Introduction
In Europe, where life is comparatively safe and comfortable, it is hard to imagine existence under apartheid. Long aware of the occupation of Palestine, as a teenager I witnessed my stepfather campaigning for a free Palestine, something he had done since the 1970s. Later I became involved with Amnesty International and the anti-apartheid movement. In school I learned about World War II and what constituted genocide. Now, thirty years on, little has changed, except that this time it is an Israeli Zionist government inflicting on others what was once inflicted on them. This time it is worse, because the entire world knows what is happening, yet governments remain silent.
In the wake of the October 7th attacks by Hamas, it became clear that Netanyahu and his government intended to use the assault to escalate a plan to invade, ethnically cleanse, and claim the whole of Palestine. Over the last decade I have photographed pro-Palestine protests in the UK, increasingly so after October 7th. I saw a proportion of those participants, frustrated by government refusal to challenge Israel, move toward more direct action: Palestine Action, the Global Sumud Flotilla, Thousand Madleens to Gaza, the Freedom Flotilla. I documented them closely but wanted to learn more. I wanted to hear Palestinian voices tell their own stories and witness what life was like for myself. In December 2025 I joined Eyewitness Palestine, a US-based educational delegation to the West Bank, where I spent twelve days.
The Political Context
In Ramallah I met Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian doctor, activist, and politician. He spoke about the historical and political context following the October 7th attacks. His belief is that they did not happen in isolation but were the direct result of 77 years of displacement and occupation and something that could have been avoided had democratic elections taken place within the last two decades. This is not a new concept – it can be seen throughout history. Where there is colonial rule, occupation, and oppression, there is resistance. Eventually people fight back.
Barghouti argues that the Oslo Accords[1] betrayed the Palestinians and allowed an apartheid regime to take root with the implicit support of complacent Western leaders. This was compounded in 2020–21 with the Abraham Accord[2], which spoke of ending the “Palestinian question” and rejected both a two-state solution and shared governance. These agreements led Zionist leaders to believe they were powerful enough to “finish the job” through right-wing settlers and the growth of fascism. It is an exercise in Jewish supremacy that leads to Palestinian arrests, imprisonment, human rights violations, and murder, including withholding the bodies of the dead from their families. The claim that every act of Palestinian resistance is a terror threat removes the right to resist altogether.
In 2024, a Human Rights Watch report concluded Israel was enacting an apartheid regime. This was more an acknowledgment of reality than a surprising revelation, joining an extensive line of reports saying the same. What we know is that Israel is manifesting to the world what Palestinians have long understood – it wants to take the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and remove the people living there.
Barghouti calls this a struggle for survival against oppression and quotes Nelson Mandela: “Palestine is the biggest subject of our generation.”
Movement Restriction and Economic Warfare
The first thing I witnessed travelling through Jerusalem was the restriction of movement in the form of the separation wall – a 70-kilometre barrier, thirty feet high (twice the height of the Berlin Wall), that disrupts Palestinian access to work, businesses, shops, and markets. In Jerusalem, the wall obstructs routes and is designed to prevent Palestinians from building community and prospering. This is economic warfare.
The West Bank is dotted with approximately 1,000 checkpoints, each a major obstacle to free movement. These are not merely static barriers – they actively restrict travel, commerce, and daily life. Smaller checkpoints serving local villages close for extended periods or shut without warning for arbitrary reasons, isolating communities and forcing residents to find circuitous alternative routes.
The impact is felt acutely in everyday situations. While travelling from Tulkarm to Jerusalem, the minibus I was in had to take a forty-minute detour due to a sudden checkpoint closure. Such disruptions are common – a single incident, a shooting, an arrest, a raid by the Israeli Occupation Forces, can trigger a total lockdown of the surrounding area, amplifying the sense of restriction and uncertainty.
