In January of 2024, during his winter break at New York University—and having never yet written for an outside publication—reporter Jasper Nathaniel decided to travel to the West Bank. As a Jewish-American, he knew he could easily enter the region, and with Israeli settler violence increasing dramatically since the Oct. 7 attacks, there was no time to wait for an official assignment. 

Since then, Nathaniel's reporting has made international headlines. In October 2025, he filmed a masked Israeli settler clubbing a Palestinian woman in the head during an olive harvest, knocking her unconscious, despite his attempts to intervene. The footage horrified viewers—but it was only one shocking example of daily brutality in the West Bank, with settler violence reaching record highs in 2026. This time, Nathaniel just happened to capture it on camera.

The Brooklyn-based reporter joined Current Affairs to discuss the organized nature of the attacks, the deepening crisis inside the Israeli prison system, and the unwillingness of U.S. politicians to stop funding the bloodshed. (For more of Nathaniel's reporting, subscribe to his Substack.) 

John Ross

So you've been reporting from the West Bank. You were last there for the month of October, for the olive harvest. And last year you wrote that, "You could take Gaza out of the picture entirely, and what the Israeli state is doing in the West Bank would still be one of the gravest crimes against humanity happening anywhere in the world today."

Why do you think this is, and what do you think Americans who might not be following this so closely need to understand about what's happening in the West Bank?

Jasper Nathaniel

That's a great first question. To take a step back, to me, the occupied West Bank has always been the sort of clearest expression of the Zionist project in its purest form. And so what I mean by that is the settlers in the West Bank and their allies at the highest level of the government and in the military really are going back to Zionist first principles to justify the systematic land theft operation and ethnic cleansing. They frequently use archeology as a pretext for stealing land there by citing events from the Old Testament, which nominally happened in what they call Judea and Samaria. And when you talk to settlers, they often say things like, "Listen, if Israel has a right to Tel Aviv because of a Jewish connection to the land, well, we have a much stronger connection to the land in Samaria or Judea." And frankly, that is completely true. And that's why we have international laws and borders and stuff, because we don't go by the Bible to determine who gets to live where. If we went by the Bible, or even if we went by ancient history, the entire world order would collapse. Of course, those of us who live here in the United States would be out of here.

And so I think that when you listen to the settlers talk, and you watch their actions, it really is Israel living up to its original promise—much more so than Gaza is. And to be very clear, this is not to suggest that what's happening in the West Bank is worse than what's happening in Gaza. Certainly on the scale, and the sheer carnage of it, it's not at all. But the way they talk about Gaza is really just more sort of a project of pure ethnic cleansing, like, "We've got to get these Palestinians out here because they all want to kill us." There's really not a lot of biblical significance to Gaza in the Old Testament. It was the home of the Philistines, who were sort of the eternal enemy of the Jews, and it was certainly not like a cradle of civilization for Jewish people the way the West Bank is. And so that's why I think it's just sort of in its own right very important to cover and to understand. In terms of your question, why is it one of the great crimes against humanity? I think that people see videos of these terrible settler attacks, and they're horrified by it. And I think increasingly people understand that the military often stands by and does nothing, or they're even involved.

But I don't think that the vast majority of people understand the degree to which the government, the military, and the leaders of the settler movement are coordinating in a strategic, systematic process of basically cutting off access between villages in the West Bank, choking off both the larger economy as well as individual economies there, and they have a very deliberate method of land theft. And so these would appear to be just crazed settlers raiding villages and what can look like random violence. Actually, it couldn't possibly be further from random.

When a settler outpost is established—and what an outpost refers to is when settlers basically peel off from a settlement, which is legal in Israel, illegal under international law. And they just basically plant a flag somewhere that is Palestinian land and say, "This is ours now too," and it is not authorized by Israel. Then from these outposts is where they are typically launching attacks. But before they do that, they have met with a commander in the military, have mapped out the right place to put their tents, and have been assigned a military battalion that will protect them. And the idea will be, we can take this land, and then we can chase this Bedouin encampment off the community, and then we can inch a little bit closer.

They have a plan, which is, ultimately, full ethnic cleansing, but at least for now, it is basically forcing all the Palestinians in the West Bank into a small handful of completely disconnected enclaves or population centers so Israel controls the vast majority of the West Bank. They could even formally annex it without having to worry about taking all these Palestinians in as citizens of the country of Israel because they've been squeezed into their own little pockets. And so in terms of the violence itself and the deaths and stuff, it certainly doesn't compare to Gaza. It certainly doesn't compare to Sudan or what's happening in even the Horn. But in terms of the systematic effort through which the government, which, of course, we consider our closest allies, and the military, who we are doing a lot of the funding for, are committing this crime against humanity. I think that is something that the world does not quite understand.

Ross

Yes, and I've always sort of felt that the word "settler" is a little bit too soft for what it is that we're actually describing. As you know, these people can be extremely violent, and I think that if armed groups entered villages and burned homes, killed civilians, and tried to drive people off their land in pretty much any other context, we might describe that as terrorism, or we might characterize them as lynch mobs, but we don't usually do that in this context.

