Jessica Buxbaum
Israeli
settlers are taking over Palestinian land by creating "farming
outposts" with the goal of ethnically cleansing Palestinians. This
strategy complements the Israeli state's broader plans for annexing the West
Bank.
While having
tea in the village of Jaba in the southern Jordan Valley, Rabbi Arik
Ascherman’s phone rang. An Israeli settler was grazing his flock on private
Palestinian land in the nearby Bedouin village of Mukhmas. Ascherman, founder
and director of the Israeli human rights NGO, Torat Tzedek, drove to Mukhmas,
donned body armor, and confronted the settler and his sheep with a
siren-blaring bullhorn in an attempt to push the settler off Palestinian land.
Settler attacks
like these have become routine in recent years throughout the Jordan Valley.
The violence, ranging from stone-throwing to livestock theft to slashing bales
of hay, is perpetrated by settlers from surrounding, newly-erected outposts —
settlements built without official authorization from Israel’s government and
therefore illegal under Israeli law. In Mukhmas, for instance, four outposts,
established within the last three years, now encircle the pastoral community
and wreak havoc daily.
“After October
7, it has become more violent,” Khader Muhammad Musa Ka’abneh, a Mukhmas
resident, told Mondoweiss. “They honk their horns in the middle of the night to
scare the kids. They park their cars right where we park. They graze their cows
on our land.”
In the village
of Jaba, an outpost was established in February 2025, and within 10 days of its
construction, settlers raided and burned down two homes and a car as well as
injuring several residents during the attack. Ever since, settlers have
regularly assaulted Jaba — throwing nails on the road to puncture Palestinian
tires, hurling stones into the village’s homes, and driving their sheep up to
Jaba’s houses.
Amid the daily
violence, shepherds in both villages have stopped grazing their livestock out
of fear they will be stolen by settlers. On numerous occasions, settlers graze
their livestock next to Palestinian flocks and then capture the Palestinians’
animals in the process. Now, Palestinian shepherds keep their sheep and goats
locked up.
“We Bedouins
don’t have a society. Our lives are centered around our flock,” Abu Yousef
Ka’abneh, head of Jaba village, told Mondoweiss.
Now that way of
life feels threatened.
“Our flocks are
shuttered in and we have to buy feed for them while their flock is just going
everywhere and eating from the olive trees, eating everything,” Abu Yousef
Ka’abneh said.
A joint
settler-state effort
The violence is
part of a new settler strategy that has emerged in the occupied West Bank.
Since 2022, settlers have established shepherding outposts near Palestinian
villages and then systematically harassed the residents. The goal of this
strategy is simple: expulsion.
“They just want
to destroy and deport the people,” Khader Muhammad Musa Ka’abneh said.
While Ka’abneh
refuses to leave his home despite the escalating violence, in other areas, the
settlers’ methods have worked.
In July 2022,
the Jordan Valley village of Ras al-Tin was entirely expelled because of
enduring violence from surrounding settlers — the first time such a
displacement has occurred. Two and a half years later, more than 60 Palestinian
shepherding communities in the West Bank have been similarly displaced,
according to Israeli advocacy group Peace Now, with settlers then seizing 14%
of the West Bank through shepherding outposts.
In May 2023,
Mondoweiss reported on the ethnic cleansing of the Bedouin community of Ein
Samiya, also comprised of the Ka’abneh clan. That same clan also resided in
Wadi Siq, making up the largest Bedouin community on the eastern slopes of the
central West Bank, but on October 12, 2024, it ceased to exist. As reported by
Mondoweiss, armed Israeli settlers invaded Wadi Siq and forced the Palestinian
families to leave at gunpoint.
While
agricultural settlements aren’t a new idea, with some outpost farms cropping up
in the 1980s and 1990s, the rate of their establishment has dramatically
accelerated.
“It was never a
systematic way of taking over land as it is now,” Hagit Ofran, from Peace Now’s
Settlement Watch team, told Mondoweiss. “2017 is the beginning of these kinds
of shepherding communities, but it was much slower — five, ten of those [built]
every year. And now, it’s almost every week, another one.”
Ofran
attributes the rapid development of these farming outposts to state support.
