I cannot sleep the night before my second shift. I throw up around midnight. Nerves, and too much vodka. Why does it fill me with horror to go back? Most of the time I am filming kids younger than my own. Statistically, I’m more likely to be killed driving to the West Bank, than in it. But on my first day, a senior activist and a Palestinian drove me to a lookout point to see the new outposts, sprinkled like salt over the imposing mountains around Mukhmas. “I was picking olives in the Valley when a group of settlers beat me up,” the Palestinian said. “Then they burnt six homes. Nobody lives there now. Their violence escalates until they achieve their goal and drive us from our homes.”

The violence escalates. So far in Taybeh, where I work, they’ve been sending teenagers to cut fences and drive their flocks up to the houses. They try to cut water and electricity lines. They come every day, twice a day. The Palestinian children leave home at 6 a.m. so they can get to school before the settlers arrive. The families lock themselves in their houses. They barely leave their compounds. But despite the misery of their lives, they aren’t leaving their homes. “I was born here, and my father before me,” my host Husni says. “I will never leave.”

But the violence escalates. In the end, won’t they leave? When lives are threatened. To save their children. At some point the settlers will decide: “OK, this isn’t working. Time to go to the next level of terror!” My role is passive, limited to unviolent reaction. They call the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)