Moish Feiglin stops when he arrives at the settlement where he lives in the area of the West Bank occupied by Israel and points to a 2.5-meter concrete slab that rises halfway up the road. “That’s new,” he said. He drives slowly to go around it and nods as he passes more security barriers and some heavily armed soldiers peek behind the entrance gate. “This is also new, that and over there.” Feiglin said that in the last month, his population called Tekoa has become a “military base,” something that goes completely against his personal code. “The windows of my car are not rock-proof glass,” he commented. “I don’t want rock-proof glass.” “But you have to understand what people are preparing for,” he adds. “They are preparing for 200 terrorists to come.” The West Bank, an area with its own complications and several times the size of the Gaza Strip, is once again a focus of tension and nervousness is evident on all sides. While the bombing of Gaza by Israel is increasingly criticized worldwide, there is also growing concern about the actions of the Israeli army and Jewish settlers in the West Bank, a disputed mosaic of Palestinian areas and Israeli settlements like Tekoa, which are communities that the majority of the world considers illegal. Jewish settlers of all political ideologies are arming themselves and extremists from these groups have attacked Palestinians and forced hundreds of them to leave their land. At the same time, this month there have been more incursions by the Israeli army, more violent demonstrations, more arrests, and more Palestinian attacks against Israelis than in any similar period in years. The result is an increasingly volatile atmosphere, an atmosphere in which people are divided by faith and united by fear, and the humanity of almost everyone is being tested. “I feel very confused,” says Abu Adam, a Palestinian tour guide who asked to be identified by his patronymic for fear of “social isolation” or some form of aggression for expressing a moderate stance. “We suffer, they suffer. Everything has stopped.” “And it is going to get worse,” he adds. The story of Moish Feiglin and Abu Adam, two professionals whose lives have completely changed due to violence, reveals how deep the fear of both sides is, even though the power dynamics between them are infinitely unequal. As an Israeli citizen, Feiglin cannot get the attacks of October 7 out of his head. The scale and horror of the actions of Hamas terrorists, who are estimated to have massacred 1,200 people in Israel (most of whom were civilian citizens) and some of them with enormous cruelty, have caused, as he himself admits, that he “closes” part of his heart. He doesn’t like carrying a Glock pistol. But it’s allowed, so he does. The Israeli army was tasked with protecting his community. Either way, he cautiously observes the exposed hills that separate his village from Arab areas and begins to question many fundamental ideas that he used to believe in. “I’m having difficulties,” he explains. “Six weeks ago, I promoted peace, planned to send my children to an Israeli-Palestinian summer camp, shopped in the village in Arab stores, and accepted the ideology that went along with it all. Now, I wonder, ‘What is going to happen? Will we really be able to go back to before? Was I too naive in the past? ‘” Abu Adam used to participate in community peace promotion projects and also wonders if his attitude is no longer suitable for this time. He is a Palestinian who faces the daily difficulties of living under Israeli occupation, which makes him stateless, restricts his movements, and considers it illegal for him or any other Palestinian citizen to carry a firearm. The bombing of Gaza, 96 kilometers away, by Israel has killed more than 11,000 people, according to the enclave’s Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas. He says that the images he sees on television of his fellow Palestinians, bloodied and dying, crying and immersed in immense grief, have hardened him. “We have lost everything,” he says. “Sometimes, you just want to escape. But you have nowhere to go.” These men live very close, share similar thoughts, and even their work has certain similarities. But they have never seen each other, and in the occupied territory of the West Bank, they live in different worlds. On the morning of October 7, Feiglin was praying in a synagogue in Tekoa and Abu Adam was guiding a tour in Jericho. He was taking an American family through what may be the oldest city on the planet when the phone in his pocket started vibrating. “I looked at my messages,” says Abu Adam. “All I saw was: cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel.” His next clients canceled the trips they had scheduled for this fall, and those with him were so horrified by the news that they insisted on leaving Jericho immediately. That night, when he returned home and collapsed on the couch, he was horrified by what he saw on television. “It was terrible to see them killing people like that,” he said. “Hamas made a mistake.” But he quickly added that “too much pressure can cause an explosion.” Up the hill, Feiglin watched his community transform before his eyes. Those with guns wielded them, and a civil guard was immediately formed. Tekoa is one of about 130 settlements in the West Bank that were built on land that Israel seized during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Many are like islands in the middle of Arab areas. They are often criticized, even among many Israelis, for being the biggest obstacle to peace. Approximately 500,000 Jewish residents live in the West Bank along with about 2.7 million Palestinians. The villages reflect a wide range of political affiliations and lifestyles, from ultra-nationalist communities to more moderate ones dedicated to agriculture. Tekoa, located half an hour south of Jerusalem and with 4,300 residents, is close to the midpoint of the political spectrum of its inhabitants. Known to some as the “hippie settlement” for its considerable number of artists and peace activists, it is also home to some supporters of the right-wing ideology that advocates taking more Palestinian territory. So far, there has been little violence here, and Feiglin says that recent settler attacks in other areas are “reprehensible,” “contrary to Jewish values,” and “very very marginal.” Such aggression, he says, clearly contrasts with the minimum interdependence that Tekoa and the neighboring Arab towns had maintained, more out of necessity than anything else. Before October 7, many Palestinian men worked in construction in the settlement, which, with its row houses and irregular streets, looks like an American subdivision. Some settlers, like Feiglin, ventured into Arab areas to buy hardware or repair their cars. Sometimes, Arabs and Jews shared meals, played music together, or gathered with their families in a camping area near Bethlehem. None of that is happening now. Feiglin is a therapist, musician, and desert guide. He specializes in breathing work and music therapy. But now that tourists are fleeing Israel, his business in that sector, like Abu Adam’s, has stopped producing. Both have little money. Both are worried about their children. Feiglin’s 10-year-old daughter was heading to school this spring, he recalls, when a group of Palestinians attacked her bus with rocks. She is still upset about the incident. As for Abu Adam, he worries that his children will end up being the ones throwing the rocks. Precisely because of his children, Abu Adam had joined local peace promotion projects that organized meetings where Palestinians and Israelis dialogued to find a way to live together. When he was young, he was imprisoned for participating in violent demonstrations against the expansion of Tekoa, which he and other Palestinians say was illegally built on their land. “But the problem I had in life,” he says, “I didn’t want my children to face it too.” Feiglin, 39, is a…