According to Peace Now’s December 2024 joint report on shepherding outposts
with Kerem Navot, an Israeli NGO monitoring land policy in the West Bank,
Israel’s government assists in two key ways. One is awarding grazing contracts
to settlers from the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization, a
non-governmental body financed by the state. Through these agreements, the
Settlement Division has allocated 80,000 dunams (nearly 20,000 acres) of West
Bank land — a little over 12% privately owned by Palestinians or within the
Palestinian Authority’s jurisdiction — to settlers for grazing purposes. In
turn, settlers then use these contracts to establish outposts, often on land
not even designated to them through the Settlement Division.
Secondly, the
Settlement Division and the Israeli ministries of Settlements, Agriculture, and
Negev and the Galilee funnel tens of millions of shekels to these outposts
annually so the settlers can buy essential equipment to maintain their farms,
such as generators, solar panels, lighting poles, fences, animal pens, and the
purchase of livestock for grazing. Since 2019, Israel’s Agriculture Ministry
and the Ministry of the Negev and the Galilee have provided tens of millions of
shekels to agricultural volunteer programs run by non-profits, which send their
volunteers to these shepherding outposts.
“The first step
is to clear Area C from Palestinians,” Ofran, who co-authored the Peace
Now-Kerem Navot report, said. “They’re also attacking Palestinians in Area B to
make a Palestinian presence in the West Bank much smaller, and to push the
Palestinians into smaller spaces in the West Bank so that the Israelis will
have more land.”
The West Bank
was divided into Areas A, B, and C when the 1993 Oslo agreement came into
effect. Area A is exclusively controlled by the Palestinian Authority and is
mainly comprised of Palestinian metropolitan areas, while Area B is a mix of
Israeli military and PA control and Area C is only under the Israeli military’s
authority, and primarily inhabited by Palestinian shepherding villages.
While the
Israeli state doesn’t explicitly state that the aim of these farming outposts
is the complete expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank, it goes hand in
hand with the government’s broader policy of annexation, which does aim to
drive out Palestinian communities from areas slated for annexation. What’s
more, the settlers are blatant in their intentions regarding ethnically
cleansing Palestinians from their land, as noted in a recent conversation that
Jaba resident, Ahmad Ka’abneh, had with a settler.
“He told me,
‘You guys should leave. We want to take over your place,’” Ahmad Ka’abneh said.
“I replied to him, ‘I’ve been here 30 years, my brother and neighbors, around
50 years. You guys are new here — 40 days max — why don’t you leave?’”
April 18, 2025
Loaay Wattad
Dorgham Qreaiqea leads children's activities in a tent in Al-Mawasi,
Khan Younis in southern Gaza, Dec. 12, 2024. (Courtesy of the Qreaiqea
family)
Dorgham Qreaiqea led film,
theater, and painting projects with an unshakeable belief in the power of art
to transcend the war. An Israeli airstrike killed him.
In that land where the sky
rains fire and the future is obscured by smoke and rubble, Dorgham Qreaiqea
planted seeds of hope.
Born in 1997, Dorgham was a
Palestinian artist known and beloved by many in Gaza. Through theater, cinema,
painting, and song, he brought smiles to the faces of displaced Palestinians —
especially children — throughout the genocide. But Dorgham was not just a
painter, filmmaker, or theater director: with his humble presence and tender
voice, he gave kids whose childhood had been stolen by war the chance to dream
again, and the hope that they would one day come to life.
Dorgham was a vital part of
the Banafsaj project at the Tamer Institute for Community Education, a
nonprofit founded in 1989 to expand Palestinian children’s access to books,
theater, and other cultural education. Banafsaj (the color purple in Arabic) is
a youth-led visual arts team that brings together young people to explore art,
painting, photography, design, and sculpture as forms of creative expression
and peer learning.
Dorgham didn’t view art and
entertainment as luxuries in wartime, but as urgent and basic necessities to
preserve the soul. Even after the Israeli army destroyed his home and studio,
he wrote, “Hope is only killed by the death of the soul, and art is my soul —
it will not die.”
On March 18, Dorgham, his
wife Aya, and 26 members of his family were killed in a brutal Israeli assault
that targeted his home in the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood of Gaza City. But the
hope and joy he planted did not die. They still resonate in the Palestinian
children who crowded into refugee tents across Gaza, where Dorgham created art
projects and staged cultural productions for them — acts of resistance in their
own right.
Art against the siege
I contacted Dorgham last
year to learn more about his work for my research on children’s culture and
life experiences in Gaza. What began as an interview grew into a deep
friendship.