And in fact, just a few days ago, you published an article called "A Young Settler Sacrifice for the Land," where you describe ferocious pogroms that are currently underway in the West Bank. And I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about that and also describe what typically happens during these kinds of altercations.

Nathaniel

Yes. So the last week and a half or so has been bad, even for the new standard of West Bank violence, and even for the standard of West Bank violence that began after the Iran war a month ago or so, when things started to get worse. Even by that standard, it's been really bad in the last week and a half. And basically what started it was an auto collision.

So a couple of young settlers, 18 years old and a little bit older, were out on what they call a land patrol. A land patrol, which the settlers will openly admit is when they go out on an ATV—a lot of the times the ATV has been given to them by the government; these are really expensive, nice ATVs that can go very fast and can go off-road. They go out on an ATV and go directly into Palestinian land, usually farmland and circling villages, and they intimidate people. They take pictures, and sometimes they bring drones, and they scare their livestock, and sometimes they aim weapons. Occasionally they actually dismount from the ATVs and go into the villages.

And this is distinct from an actual attack because they are not, in these cases, typically committing acts of physical violence. Sometimes there's vandalism, but what they're doing is they are letting the Palestinians know, "We're here, we're watching you, and you're not safe." They're menacing them. They will walk right into somebody's home and start taking pictures of people and getting in their faces. I have encountered this many, many times in the West Bank, where you are just in a Palestinian village and a teenager just sort of appears and just starts getting in your face and taking pictures.

And what I write in the piece is that they are doing this sort of equivalent of the childhood tactic of "I'm not touching you," where you get in your brother's face and you pretend you're going to hit him, and you stop an inch away. And what you're doing is you are trying to provoke him into hitting you so then you can go and tell your parents, or it justifies some sort of a greater response. And so the point is, the settlers openly admit that is what they're doing on these land patrols. They are, to quote one of their settler leaders, trying to "generate friction."

They understand that ultimately it will be friction that is going to lead to the conditions in which they can get the whole Israeli army to come fight on their behalf and start what is ultimately a sort of holy war, but on a smaller scale, just create fights that create incidents that then justify greater force. And so what happened in this instance is this ATV collided with a Palestinian pickup truck. It's unclear if it was an accident or if it was a ramming attack by the Palestinian. The settlers have claimed that it was a deliberate ramming attack. The people in the village have denied it, said that it was an accident. Just last week, the Shin Bet, which is one of the intelligence agencies, said that he had admitted to doing it, but they provided no evidence of it. There's also video from after the collision, where you see Palestinians helping the settlers, which directly contradicts what one of them had said happened.

The reason I say it's unclear, even though instinctively, I never trust what the Israeli authorities say, is because it would not be unheard of for a Palestinian to lash out at one of these settlers who was menacing them. And in fact, during the Second Intifada, it was fairly common. A lot of people would call this resistance. So it's just unclear what happened. But what's important to understand is that even if it was a deliberate ramming attack, it gave the settlers exactly what they were looking for. An 18-year-old settler died in the attack, and at his funeral the next day, it was just full-on calls for pogroms across the entire West Bank, and that's exactly what happened.

In particular, the father of the settler, the 18-year-old who was killed, went up at the funeral and said, "My son was a sacrifice from the Jewish people to the settlement movement, and now, in his honor, we need to go out and create new outposts." And then Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister of Israel, who is also the sort of de facto governor of the West Bank, goes and says, "We now need to erase the Oslo lines—get rid of the letters A, B, and C," which refers to the sort of nominal division of authority across the West Bank between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. And people listened. The settlers then went out after that, over the next couple of days, and they launched these just ferocious pogroms. A couple of people were killed. Dozens and dozens of structures were burned to the ground. People were severely beaten, and all of it was ostensibly in the name of this young settler who was killed when he went out to provoke Palestinians into an act of violence.

And so everything that happens there, as I write in the piece, is part of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The greater prophecies, of course, are that the Jews will control all of Judea and Samaria. But then within that, they have the self-fulfilling prophecy of going out to instigate violence. Once that violence comes, that then becomes the justification for greater violence. It also happens on a more bureaucratic scale, where, for example, they passed a new Cabinet decision in February where they say the Israeli military is now allowed to go into area A and area B, where they do not have nominal administrative control—it's supposed to be PA (Palestinian Authority) controlled. If there is air pollution or an environmental concern or some sort of a pretext, they're then allowed to go in and demolish infrastructure or halt development, or whatever. The reality is, to the extent that there is air pollution coming from these places, it is in large part because Israel has completely sabotaged their basic municipal functions. They have made it impossible for them to have proper waste management. They've made it impossible for them to practice greener forms of industry. And so then they create the conditions by which there's pollution. They then use that to go in and start demolishing things and taking control.

And so again, everything is either engineered specifically to create the conditions of more Jewish control of the West Bank, or something happens and then it is rapidly sort of retrofitted or reverse engineered to justify another act of taking control.

