‘Who’s This Guy Who’s Not Palestinian, Walking Around in His Socks?’
A Jewish American Substacker on balancing ethics with activism in a war zone.
I’s a jumpy cellphone video, shot through the window of a moving car, but what you see is clear: on a sunny day, a man in a mask runs up to a woman and clubs her in the back. The victim is a fifty-five-year-old Palestinian, Afaf Abu Alia. The man is a twenty-four-year-old Jewish settler named Ariel Dahari.
Settler attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are frequent and on the rise, averaging seventy per month in 2025. But the assault on Abu Alia, which occurred last October in the West Bank village of Turmus Ayya, broke through as very few do. Vermont senator Peter Welch displayed a picture of it in a congressional hearing; the Israeli Police District commander overseeing the West Bank shared an account of it with his officers, writing, “This image kept me awake at night.” Even more startling, considering the widespread impunity enjoyed by violent West Bank settlers: the assailant, Dahari, has actually been indicted on a terrorism charge.
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