Another restriction is the lack of citizenship rights. In Jerusalem, leaving home for more than two days can result in a person losing their residency, with the risk that their home will be confiscated or demolished. A newer concern is that Israel is attempting to sever financial ties between Israeli banks and Palestinian communities, further threatening economic survival. Meanwhile, Zionist entities establish illegal private companies that function as covers for forging documents and stealing land.
The lie sold to the West, says Barghouti, was that the wall would create safe and secure separate Palestinian and Israeli states. The reality is that it separates Palestinians from their land and from each other, breaks the economy, and forces them out.
Al-Walaja: A Case Study
Al-Walaja, a village between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, is a perfect example. Originally situated a few kilometres away, the village was first displaced in 1948 during the Nakba. Attacked during the night, residents initially repelled the invasion but eventually succumbed. They lost around 66 percent of the village and fled to the hills, living in caves until they established “New al-Walaja” on the remaining land.
Although allowed to live there, the community was not allowed expand. The village is now divided into three areas separated by settlements. Area B, fifteen acres, is where Palestinians may live. Area A, four hundred acres, is where home demolitions take place. In areas under Jerusalem’s administration, no Palestinian buildings are allowed. Palestinians cannot build on their own land, add extensions, or make improvements.
The villagers could not build a school, so students attended classes in homes. They challenged this and began construction, but before reaching the halfway point they received a demolition order. Resourceful, they called UNRWA, finished building, and transferred the school to the agency, which erected its flag and offered protection. The occupation had to negotiate with UNRWA instead. Healthcare followed the same pattern – between 1977 and 2017 all they had was a donkey-drawn mobile clinic. They brought in an UNRWA delegation, built a clinic, and placed it under protection.
The villagers have achieved much, yet they are still forbidden to build a children’s park. Of the two hundred homes in the village, around seventy-six face demolition orders in the courts.
The Hajajla Family
In 1967 Israel unilaterally expanded Jerusalem’s boundaries, incorporating half the land of New al-Walaja. When construction of the separation wall began in 2010, its route cut directly through the village, and through the family land of Omar Hajajla, a 58-year-old farmer.
Omar embodies the spirit of Al-Walaja. He was born on the land, as were his father and grandfather. He is a husband, father of three boys, a grandfather, and the sole driver of the school bus. The state showed him a map indicating where the wall would be built and told him his home was “a big issue for the settlers” – he could not remain outside the boundary. They tried to coerce him to leave with various offers – open cheques, land swaps, part ownership of hotels.
When he refused, they proposed a tunnel passageway allowing the family to access the rest of the village.
Their initial plan, surrounding the entire home with chain-link fencing and movement sensors, which would have severed all access to the village and land, was fought successfully in court. The modified plan installed a grey metal gate that stands there today, controlled by a single key under strict monitoring.
Omar fears that the occupation will eventually force them out. His son has been severely beaten. Omar himself nearly died from attempted poisoning with an unidentified substance. The Hajajla family live in a constant state of imprisonment – settlers on one side, the wall on the other, marooned from their village behind a bizarre tunnel and gate.
Some may question why people do not simply leave, why they stubbornly refuse to let go, but the connection goes deep – as Omar says, “You can ask the tree and the rock who we are.”
Hebron: A Tightly Controlled Town
In Hebron, once a prosperous industrial centre and one of the richest towns in the West Bank, the situation is similarly dire. It is tightly controlled, with numerous separation barriers, internal checkpoints, and a palpable edge.
Issa Amro, from Youth Against Settlements (YAS), a nonviolent direct-action group, explained how the tools of oppression, constant surveillance and military presence, constrict Palestinian life.
The first thing I noticed was the number of movement barriers and physical restrictions. The old-town market, once bustling with activity, now stands half empty, its stalls shuttered due to ongoing sanctions. The open streets weaving between these closed stalls are covered by a wire roof, a measure to protect the remaining traders and the Palestinian community from settlers, who routinely throw rocks, debris, urine, and faeces onto those below.