Ross

I wanted to ask something that's kind of related to that, this idea of protective presence. For years, there was this belief that if international activists and volunteers were present in these villages, it might deter settler violence, at least to some degree, of course, because there would be witnesses. But increasingly, we've been hearing that the settlers are becoming increasingly emboldened and that they'll attack foreigners even while they're being filmed. As someone who has yourself been attacked by settlers, do you think that something has changed in terms of the level of impunity of the Israeli military?

Nathaniel

Absolutely, something has materially changed in that when Itamar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister, came into power in early 2023, before October 7, he instructed the military to stop enforcing certain laws against settlers. The last time a settler or a soldier was indicted for killing a Palestinian in the West Bank, specifically, was 2019. And the prosecution of settlers and soldiers in the last couple of years has just gotten more and more nonexistent. And so, yes, the settlers have killed—I forget the exact number, but they've killed scores of people in the last couple of years. Not a single person has been indicted for it.

Every once in a while, the Israeli authorities, when things get too hot, when a lot of footage is coming out—for example, when I was attacked in the West Bank, it created this sort of minor PR crisis for Israel. There was footage going all around the world. It was on the Senate floor. They went out and made a single arrest. They arrested a 23-year-old guy who I filmed clubbing an older woman, which is great, but we know who runs that outpost. We know who engineered that entire attack. It's not a 23-year-old; he's an older guy who's a leader in the settler movement, and he continues to be treated as basically a VIP by the Israeli government when they go and arrest this other guy as a sort of way to release some tension. So the settlers absolutely understand that there's a very small chance that they will be held accountable for any act of violence.

In terms of the question about protective presence and activists, it's certainly true that I've seen, and lots of activists and journalists on the ground have reported, that they are now getting attacked with more regularity than they were before. I think it is still safe to say that a settler will be more comfortable shooting a Palestinian than shooting, frankly, a white person, whether that's an American or even an Israeli activist or a journalist. Like when a CNN crew was accosted the other day by soldiers in the West Bank, it was the Arab cameraman who was physically assaulted. Jeremy Diamond, the white reporter, was not physically accosted, at least from what I've seen. And so they certainly have grown more emboldened.

The reason I want to say it's not totally useless is because it is still really important to have activists out there. For example, there's this little Bedouin community outside a town called Duma, and there were just these relentless settler attacks happening there. But there were always activists there, and the activists were always documenting it and basically able to maintain a sort of foothold there. Soldiers then came in and called it a "closed security zone," which is a tactic they use to create a sort of pretense of trying to maintain order. What they're actually doing is banning activists from being there anymore. So then the activists were kicked out, and it took like two days for the violence to get so bad that the remaining Palestinians there had to just pick up and abandon the community altogether. And so it is still really important to have activists and journalists out there. But at least to this point, it has not slowed, or it has not stopped, the wave of violence that is engulfing the West Bank.

Ross

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about this death penalty law that just passed in Israel's parliament. Now, from what I understand, the law makes execution by hanging the default punishment for Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks, defined as being committed with the intent of rejecting the existence of the State of Israel, which, of course, essentially means that only Palestinians will ever be prosecuted under this law.

There was a video that went viral earlier this week of Itamar Ben-Gvir literally popping champagne while wearing a lapel pin in the shape of a golden noose to celebrate the passage of the law. And it's significant because, of course, the legal system itself is two-tiered. Israelis are tried in civilian courts, while Palestinians in the West Bank are tried in military courts. B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, has reported that those military courts have a conviction rate of around 96%, many of which are obtained through confessions, through torture. And of course, there are also laws in Israel that allow Palestinian children as young as 12 to be prosecuted in these courts.

So when you put all of that together—the two-tiered legal system, military courts with a 96% conviction rate, and now the death penalty—some people are saying that this essentially creates a pipeline that will result in what amounts to death counts. And I'm wondering if I'm understanding this correctly and if you think that that's an alarmist way to describe it.

Nathaniel

I don't think that's an alarmist way to describe it. Frankly, I think it's too early to say how widespread the use of this will be. I talked to an Israeli journalist who told me—I don't know if this is accurate, but he said that he thinks it is actually mostly for show, and most judges will not be ordering the death penalty. So I don't know whether that's true or not, but it should be said that Ben-Gvir has already turned the Israeli prison system into torture camps that sometimes turn into death camps already. This is just sort of the logical next step of that.

There is this sort of common refrain that you hear from Israel's critics on the far left, who like to say, "Israel has always been this way." What you're seeing today is, actually, just that people are paying attention. And I want to be clear that, on a certain level, I agree with that completely. The ideology has not changed, certainly. A lot of the policies have not changed, and the systematic violence against Palestinians has not changed. But it is just an objective fact that the government that came in in early 2023 has fundamentally changed certain things and turned the dials up on other things that have made the situation much graver for Palestinians in the West Bank, and one of the biggest ones is the prison system.

