Go Tell It on the Mountain: Genocide Is Wrong

Israel and its partners continue waging genocide against Palestinian people. Those who, so far, have survived the hideous attacks since October 7, 2023, now face ongoing jeopardy. Hemmed in by yet another military border, over two million Palestinians in “East Gaza” live amid rubble, unexploded ordnance, decaying corpses, starvation conditions, and the uncertainties of inhabiting makeshift homes without sewage, sanitation, clean water, or protection against harsh winter weather. A saddening certainty was hammered home on November 17, 2025, when not a single country stood up for them at the United Nations. The Security Council resolved to accept President Trump’s plan for Gaza’s future, a proposal which makes no effort to hold Israel and the U.S. accountable, in the near term, for war crimes and relentless ethnic cleansing.

Anticipating what some call the “Gazafication” of the West Bank, human rights groups are calling on the Israeli military to cease their attacks on Palestinian neighborhoods and refugee camps. Most recently, the Israeli Defense Forces raided homes in the governorate of Tubas after expelling more than twenty families from the besieged Al Far’a refugee camp.

Throughout the world, nations continue trading with Israel, perpetuating a status quo that flaunts international law. While the U.S. sanctions International Criminal Court judges for ruling against Israeli settlers who illegally occupy Palestinian land in the West Bank, the settlers have intensified their brutality, descending on Bedouin communities, villagers grazing their flocks, and Palestinians aiming to harvest olive tree crops.

Using jeeps, bulldozers, ATVs, rifles, and other equipment supplied by the Israeli government and military, settlers beat civilians with clubs, torch vehicles, steal livestock, and demolish homes.

In Gaza there is no peace: the brief quiet, punctuated as ever by Israeli gunfire and aerial attacks, is the quiet of a mass grave that cannot begin to be unearthed until Israel allows the land-moving equipment in.

This violence is not a fringe phenomenon. It is deliberate, escalatory. Shunning all international condemnation, it is ethnic cleansing aimed at involuntary population transfer and, unless disrupted, mass atrocities. The Israeli military throws up its hands at settler violence, but many of the settlers are Israeli military who commit vigilante actions, return to their homes, don Israeli military uniforms, and go back to the very places they have attacked to arrest the victims, blaming them for causing the unrest or for unrelated alleged violations of Israeli law. Fear of imprisonment and torture adds another layer of violence to entrap Palestinians refusing to leave their land.

Those Israeli outposts and settlements already constructed occupy vast stretches of land, akin to suburbs in the United States. They monopolize the best land and the readiest supplies of water for drinking or farming. They connect with segregated highways, designated for use only by Israelis. Settlers and their government leaders fully intend to expand further, accomplishing “Greater Israel.”

Amid the grotesque injustices in Israel, a Palestinian youngster can be sentenced to three years in prison for picking up a rock, while an Israeli youngster in trouble with his school or community or both can be sentenced to a settler outpost where extremist leaders will urge him to attack defenseless villagers, all in the name of racial supremacy and fulfillment of divine command. Israel gives itself a little quiet from youth delinquency by shipping troubled youth wholesale off to the West Bank. There, they can turn their rage upon Palestinians and international observers.

In 1999, Ariel Sharon, as Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, avowed Israel would seize all the hilltops in Palestine. Named for Ariel Sharon's infamous call to turn strategic heights i not "facts on the ground," the “Hilltop Youth” are bent on creating new facts: demolished homes, seized lands, ground turned black from fire or red from blood.

Why is there no accountability for settler terrorism? The UN office of the High Commission for Human Rights calls the settler attacks abhorrent. “Permanently displacing the Palestinian population within occupied territory amounts to unlawful transfer, which is a war crime,” says a November 14, 2025, press briefing from the UNHCR. “The transfer by Israel of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies also amounts to a war crime.”

Yet, the Hilltop Youth can point to Israeli right-wing leaders in the highest echelons of government who urge continued assaults against non-Jews, regarding them as sub-human.

“The ruling order in Palestine doesn’t see settler terror as a crime,” writes an independent journalist, Andrey X, who has spent three years with unarmed civilian protectors in the West Bank. “Settler terror is an essential part of the state project,” he adds, regarding the Hilltop Youth as Israel’s frontline soldiers. In encouraging these young militants, some of whom are underage, the Israeli leadership is condoning what could be deemed the use of child soldiers.

Activists with various unarmed civilian protection groups witness and record local offenses, at great personal risk. One activist who, for security reasons, cannot be named, is trained to look assailants in the eye while deescalating (or attempting to deescalate) confrontations, in part to keep tabs on which personalities have newly arrived to repress Palestinian neighbors.

During Israel’s most recent Rosh Hashanah celebration, near an outpost about a kilometer up the mountain, Jonas was assailed by an angered youth apparently visiting for the holiday. Gingerly backing away up a rocky incline as the young lad hurled stones at him, Jonas remembers keeping eye contact and gently remonstrating with him. "You know,” he said, “You don't have to do this … Did anyone ever teach you to attack old men?" One expertly hurled rock ("he could have been a good shortstop," Jonas told me later) hit so close to the bone that Jonas had to be hospitalized for a hematoma.

Nevertheless, Jonas is quite privileged compared to Palestinians who wouldn’t have access to similar health care or a passport that enables departure.

Jonas says one person in local Palestinian communities usually serves as a point of contact, on a WhatsApp line, for the entire village. In the event of an Israeli incursion, people contact him and when he contacts the international observers, they quickly send a team. Any of the villagers' watch dogs will most likely have already been shot. At least six days a week, young settlers will drive their goats and sheep down the hill from the outpost into the villagers’ yards and try, behind the shelter of guns, to drive the sheep and goats into the villagers' living quarters. While kids are getting ready for school and households rise, going about their regular life, the settlers drive their sheep and goats directly into the houses, sometimes entering also into the sheep and goat pens of the villagers. Then, settlers claim all the livestock as their own, stealing the villagers’ livelihoods, as they herd the animals out of the village and back to their settlement. An international team may help prevent the pernicious process.

Unarmed westerners accompanying villagers risk deportation if they make an official complaint. Israelis on other teams can make complaints, but with zero observable effect. Even the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), were they inclined to, would have little impact on the settlers: one of Jonas's friends heard of a settler who claimed, “I have automatic weapons in my house, and they’re for the IDF if they try to move me out."

Lest we forget, the Israeli government has basically told the world that it has nuclear weapons inside their Negev desert facilities, and they could use these annihilatory weapons against anyone that tries to stop Israel from establishing an ever-increasing apartheid state.

The current Trump-ordained quiet, so far from being a peace, appears doomed. Since October 10, Israel has violated the terms of the agreement more than 500 times.

In Gaza there is no peace: the brief quiet, punctuated as ever by Israeli gunfire and aerial attacks, is the quiet of a mass grave that cannot begin to be unearthed until Israel allows the land-moving equipment in.

Jonas, who has spent decades as an international activist in conflict and war zones, says he has never before seen the systemic cruelty perpetrated by Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza.

But, the violence may come home to the UN General Assembly members choosing quiet observation. And, if we take the new dispensation as reason to fall silent, we may end up being silent for a long, long time.