Settlers have also constructed movement barriers throughout the area, physically blocking streets. In the old gold markets, which were attacked and looted, routes remain obstructed by wire and piles of refuse, further disrupting daily life and commerce, while settlers hide themselves between barricades, razor wire, and CCTV cameras, which are everywhere watching every movement.
At Issa’s home, which has become a centre for Palestinian resistance and a last line of defence, the doors remain open to anyone seeking refuge, education, or community. People gather to listen to talks, watch films, and socialise. Yet the sense of safety is fragile – settlers linger outside, and a surveillance drone circles overhead, a constant reminder of ever-present threat and scrutiny.
Ecocide and Greenwashing
In the rural areas, young settlers known as the Hilltop Youth are initially brought in to intimidate Palestinian communities and drive them off their land. Supported by the army and ignored by the police, they are given free rein. They, other settlers, and the IOF are responsible for the destruction of indigenous resources.
On July 31, 2025, Israeli forces bulldozed the seed multiplication unit of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees’ seed bank in Hebron, destroying around seventy varieties of indigenous heirloom seeds. Like precious manuscripts, artwork, and documents, seeds are a living archive of Palestinian agricultural memory and cultural heritage. In that one raid, generations of seed saving and ecological knowledge, tools, materials, infrastructure essential to food sovereignty were gone. In Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, seed saving is described as akin to political resistance – “Seed banks are not neutral repositories they carry the DNA of memory and resistance”
While Israel promotes its “green” policies, claiming to have planted 240 million trees since 1948, it fails to mention that these are primarily non-indigenous varieties. Native species like olives, dates, and citrus trees are torn up and replaced with fast-growing pines.
The rationale is that pines spread easily and are more “recognisable” to European settlers making them feel at home and allow them to stake a claim to the land, making it difficult for Palestinians to return. This has caused enormous problems – it has contributed to the spread of wildfires, caused desertification, and decimated soil nutrients. And many of their so-called “parks” have been planted on the ruins of Palestinian villages.
Farkha: Resilience and Hope
Mustafa Hammad, the 33-year-old mayor of the eco-village of Farkha, exemplifies community resilience and offers a story of hope, amid the grim reality of everyday life in the West Bank. Facing increased settler incursions, villagers strive for self-sufficiency and control over their resources. Their efforts to cultivate land and produce energy reflect a commitment to resist oppression through self-determination.
When settlers invade, Mustafa tells me, they first cut the water source and divert the supply, now using it to fill their swimming pools while Palestinian villagers are rationed. Settlers control half of Farkha, stealing 60 percent of the olive harvest, uprooting 150 trees, killing livestock, and driving out Bedouins who are no longer allowed to live their way of life on that land. Any time a farmer tries to do something, they are attacked.
Because of the army and settlers attacking people, many villagers left and abandoned the land. Mustafa says it is an “occupation of the mind, not just the occupation of the earth, but whoever works on the earth belongs on the earth.” Even those who chose to leave retain a close connection to their ancestral lands. Moussa, for example, told me that this is his family land, has been for generations, and he will continue to farm it.
Others are returning. In 2025, thirty-two families produced their own food. This year, Mustafa says, around fifty farmers will be planting. Farkha also produces electric power from solar energy, gets 35 percent of its water from a local spring, and conducts all its own infrastructure projects. They aim to be self-sufficient by the end of the decade.
Mustafa finishes by saying, “As long as you retain control of your own food, you have power.”
Guest post for Real Media – Words and photographs ©2026 Denise Laura Baker
Thanks to Eyewitness Palestine for their invaluable assistance
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The 1993 Oslo Accords were a pair of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) that created the Palestinian Authority (PA) and inaugurated a 5-year interim peace process. Signed in 1993 at the White House by Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin and PLO negotiator Mahmoud Abbas it involved mutual recognition and aimed to create a framework for Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
[2] A series of joint agreements signed in 2020 and 2021 that normalised diplomatic, economic and security relations between Israel and several Arab nations and was mediated by The United States under Donald Trump. The Accords were criticised by the PA for bypassing their goal of a two-state solution.
