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THE VOLUNTEERS PUTTING THEIR BODIES BETWEEN ISRAEL SETTLERS AND A
PALESTINIAN VILLAGE  
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Julian Borger and Quique Kierszenbaum
December 20, 2025
The Guardian
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_ In the Jordan valley, teenage settlers drive herds of goats into a
Palestinian community in a bid to force families out – volunteers
are trying to hold the line _

Herds of goats are sent to the Palestinian village of Ras Ein al-Auja
while volunteers form a ‘protective presence’., Photograph: Quique
Kierszenbaum/The Guardian

 

It is a daily onslaught. Every morning, teenage Israeli settlers drive
a herd of goats from their outpost in the hills down into the valley
towards the Palestinian village of Ras Ein al-Auja.

The local men, women and children retreat inside their huts and tents.
Any hint of resistance from a Palestinian is likely to bring in the
Israeli army or the border police, confiscation of property and
disappearance into the maw of “administrative” detention without
trial, for months or years.

Instead, a small group of volunteers step forward each morning to face
the descending settlers whose stated aim is to overrun and trample the
village with their livestock, and drive Palestinians out.

On this particular Saturday, the defenders of Ras Ein al-Auja are four
Israeli Jews, a Hungarian and an American, who make a screen around
Palestinian homes to shoo away the encroaching animals.

“The settlers are trying to provoke the local people into protecting
themselves, but if they do the army and police will storm the
community and arrest everyone,” said one of the Israeli volunteers,
Amir Pansky, a retired Israeli army major.

“We are a protective presence because we are putting our bodies
between the Jewish settlers and the Palestinians.”

For every defensive move they make, the teenage settler goatherds
respond with an offensive counter-move to outflank the village
guardians. The boys walk right up to the volunteers until their faces
are inches apart, and the latter try to stand their ground, waving
their arms and shouting.

[Goats with two people]
Part of a flock that belongs to Jewish settlers. Photograph: Quique
Kierszenbaum/The Guardian

The goatherds hold up their phones to record the scene, and give a
running commentary, while each defender wears a body-cam, an insurance
policy against any false claims of assault.

It is a tense battle of wits. Chess, but played with goats. Just when
the face-off is at its peak, the settlers in the outpost half a
kilometre uphill unleash a surprise move – driving a herd of about
50 camels down towards the other end of the village, like a cavalry
charge ordered by some unseen hilltop Napoleon, forcing the defenders
to split up to confront the new threat.

For all its outward absurdities, the game is played in deadly earnest.
The goatherd boys carry sticks and clubs and have shown themselves
ready to use them in tussles with volunteer defenders.

There are older settlers waiting in the wings with other weapons. On 3
December, assailants on all-terrain vehicles raided the compound where
international volunteers stay in Ras Ein al-Auja, and aimed pepper
spray in the face of several of them.

On the day of the camel charge, a man with a light brown uniform and
assault rifle slung around his shoulder arrived at the scene in a
white pickup truck and walked alongside the goatherd boys in a show of
support.

Israeli activists identified the newcomer as Gabriel Kalish, the local
security coordinator from Me’vo’ot Yericho, about 9km farther down
the Jordan valley.

Kalish refused to give an interview to the Guardian, suggesting that
he happened to be passing by. However he added: “This land belongs
to the Jews.” Activists have photographed him many times, in a
variety of different uniforms, at the site of settler incursions on
Palestinian villages.

As a security coordinator in a settlement, Kalish’s wages and gun
are paid for by the government, and his presence at the daily campaign
of intimidation against Palestinians is a link between the teenagers
herding goats and camels and the extremists currently in cabinet
positions, who are bent on the annexation of the West Bank
[[link removed]].

Lev Taor, a young settler whose turn it was a few days earlier to
drive a goat herd through Ras Ein al-Auja, made no secret of the
overall objective.

“I came with my flock to protect the land. The goal is to expel
these people,” Taor said, referring to the local Palestinians.

The lives of the people of Ras Ein al-Auja have been increasingly
hemmed in over recent years. They can no longer graze their herds on
the western slopes of the Jordan valley, as previous generations had
done.

Since the beginning of the Gaza war, and the radical acceleration of
an Israeli land grab across the West Bank, the 700 local people have
largely been confined to the village, a string of huts, tents and
animal shelters along a creek running east from a spring towards the
River Jordan. They have cut down their flocks and bought feed for
them, but refused so far to give up Ras Ein al-Auja altogether.