The guy who actually oversees the prison system reports directly to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister. He's basically like a henchman. And right when he comes into power, one of the first things they do is literally cut down on the amount of food that is given to Palestinian prisoners. It had been, before, I think it's fair to say, a meager ration, but they cut it down to what basically nutritionists told them was the bare minimum for survival. I should say the Israeli Supreme Court ruled late last year that actually it was not meeting the bare minimum of survival and was starving people to death, which has happened numerous times. They ordered them to change it, and they refused. And so they cut down on the amount of food they were giving to prisoners.

They say now we're going to put 10 people in a six-person cell instead of six people in a 10-person cell, which means not everybody has a bed and 10 people share one open toilet. All the problems with overcrowding, and torture becomes much more systematic. Certainly Israel has always tortured and beaten prisoners and stuff, but it has become much more systematic. And one just sort of anecdotal thing I'll say is that when you're in the West Bank and you talk to Palestinians, so many of them have spent time in prisons before. I don't know the exact number, but it's almost unheard of that you're with a crowd of men and at least a handful of them have not been in prison, if not all of them. And every last one of them says it's gotten much, much worse in the prison system. As in, the ones who spent time in prison before and after have said it's gotten much, much worse.

So the death penalty law is, to me, the logical sort of next step of that. They already are starving Palestinians to death. They're already basically locking them up and, in a lot of cases, throwing out the key, and now they're saying, "We'll kill you too." They call it "deterrence," which is actually sort of ridiculous, because the reality is, most Palestinians who are engaging in attacks where they intend to kill Israelis are on suicide missions. They're expecting to be killed on the scene. Frankly, they're martyring themselves—this is how they describe it. So I don't actually see any deterrence.

Ben-Gvir is a terrorist in the pure sense of the term, in that what he's trying to do is terrorize Palestinians, who he truly hates with a passion. He has since he was a boy. He was raised that way in a settlement, and he wants to terrorize them. And that's why you see all these theatrics around it. He films these videos going into prisons, lording over prisoners, and bringing in these vicious dogs. And the champagne. He knows these videos are going viral. It's what he wants. He wants to be seen as cruel and sadistic and to terrorize people.

So my point is, I don't yet know to what extent—I don't think anybody yet knows to what extent—this is going to actually unfold on a widespread scale. I think it's certainly possible it will, which will, of course, be a horrifying development. But I think it should be seen as just another sort of logical step in the process of terrorizing Palestinians, making their conditions across all facets of life worse, and doing so in the Israeli prison system. I also just want to add in something that I think is relevant. The Israeli hostages in Gaza after October 7, a couple of them came out when they were released, and they said that the times when the conditions got really bad for them were always after Ben-Gvir made some public remark about how they were treating Palestinian prisoners, about how they were torturing and starving them. What these Israeli hostages said is that, literally, their captors would see this, see these videos of Ben-Gvir, and they would then go and basically reciprocate it. And so I think that it is very fair to say that if we actually start seeing widespread hanging of Palestinians, then that's going to become the new reality for Israelis that are taken captive by Palestinians as well.

Ross

Yes, when you were just talking there about how Itamar Ben-Gvir is essentially a terrorist, you reminded me of how he's openly praised Baruch Goldstein, who infamously carried out the 1994 massacre. And it's ironic that under this new law that just passed, it only gives the death penalty for those who commit acts of violence with the intent of rejecting the existence of the State of Israel. So even under this law, someone like Baruch Goldstein would not be able to be prosecuted under it, which is just crazy.

Nathaniel

Yes. Just the opposite. Like you said, Ben-Gvir and lots of settlers and Israelis really do view him as a hero. Ben-Gvir had a framed picture of him on his wall, and they hold up his photo at weddings, and they dance. He's a hero to them. And so, yes. It should also be said, I think there are two instances in Israel's history where they have actually carried out the death penalty, and they have a 50 percent accuracy rate because one of them, after the fact, was actually vindicated by evidence. So the other just obvious thing here is not unique to Israel, but the case with the death penalty everywhere is you end up executing innocent people. And so we're certainly going to see that.

As you said, the criminal justice system for Palestinians is just completely insane, absurd on its face. They're prosecuting 90-something percent of people. So I'm actually very frightened of the idea of starting to see Palestinians being hanged because I'm sure they're going to be filming it, and we're going to see these horrifying videos of them celebrating. I really hope it does not come to pass and that this theory that it's more for show is the case, but I just don't know.

And just one last thing is the gold noose lapel pin that you mentioned: it's designed to look like the Yellow Ribbon hostage pin. And so when they started wearing it to the Knesset, Ben-Gvir and his cronies, it initially looked like the yellow hostage pin that everybody was wearing. And then you had to look closer to realize it was a gold noose. So these people don't care about the hostages. They would have been happy for the hostages to all be killed, just like they don't care if this new death penalty all leads to more hostages in the future being killed. They're sadists, first and foremost. And what they want to do is terrorize Palestinians.

