Home truths ahead of the Israeli election

In Um al-Khair, in the South Hebron Hills, I watched dozens of the village’s goats slowly starve to death.

Overnight, settlers from neighbouring Carmel, barely 20 metres away, had built a low wall across the entrance to the goat shed. Anyone who climbed over it risked being detained by the army, ostensibly for violating property rights. The wall protects nothing the settlers claim as theirs. Its only function is to stop the village’s residents from reaching their animals.

The wall went up on a Thursday. By Monday, the goats had gone five days without food or water. Weary, wobbly and dehydrated, they were dying in front of us, while their owners looked on knowing that no authority, neither the army nor the police, would step in to protect them.

Set against everything else Um al-Khair faces, a low wall might seem a small thing. The village lives under threat of eviction and dispossession, with near-daily verbal and physical violence and a steady drip of intimidation: cars parked to block the village entrance, children accused of kicking a ball in the wrong direction. But it is precisely this accumulation of small cruelties that makes a home so hard to hold on to.

And yet. Community leaders including Eid Suleiman, who have fought for over a decade to remain on their land, received us with extraordinary warmth. From a kitchen so rudimentary it felt like a small miracle that anything could emerge from it, they served us a filling meal of rice, beans and salad. Despite every effort to break their sense of home, that meal, and the smiles on their children’s faces, were proof that it endures.

The silence of Al-Shuhada Street

In Hebron, the silence of Al- Shuhada Street, home to about 800 Palestinians, is its own kind of noise. Palestinian homes have front doors that they can no longer open onto the street. In one window, dresses hang out to dry like disembodied people, an incidental art installation in a ghost town: a physical record of the Palestinians who are at once present and absent. What does it mean to have a home in a city when your street has been “sterilised” and you can no longer walk through it?

All around are flyers and posters proclaiming the eternal Jewish connection to Hebron, resting place of the patriarchs, a city of spiritual light. Yet barely 800 settlers live there, protected by a similar number of soldiers.

Despite all that protection, and generous government funding and incentives to build and settle, Jewish numbers in Hebron and neighbouring Kiryat Arba remain strikingly low. Kiryat Arba has around 7,000 residents against a planned 20,000 to 30,000, many of them new immigrants with few other economic options.

What was once a bustling market city is eerily quiet. In H2, the Israeli-controlled part of the city, unemployment stands at 87%. Stifling Palestinian life here has produced something so toxic that no one, not even the Jewish residents, can arguably feel truly at home.

A bookshop under pressure: snapshot from East Jerusalem

In East Jerusalem, on Salah al-Din Street, Mahmoud Muna runs the Educational Bookshop: floor-to-ceiling shelves, and a beacon of intellectual and cultural light. Downstairs is a salon of sorts and a kitchen, which served our group stuffed courgettes, aubergines and salad, while his daughters in their school uniforms skipped up and down the stairs. Mahmoud himself is brilliant, satirical and razor-sharp.

In February 2025, eight plainclothes Israeli police officers arrived with a court order and took 300 books. Mahmoud and his brother Ahmad were arrested and held at the Russian Compound, which he describes as “indescribably brutal”.
“They said that they wanted to treat Palestinians like Hamas treats the hostages.”

He recalls one officer holding up an illustrated edition of Orwell’s 1984, shaking it in his face and saying: “Ah ha, 1948… let’s see what you people say about what happened that year.” When he tried to explain the nature of Orwell’s book, he realised he himself was living inside the novel’s dystopian vision.

According to Mahmoud, no evidence of incitement was found, yet he was released under restrictive conditions, and the case remains formally open. Just two weeks ago, travelling to the Frankfurt Book Fair, he was again taken aside at border control and questioned – a black mark against his name.

His shop is an oasis for curious minds and a pitstop for many an international scholar, but life as a Palestinian in East Jerusalem is a constant reminder that he is not meant to feel fully at home and his pride is mixed with anxiety. The vast majority of the city’s approximately 360,000 Palestinians are residents rather than citizens: they cannot vote in national elections like the one next week, only municipal ones, which he says are “about services, not rights”. “We pay taxes like everyone else yet have no power or say in who leads or governs us.”

He is wary of the growing number of East Jerusalem Palestinians seeking Israeli citizenship, which, given the number of Palestinians involved, he believes will jeopardize the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. With elections days away, he hopes that at the very least National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir will be gone, and his own case closed – even if he can’t vote for a different reality.

Building home anyway

‘Don’t just talk about the challenges, talk about the response” Shira Ben Sasson, Director of NIF in Israel, implored as we closed the study trip last week.

And indeed, we would be wrong to describe only the challenges, because people in every part of the country are responding vigorously.

Across the 27 mixed Jewish and Palestinian Tzedek centres they are bringing together residents to participate in training programs for social change. People come together to decide their community’s needs for themselves and to fix municipal problems, from something as mundane as the regular provision of dog-waste bags to fighting for a broad and liberal after-school education for their local primary-age children. In time, they want people to stand for leadership positions.

There’ll be municipal elections in 2028, and Tzedek centre leaders are confident that trained participants of their programmes will have front and centre roles that influence not just locally, but ultimately nationally.

A home we can be proud of

Next week Israel votes.

Aside from the Democrats, none of the Jewish parties has openly stated that it will work with Arab parties to build a coalition.

It is a deeply troubling reality – one in which just yesterday 80 volunteers, including numerous American Rabbis, were detained for participating in protective presence work during the critical olive harvest.

But if we want to fight for that precious sense of home, we need a real one: where you can feed your flock and harvest your olives without fear of repercussion; where the 20% of Israel’s citizens who are Palestinian share in its leadership; and where the approximately 360,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem have a genuine say in the future of the country.

Only then will we have a home we can be proud of, not, as David Grossman has warned, a fortress.

Atira Winchester is Director of Content and Leadership at the New Israel Fund