“It was very quiet here before. You could graze your flock east,
west, north, south and there was no problem,” Naef Ja’alin, one of
the villagers, said. “The settlers started harassing us years ago,
when we were grazing our flock, but that was some distance from the
village. But since 7 October [2023], they have come closer and closer,
to the point that today nobody takes their herd outside the
village.”

He said his son slept in his shoes so he is ready to run if the family
is attacked at night.

Settler outposts have sprung up on two sides of the village, and the
Palestinians have been stopped from using the local spring, one of the
most renowned in the Jordan valley.

The Ja’alin family were moved to the area from southern Israel after
the 1967 war, which began the occupation. Naef Ja’alin says they
have nowhere else to go but credits their remaining tenuous grip on
the hillside to the thin line of volunteer defenders.

“Without these people, we would have been gone a long time ago,”
he said. “Nobody helps us. Only these people protect us.”

The volunteers are a mix of young and old. Both Israelis and
foreigners are seeking to make a difference, to compensate for what
they see as the complicity of their governments in the victimisation
of Palestinian civilians.

The Israeli volunteers are part of an organisation called Looking the
Occupation in the Eye [[link removed]], a pithy
description of what they set out to do.

“The main thing that motivated me is what I’m going to tell my
grandsons about what I was doing during the disaster the government of
Israel has made in this area,” one senior volunteer, Doron Meinrath,
said. “I want to be able to look in the mirror and be able to say I
did all I could do.”

[Meinrath with donkey, hills behind]
Doron Meinrath: ‘I want to be able to look in the mirror and be able
to say I did all I could do.’ Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The
Guardian

Like Pansky and many other elder members of the organisation, Meinrath
was a senior officer in the Israeli army who feels that the force has
changed out of all recognition in recent years, from one focused on
Israel’s defence to an aggressive accomplice in the ethnic cleansing
of the West Bank.

“For young children here, it is the first time they have seen a
Jewish guy who is not attacking them, and who they are not afraid of.
It’s important to show not all Jewish people are the same.”

The international volunteers at Ras Ein al-Auja have come through an
organisation called Unarmed Civilian Protection in Palestine
[[link removed]], one of several volunteer groups seeking to
protect West Bank Palestinians from attack.

Josie, one of the volunteers, who preferred not to give her full name
for her own safety, said it was impossible for her to stay safe and
comfortable at her home in north Wales in the face of such obvious
oppression.

“I don’t like injustice anywhere. I don’t like it in the UK, in
my everyday life. Equality, human rights and justice matter to me,”
Josie said. “Families are being driven away from their homes and
there’s no one to call. There’s no one on their side. If they ring
the police, they get taken to jail. And it saddens me that the whole
world, the international community, is failing to stand up for
Palestinians and their defence and independence in the same way it is
standing up for Ukraine.”

Josie sees the recent pepper-spray attack on the volunteers’
compound as an uncomfortable but ultimately encouraging sign.

“It shows we are interfering with the plan,” she said. “We’re
making it harder for the settlers to take what they want.”

Settler attacks on international volunteers are on the rise, as they
become more of an obstacle to the seizure of Palestinian land. At the
end of November, three Italians and a Canadian were attacked and
robbed
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in the nearby village Ein al-Duyuk, close to Jericho.

On 7 December, a gang of eight masked Israeli settlers armed with
clubs raided a Palestinian family home on a hillside outside the
village of al-Mughayyir, north-east of Ramallah, injuring a
13-year-old Palestinian boy, his 59-year-old grandmother and
international volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement
[[link removed]] from Colombia, the US, France and the UK.

Phoebe Smith, the 31-year-old British volunteer, suffered extensive
bruising, and a gash in her arm. She was recovering last week but
determined to go back to help defend the Abu Hamam family, the
Palestinians the volunteers have been trying to shield.

“I want to support the family in any way that I can and just show
them that we can’t be pushed away. They have to remain there. Their
livelihood is tied to being at the home and that is their life,”
Smith said.

“I was a charity worker in the UK working closely with refugees and
had come across a lot people who’ve been forcibly displaced from
their homes,” she said. “Coming to Palestine
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one small way of something that was not just watching from the
sidelines.”

_Julian Borger is the Guardian's senior international correspondent
based in London. He was previously a correspondent in the US, the
Middle East, eastern Europe and the Balkans. He is the author of two
books: I Seek A Kind Person and The Butcher's Trail. Click __here_
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for Julian's public key_

_Quique Kierszenbaum is a Jerusalem based reporter and photographer
who has been covering Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories
since the Second Intifada_

* West Bank
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* West bank settlers
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* right wing attacks
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* resistance
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