Ross

Yes. Setting aside the death penalty for just a moment, you mentioned that if you were in a group of a bunch of random Palestinian men, there's a good chance that at least one of them has been caught up in this system. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the kinds of people who are usually caught up in this. Is it people who are typically carrying out violent attacks, people who are accused of throwing stones, or people who might be accused of membership in a certain political organization? And then also, can you talk a little bit about what the conditions in the Israeli military detention system are like, what they're actually like in practice?

Nathaniel

In terms of the people who have spent time in Israeli prisons, it's all over the map. A lot of them, or some of them—I don't know percentages, but some of them were, in fact, part of militant groups during the Second Intifada. They were maybe carrying out shooting attacks or ramming attacks, or they were linked to a group that was doing it.

When you're able to talk openly to Palestinians, like the ones who were part of the armed struggle, they are not ashamed of it. They're proud of it, in fact. So a lot of them were, in fact, militants. A lot of them were kids who threw a rock at a settler's car or at a tank, and then a lot of them did nothing at all, and they were just picked up, either literally for no reason or because, like you said, they might have been linked to some political group. It's very common for them to raid universities in the West Bank and arrest people who are part of a student government group that might have endorsed Hamas or something like that. So it's all sorts of people. Some of them are real hardened fighters. Others were a kid who threw a stone, and others did nothing at all, or they had some political affiliation.

There's a system called administrative detention in the West Bank where they're allowed to arrest people and not charge them and hold them for, technically, up to six months, but then after six months, they can go to a judge and ask to extend it so it can turn into years. And the idea behind it is that releasing the evidence that they have, which they claim they privately showed to the judge, would pose a security risk. And so they have to hide the evidence and can't actually have a charge, so they just get to lock them up, and they have no habeas corpus, basically. Which is, of course, nonsense. You could make that case anywhere in the world that you know evidence could put people at risk or something. So now you have people who don't even ever learn why they have been imprisoned. They are taken from their homes at night, or they're abducted from their place of work or anywhere, and they never even learn what the charge is against them. And if they're lucky, then maybe one day they are just sent out—they're released without explanation, if they are not kept sort of indefinitely.

In terms of the conditions, I think the big, sort of pervasive one is that they're being starved. Quite literally, these people are being starved. And I think that you can't overstate the degree to which that is a form of torture. Mohammed Ibrahim, the 16-year-old Palestinian American kid who was in prison for almost a year on the spurious charges of throwing a stone, was just released in November. He talked about having terrible pain in his stomach and his head 24/7 for 10 and a half months because of the hunger. There were fluorescent lights shining in their cell 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so it made sleep virtually impossible. They had just an open window with bars on it. So in the winter it was freezing cold. In the summer, it was boiling hot. There was an Israeli flag draped in their cell.

Ross

There was a scabies outbreak, correct?

Nathaniel

There was a terrible scabies outbreak that they were really not given treatment for. It just tore through the prison system. Some people suspect that they were basically using it as disease warfare by transferring scabies patients from one cell to another to spread it around.

And I think, to me, one of the worst parts, certainly, for the minors, is that they had cameras in their cells and they were watching them 24/7, and if they caught them trying to have fun—literally, they made a makeshift chess set out of stale bread and scratched the board into the ground, and they caught them, and they went in and they beat them, pepper sprayed them, and confiscated their beds. If they sing, the same thing will happen. If they do push-ups. So they are not even allowed to be boys. It's torture, basically; it's torture.

And I guess the last thing is that since October 7, Israel has banned family visits to all Palestinian security prisoners, as they call them. So these kids and men and women are not allowed to speak to their families the entire time they're locked away. Red Cross visits, which are mandatory under international law, have also just been banned again. They call it a security concern. So they're not even following the international law around accountability, allowing Red Cross visits. And so there's a lot that we don't even know about just how bad things are getting in there. But dozens and dozens of people have dropped dead in the last couple of years in prisons. A lot of their bodies are still being held by Israel, so we don't even know what they died from. But I think that they are gulags, essentially.

Ross

I wanted to talk a little bit about American electoral politics and where the political ceiling currently is on this issue. You recently interviewed Representative Ro Khanna, and to his credit, he introduced this resolution condemning settlement expansion that I believe he sought your input on. And in the interview that he did with you, he was willing to say that Israel is an occupying power violating human rights, which, of course, is much stronger language than most Democrats are willing to use. But I thought it was striking that when you pressed him on things like Iron Dome funding, the feasibility of a two-state solution, and even whether AIPAC should have to register as a foreign agent, he basically morphed into Kamala Harris in his answers, totally indistinguishable from what someone like her or Gavin Newsom might say.

And I don't mean to single out Ro too much, because I definitely think that his foreign policy is better than someone like Josh Shapiro or Andy Beshear. But the fact that someone like him is considered the left edge of acceptable opinion within the Democratic Party mainstream, I think, is sort of an indictment on the rest of the party as a whole. But what I want to ask you is, given the scale of the terror of what's happening, do you think that this should be a litmus test issue in Democratic primaries in 2026 and 2028? And if so, what specifically should it be? Is it opposing military aid? Is it being willing to call it genocide? A combination of things? What do you think voters should demand from candidates on this?

