"One Saturday, I arrived in Khirbet al-Tawil. I went in to say hello to a woman I care about deeply, her granddaughter, and the family. Without any warning, she lifted her shirt. Her entire chest, up to her shoulders, was covered in bruises and blue marks.

She said to me in Arabic: “Did you see what Yedidya did to me? He came in at night and beat me with a club.”

I choked up. I went outside because I couldn't hold myself together and started crying. All I could think about was my mother. How would I feel if my mother lifted her shirt in front of me and showed me something like that, and there was nothing I could do?

Before I had even had time to recover, he came back to the compound. This time, he noticed a 15-year-old Palestinian boy returning from grazing sheep. Standing right next to me, I heard him tell two minors from the area: “Call the army and tell them he's coming to attack you.” And that's exactly what they did.

The boy walked toward his home, and they tried to enter behind him—to manufacture an incident that would retrospectively justify calling the army.

Another woman and I were there. It was Saturday. Everyone was wearing kippahs. Yedidya, who always walks around wearing tzitzit and a tallit katan, got out of the Ranger he had been driving on Shabbat, opened the door onto us, and ran toward the boy's house. We stood in front of him. We told him we had heard the entire conversation, that we knew he was lying, and that we would not let him enter the house.

“You won't stay here today,” Yedidya told him.

The boy, who did not really understand what was happening, invited us into his home and even came to open the gate to protect us. The minors almost took the opportunity to get inside.

The army arrived and, of course, first went to hear what the settlers had to say. After the soldiers left, another Ranger arrived. This time without license plates, carrying masked men. It was quite clear why they had come: to finish what they had failed to do earlier, only by other means. When people arrive masked, they don't come to talk.

My heart was pounding. The first thing that came to my mind was the attack on my friends in Qusra by youths who are now responsible for the siege there.

When, for a moment, I am happy that an indictment has been filed against a person capable of carrying out such a sequence of acts within a few hours, I mostly think about how low our expectations have fallen.

In a reality where violence against Palestinians takes place again and again in front of witnesses, cameras, soldiers, and police officers, the mere fact that one case crosses the distance from documentation to investigation, and from investigation to indictment, is already perceived as an achievement.

And perhaps that is one of the things this reality does to us: it changes the scale. What should be a basic function of a law-enforcement system—to investigate violence and prosecute when there is evidence—becomes an exceptional event worth celebrating.

I don't think it is even possible to speak of “justice” in the full sense in the face of what Palestinians endure. Not only because most incidents never reach an investigation file or result in an indictment, but also because what we see in videos and on social media is only the part that can be documented. A camera can capture a blow, an invasion of a home, or a vehicle running someone over. It is much harder for it to capture an entire life organized around the possibility that it will happen again in an hour, in the evening, or tomorrow morning.

So I am glad about this indictment, but I try not to confuse what that happiness means. One indictment does not mean the system works. Sometimes, it illustrates just how rare it is for it to work."

Event Notes