This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Wars rage across the Middle East between the US and Iran, Yemen’s Houthis and Saudi Arabia, Israel and Hezbollah in south Lebanon. Yet future historians may see Israel’s slow moving but relentless campaign to make life unliveable for the 3.4 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, forcing them from their land, as the more consequential conflict because it involves the destruction of a whole society.  

Israeli ministers boast about having nearly doubled the number of settlements in the West Bank from 127 to 231 since 2023. Outposts set up by Israeli settlers harass Palestinians farmers until they abandon their hamlets and villages and take flight to the cities or into exile. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, says openly that, “I think we need to go to war in Judea and Samaria [West Bank] to do what we did in Gaza”, where 82 per cent of buildings have been damaged or destroyed according to the UN.

The war that Smotrich yearns for in the West Bank, however, has in many senses already begun, some calling it the “the orphan war” as it is largely ignored by a world fixated on the battle to control the Strait of Hormuz. Last month UK Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, bravely denounced Israeli actions in the West Bank as “ethnic cleansing”, and imposed a UK ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements there. 

Yet the complicit silence on the crushing of Palestinian society is returning and the Israeli government will have been gratified to see that elderly supporters of Palestine Action were still being arrested outside the Labour Party conference in Liverpool.

Recently I spoke by telephone to a Palestinian shepherd, Muhammad Abu Awwad, 25, who lives in a shack with his parents in the village of Atouf, north of the Jordan Valley, which is part of the West Bank. 

“Atouf is not merely a spot on the map,” he said. “It is fertile agricultural land that was once known as one of the Jordan Valley’s food baskets. People lived here from farming their land, grazing their sheep, and relying on water from its wells.” 

He added that Israeli settlers with the help of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are systematically destroying it, starting with “the demolition of water wells that supplied crops and livestock”. Tractors and other vehicles were confiscated. A new trench was dug through the village, apparently part of a new Israeli security fence, making movement difficult for people and animals.

Abu Awwad used his phone to show me two sheds knocked down by an Israeli bulldozer and two shattered waterpipes. His family owns 500 sheep and goats, which I could see milling about close to his shack. 

“They are dying because of lack of pasture and water and a place to shelter from the heat,” he said. “When they knocked down the two sheds, I lost my temper and shouted at them: ‘Don’t you have humanity towards the sheep, if not towards us?’”   

He had never been physically attacked by soldiers or settlers, nor had he and 150 Palestinian........

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