Nathaniel

Well, I can say what my own litmus test will be—what I think people who really care about Palestinian people's litmus should be—and it is not another dollar to Israel for anything, under any circumstances. Not military aid, not for the Iron Dome, not for anything. And I think in particular the Iron Dome funding question is key, and this is why I was really pressing Ro on it. What he says is that the US Congress will apply the Leahy Law, which basically states that if a country is violating human rights law, the US does not send them military funding. And so that is the justification that he and many other Democrats use to say, "We shouldn't be sending them weapons anymore." Fine, that's great.

Where they draw the line, though, is on the Iron Dome. The Iron Dome, which is the Israeli system of basically shooting rockets out of the sky before they land in Israel, they call that defensive. And so what Ro Khanna says in that interview with me is that, "I'm for any system that's protecting human lives. And I don't think the answer here is to have Israeli civilians dying en masse." And to be clear, I don't want to see anybody dying en masse. I think that most of what I would consider my comrades just don't like to see civilian death, period. The question of Iron Dome funding is not "How many Israelis do we want to die?" It is, "Should Israel feel completely immune to consequences from its relentless aggression and belligerence?"

And what I said to Ro Khanna in that interview, basically, was if the Israeli population understood that war with Iran or genocide in Gaza would mean hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of missiles landing across Israel, there would be no support for those wars. The reason that there is support for them is because, in large part, Israeli people feel that there will be no blowback on them. They won't have to pay for it. And when you see a handful of missiles landing and a handful of Israelis dying, it's a huge deal. It's a huge deal over there.

And so the question is, for these politicians, I don't care if they say the word "genocide"—I think they should say it. But what I'm afraid of is somebody like Ro Khanna or whomever using that as a shield, using the word "genocide" or the word "apartheid" as a shield, to then not have to actually make the material commitments that will end the genocide, which is to say, we are no longer offering you full protection from the consequences of your actions. And so to me, the single most important litmus test question will be: do you support sending money for Iron Dome funding? Which sounds a little narrow, but it is, again, indicative of this broader question of, do you believe Israel should be accountable for its actions?

It should be said—I want to give Ro a little credit here, because we're sort of shitting on him a little bit. Excuse my language. But I think that he is somebody who's frankly trying to figure out the right position to take. And one way to view that is that he is just sort of blowing in the breeze, which I think sucks, but I think that he is actually out there trying to understand. My impression from that conversation with him, frankly, was that he had not thought about this question too deeply. Yesterday we saw AOC apparently commit—I'm not sure if it was some sort of a DSA meeting—

Ross

DSA electoral forum where she committed to voting against "any spending on arms for Israel, including so-called defensive capabilities."

Nathaniel

And so this is obviously a reference to Iron Dome funding, which has been a sort of holdout for a lot of Democrats, where they say, "I'm not sending any more weapons to Israel, but we're still going to fund the Iron Dome because it's defensive." And AOC has now, obviously, as a sort of shrewd politician, understood people who support Palestine are not going to view this as defensive. They're going to view it as offensive. And also, if you think they're committing genocide, why are we sending them anything? I think that's just a sort of more obvious question to ask.

But anyway, the fact that AOC moved on this yesterday, I would not be shocked—I actually tweeted at Ro Khanna yesterday. I don't think he's responded yet, but I shared the clip of him saying that he continues to support Iron Dome funding. And I asked, "Have you thought more about this, and has your position changed?" And I think that is going to become sort of the point where the rubber meets the road for these politicians who claim to believe that Israel is committing genocide as an apartheid state, but basically, they need to put their money where their mouth is. So I think that's a big one. Another one that sounds like it's more of a sort of rhetorical issue, but I actually think it's more than that, is this question of talking about a two-state solution. So my main issue with the House resolution that Ro Khanna created, which, to be clear, the specific demands in there—none of them will be followed because it's just a House resolution. It doesn't actually have enforcement power. But in terms of the content of it, which is no more settlement building, you have to cancel this construction plan in this zone called E1, prosecuting settlers, blah, blah, blah—it's all great, but all of it is framed as you must do all these things so we can maintain a potential two-state solution, which, number one, is morally wrong, because these things should be stopped because they are cruel and illegal towards Palestinians, not because it's the fair thing to do for a potential political thing that some people happen to believe in. That should be entirely irrelevant.

But, more importantly, the two-state solution is a fiction. What I think it is akin to is talking about what we're going to do, and we have eliminated fossil fuels. It's a parallel universe. There are three-quarters of a million settlers in the West Bank and in occupied East Jerusalem. They are heavily armed, they are deeply messianic, and they have the full support of their government. And a true two-state solution would require them to leave, or at least to peel back from a huge amount of the land they've taken over. And there's just no reason that that would happen. There's no momentum moving in that direction. And so what I believe is that when these politicians get to talk about a two-state solution, what it is actually doing is it's obfuscating the fact that they are not willing to put real conditions on Israel that will stop the settlement movement. It's sort of painting this fantasy that allows them to skip right over the reality of the situation there.

