization that neighbors who despise each other sometimes still need each other. I am not normally romantic about rural life, but one must take one’s optimism where one can get it.

But between those two groups, there was an invisible wall of separation as high as any of those concrete T-walls between Jerusalem and the West Bank. After spending the night in Wadi al-Siq, I told the Bedouins that I wanted to meet the settlers. They warned me that these people were cruel and dangerous, and said that if I wanted to meet them, I’d have to go alone. The way the Palestinians spoke about the settler outpost reminded me of the way astronauts in alien movies talk about going on a space walk. It was “extravehicular activity,” and if I wanted to pass through the airlock, they would watch me through the portholes and hope I didn’t get gobbled by the monsters out there.

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I walked down the road and saw the little settler outpost about a quarter mile away, across a dry gully. I sat on a rock and watched it for a few minutes. It was as primitive and dilapidated as the Palestinian village: a sheepfold, some vehicles, and stray agricultural equipment. Eventually a flock of sheep emerged, with a lone settler driving it slowly up the side of a hill. I walked toward him, waving my arms like an idiot so he knew I wasn’t trying to sneak up on him.

He was a boy, surely not far past his bar mitzvah, and he wore a dirty work shirt, flecked with bits of fodder. As I got closer I yelled a greeting, and when he turned to me I saw he had on tefillin, the leather apparatus religious Jews wear during morning prayer. I am not sure what he thought was going on, or whether he appreciated the oddity of our situation: a settler praying among his sheep, interrupted very early in the morning by a random fool wearing shorts and Tevas and waving an iPhone and a notebook. He gave me the universal What the hell? look, which was fair enough, and I left him alone.

About five minutes later, a battered pickup intercepted me. I gave the driver a shalom, and watched him dig around the cab of the truck. I wondered if he was looking for a gun, and if he would shoot a guy who had just wished him peace.

In fact he produced a phone, from a door compartment that contained nothing else but a prayer book. He handed the phone to me, impatiently, and pointed at it. A woman’s voice came on. “Who are you? What are you doing here? What are you writing in your notebook?” I told her I was a journalist, and I wanted to meet the settlers and learn about their lives, and I had parked my car back by the Bedouin camp.

He talked with her for a few minutes, agitated, then put me back on. “He will drive you back to your car,” she said, with a note of genuine concern, not menace. “You should be so careful. The Palestinian people are very terrorist.” Then I got into her comrade’s truck, and he drove me back to the Palestinian community. (I could see from the look on his face that the lift was not a favor but a forced transfer in miniature: They wanted me gone.)

Half a dozen Arab men came to the edge of the road to witness my arrival in a settler truck. When I stepped out, they eyed me carefully. I’m not sure they had ever seen someone who was not a settler emerge from a settler truck. When I got out, the settler drove off, spraying dirt and dust on us all.

I asked one of the men there if they recognized the guy who’d given me a lift. His answer contained the one word everyone at Wadi al-Siq, Israeli or Palestinian, seemed to know in English. “He is a fucking terrorist,” he said.