Dorgham had an unwavering
belief in art’s power to mend broken and defeated spirits. “The screen is
bigger than the war,” he used to tell me, a phrase he once heard from a
participant at one of his shows. It wasn’t a poetic metaphor to him; it was a
mantra, a plan of action. In cinema, he saw a gateway that transcended the
blockade to a world where children could simply be children — if only for an
hour.
For an initiative he called
“Camp Cinema,” Dorgham turned the nylon walls of tents into projection screens,
showing animated films under the open sky. Children gathered barefoot on the
sand, their eyes glittering like stars, waiting for the stories to transport
them to a world with no walls. They didn’t need popcorn or leather seats; all
they needed was Dorgham, his projector, and the stories he brought.
But Dorgham was never
content with just relaying other people’s stories. He wrote and directed plays
reflecting life in the tents around him — such as “Diaries of the Displaced.”
Through a series of comedic sketches and monologues, the play depicted everyday
struggles in the displacement camps — from food shortages and overcrowding to
the absurdities of adapting to life in a tent — all seen through the eyes of
children trying to make sense of a broken world. To Dorgham, these theatrical
scenes were collective therapy, a tool for hope and survival.
In the summer of 2024,
while warplanes roared overhead, Dorgham filled inflatable pools with water for
the children of Khan Younis and Al-Qarara in southern Gaza. They splashed
around and shouted with joy, as if the world outside those rubber pools didn’t
exist. In August, he unfurled a 30-meter canvas for dozens of children to fill
with their paintings and handprints. There were no instructions or limits —
just an open invitation to draw.
Dorgham’s work also made
space for Gaza’s children to speak about what they had lost. Whether in a
drawing of a house that no longer stands, or in a play about waiting in line
for water, his art reflected their lives — and invited them to imagine new ones.
In the weeks before his
martyrdom, Dorgham continued to plan and host film screenings for displaced
children in the camps. The team had no electricity, no stable internet, or
funding. Still, they hung banners at camp entrances, carried gas-powered generators,
and handed out handwritten tickets to children. These shows were affirmations
of life to the children of Gaza: You are here. You matter. You deserve joy.
A wide imagination for a
narrow world
I often recall a photo of
Dorgham standing under a quote by the great Palestinian writer Hussein
Barghouthi from his autobiographical novel “The Blue Light”: “One must have a
wide imagination for a narrow world.”
It’s a photo I share in
nearly every lecture I give about the power of children’s literature in
Palestine, especially in Gaza. In that photo, Dorgham is standing with his arms
outstretched to the sky, carrying within him the sorrows of Gaza’s children and
all the hope he never gave up. Dorgham wasn’t a saint — there are none in our
time — but he embodied a kind of sacredness rooted in his presence in the
camps, his commitment to Gaza’s children, and his steadfast belief in the power
of dreams.
From Dorgham, I learned to
quiet the voices of despair that so often drift through the atmosphere of our
days, and instead to focus on action — on the need to keep children’s hope
alive, and to make space for a future even in the middle of mass destruction. His way of resisting
wasn’t loud, but it was steady and deliberate: he chose to build and create
when everything else urged surrender.
Dorgham acted with the
urgency and generosity of someone who knew time was fragile. When he returned
to Gaza City in February after 15 months of displacement and found his home and
studio in ruins, he wrote: “Today, everything is being destroyed. My studio —
once my refuge for creativity and freedom — is now just rubble beneath the
weight of war machines. The Israeli army, which has long abused its power,
destroyed all my artworks. Works that expressed history, homeland, the pains
and dreams of a people.”
But though Israel took his
life and laid waste to his art, Dorgham still remains: in the colored
handprints on a tent’s fabric; in the memory of a child who once laughed at one
of his plays; in a screen still standing. Dorgham was convinced that neither art
nor people die as long as the spirit lives on. And Dorgham’s spirit was an
artist’s: stubborn, radiant, and unbreakable.
“If it’s not for us to
continue living,” Dorgham wrote at the beginning of 2024, “then preserve our
deeds, names, and images. Write on our graves in bold letters: ‘Here lies one
who loved life but could not reach it.’”
Dorgham Qreaiqea didn’t
just love life. He gave it, generously, to the children of Gaza.
Farewell, Dorgham.
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