And this is not to say that I have the solution or that I believe firmly that we need to be demanding this or that. I do have my beliefs, but in terms of what politicians should be saying, I would like them to be in touch with reality, basically. They're talking about this two-state solution that is entirely unfeasible from a material perspective, and by the way, very few Israelis and very few Palestinians support it at this point. What are we doing here? Let's get in touch with reality. And so that, to me, will be another big question for Democratic politicians.

Ross

Yes, I actually printed out this article that you did last year called "It's Time to Treat the 'Two-State Solution' Like Climate Denial." And in fact, in the subheadline, you actually say, "A new litmus test for U.S. politicians."

"Unless they can explain how they plan to remove 750,000 armed, messianic West Bank settlers who have the full backing of the Israeli state, presenting “two states” as the sensible way out of this catastrophe should be treated like climate denial."

So I agree. I think that's a very smart litmus test. And for Ro Khanna, to be clear, I only singled him out because I do perceive him as someone who is potentially movable on this, unlike, for example, Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Dan Goldman, who didn't respond after you were attacked by settlers. Or Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman, for example, after the killing of Nasrallah Abu Siyam. We did an article in Current Affairs about how there's been radio silence from them, even though it was one of their own constituents who was murdered. And to be clear, just because you're an American citizen doesn't mean that your life is any more valuable. But you would think that American politicians should have a responsibility to speak out after one of their constituents is killed in that way and the message that it sends to the Israeli government and settlers on the ground when there's no accountability for those actions.

Nathaniel

Yes. Like you said, these Palestinian-Americans lives are no more precious than non-American Palestinians. But I think that it's an important case to examine because it shows the degree to which the United States shows deference to Israel, even in the case of killing its own citizens, which is sort of revealing of how the United States thinks about Palestinians in general, that it even negates their rights as an American citizen. I'm actually writing a bigger piece about this right now, so maybe we can have another conversation when it comes out.

But I actually think that this is another thing that a lot of Americans don't quite understand, which is not just that there are Palestinian Americans in the West Bank, but there are entire communities, entire villages, that are made up almost exclusively of American citizens. These places, for a long time, had some form of protection, in part because their blue passports got them through checkpoints. For various reasons, the occupation was sort of distant from them; that buffer has completely collapsed in the last two years. They are now, like every other Palestinian in the West Bank, being killed by settlers and by soldiers. They're routinely being brutalized and attacked and locked in prison. And the US embassy in Israel, both under Biden and the Blinken State Department and now, certainly, under Trump and the Rubio State Department and Mike Huckabee as the ambassador there, has basically told these American citizens there to go fuck themselves, to just be blunt. They have told them, as they told me when I was attacked—and I specifically reached out and said, "I need protection"—"There's nothing we can do for you."

A thought experiment is to imagine, is there any other country in the world where an American could be killed or attacked by people from that country, either civilians or soldiers or whomever, and the State Department and the embassy there would tell them, "There's nothing we can do for you"? I can't imagine any other place in the world where that would happen.

And so again, this teenager Nasrallah, who was murdered by settlers about a month ago, was born in Pennsylvania. He was born in Philadelphia. His brother lives there today. He went back and forth. He spoke perfect English. He was like millions and millions of Americans who had dual citizenship and would go back to their ancestral countries at times, and he was just murdered in cold blood. Just murdered. And there has not even been a demand for an investigation by the United States. And I think that it really is an issue worth highlighting to show the extent to which the US just shows complete deference to Israel.

Ross

And when American politicians won't even speak out after an American citizen is murdered or after an American journalist is nearly murdered, what message do you think that sends to the Israeli government and to settlers on the ground?

Nathaniel

"Do whatever you want." That is the message that the US sends to Israel in general. Sometimes they get a tisk, tisk. A slap on the wrist. And in the case of Trump, if the actions of the Israeli government threatened his financial interests with Gulf states or something, he might drop the hammer down and make some demands. But aside from Trump's financial interests, Israel just has carte blanche to do whatever they want, not just in Gaza and the West Bank, but in Lebanon and Syria and certainly Iran—all the way from the Nile to the Euphrates, as Huckabee said in an interview recently.

Ross

Two more quick questions for you. I wanted to ask briefly about Israeli public opinion, because I still think in the United States there's this tendency to just blame the state of affairs on a few politicians. "It's the Netanyahu government; it's Ben-Gvir." But when you look at public opinion polling in Israel, it seems to go much deeper than just those surface-level politicians. In 2025, more Israelis supported continued settlement construction in the West Bank than opposed it. There was a recent Haaretz poll that found that something like 82 percent of Israeli Jews support the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, and a majority also support expelling Arab citizens of Israel as well.

When these kinds of policies have this level of public support, do you think that that says something deeper about where Israeli society is politically right now, and where do you think that trajectory might lead, especially coupled with this death penalty law, for example?

Nathaniel

It's just undeniable that there's been a rightward lurch in Israeli society for years, but mostly since October 7. After October 7—actually going back further, after the Second Intifada—the nominal left-wing in Israel, which had been pushing for an end to the occupation, basically called it quits. They were convinced that it was no longer in their security interests to fight to free the Palestinian people. And the sort of left-wing movement in Israel collapsed after that 20-some years ago. There were still people who, I think, don't like to see Palestinians murdered and brutalized, and some of them might even vote that way. But then, after October 7, again, what you have is people putting what they believe to be their own security interests above everything else.

And so in the case of the settlements, for example—I don't know the exact point on this, but anecdotally, I can say the average Israeli in Tel Aviv is not going to come out and say, "Yes, we like to see these feral settlers going in and attacking children and grandmothers and farmers in Palestinian villages." But the settlers are what some people call the "bulletproof vest" of Israel: the settlements are what is preventing an October 7-style attack from coming out of the West Bank. "If we hadn't disengaged and pulled the settlements out of Gaza in 2005, there never would have been an October 7." And so the settlements have, frankly, really done a very good job marketing themselves this way, as the buffer between Israel and all the barbarians east of the green line who want to come kill them, as they would claim, both from the West Bank and also from beyond.

Ao I don't know to what extent people's hearts have changed in Israel, but it's just clear that every time there is a real Palestinian uprising that results in casualties of Israelis, they just sort of double down on security. I should say there is a very, very slim—I don't know the numbers—very left-wing that I run into in the West Bank. They're kind of like Black Bloc protesters, anarchists of sorts, who are left of most people I know here in America, and they are pretty much still there to try to sabotage the settlement movement and whatnot. But that is just a vanishingly small—well, I don't know if it's vanishingly small, but it's a tiny sliver of people there. In terms of where the country is going, it's moving right. I'm not like an expert on the Israeli populace, but I did hear recently that the left-liberal Israelis who left the country either in the last couple of years or before are all planning on basically going back to vote in the upcoming election to try to get the Netanyahu government out of power. I just don't know if that will happen or not.

But even Yair Lapid, the opposition leader in Israel who positions himself as a centrist, literally came out and said the other day, in response to a question about Huckabee saying that Israel's biblical borders are between the Nile and the Euphrates, that he affirmed that. He agreed. And he said because of political and security conditions, we won't necessarily be going and expanding our borders that way, but yes, those are our real borders. And then a couple of weeks later, security and political conditions change, and now they can occupy all of South Lebanon up to the river, basically. And so even the sort of ostensibly centrist, moderate, even liberal Israeli politicians are just not going to move things in the right direction. Maybe they will sort of slow the forces of these obscene levels of genocide and ethnic cleansing we're seeing. I don't know. Maybe they will. But the rightward lurch, I believe there's every reason to believe it's going to continue.

Ross

So I want to end by asking you about, I believe, one of the first articles that you ever wrote from the West Bank on January 19, 2024. It's called "You Don't Understand How Bad It Is Here." And in this piece, you say, "I am convinced that no reasonable person could spend even a week here and come away believing the occupation is morally defensible under any circumstances. The trouble is that most will neither come nor even look too closely."

So my final question is, based on everything that you've seen and everything you've reported on, what is it that people on the outside still don't understand about how bad it actually is?

Nathaniel

I think what people don't understand is just how pervasive and all-encompassing the cruelty of the occupation is. People hear about the checkpoints, and they see these videos of brute violence. And maybe they know about the mass displacement and the refugee camps in the north, but I think what they're missing is how common it is to be sitting in a cafe and a soldier walks in and swipes a tray of cookies off the counter and walks out just because, or the degree to which it is just so common for settlers or soldiers to break somebody's jaw or throw them on the ground. The kind of thing that if you saw a cop do in New York, it would shock you to your core. And I'm not defending the NYPD, but I think we can agree that if a cop was on video pistol-whipping somebody and breaking their jaw, it would be a really big deal here. That is happening every single day all over the West Bank. The level of cruelty is just staggering.

Not that I would ever take this position, but even if you took the position that some sort of an occupation is necessary there, the cruelty of this occupation is so beyond what would theoretically be necessary to maintain order. Like I said in the beginning, it's meant to provoke violence in some cases, and it's meant to terrorize and make people miserable, because what they're trying to do ultimately is get people to leave, to chase them out so they can take over. And so everything that happens there is to that end. And so, yes, I think the answer would be the sheer sort of pervasiveness of the cruelty that the Palestinians are facing.

Ross

Jasper Nathaniel, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for both your intellectual and physical courage and reporting on all of this from the West Bank. I want to remind people that Jasper is the publisher and author of the Infinite Jaz Substack, and if I understand correctly, you are fewer than 100 paid subscribers away from 1,000. So if you want to support Jasper, please go and subscribe to Infinite Jazz on Substack, some of the best quality reporting from the West Bank. Jasper Nathaniel, thank you so much for joining Current Affairs today.

Nathaniel

Yes, thanks for having me. It was a really great conversation.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.