Israel’s intractable conflict hits home with a daughter’s visit there
Nov 07, 2025
What is a parent to do when distant violence gets personal?
For me, the question has not been abstract. My younger daughter, Rabbi Abi Weber, felt a moral duty to join a group of fellow rabbis in Israel and in the Palestinian West Bank. They joined in the annual olive harvest, helping protect Arab farmers facing assaults by Israeli settlers.
So, on Nov. 4, Abi was among about 30 such activists when settlers buzzed them with a drone. After the drone fell and cut one of the women on arm, a couple armed settlers in military fatigues came to retrieve it. They pointed a gun at the activists – at fellow Jews – and then fired into the air.
Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt, as happened just a couple weeks before. Then, a settler repeatedly clubbed a 55-year-old Palestinian woman after chasing farmers through olive groves near the West Bank village of Turmus’ayya. The woman was hospitalized with a brain bleed.
And, thankfully for our family, our daughter was not harmed in the drone assault – just appalled. “It was not the most pleasant set of interactions,” she put it in a characteristic bit of understatement.
Earlier, when Abi was visiting shepherds, she explained her reason for being there in a short video. She said the herders had been harassed and sometimes assaulted by settlers. As she provided what she called a protective presence, she said, “I believe as a rabbi that my Judaism calls me to prevent violence and to provide the opportunity for coexistence.”
Well, okay. But, two years after the horrors of Oct. 7 and after tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, peaceful coexistence seems like an impossible dream. Only some 21 percent of Israelis polled by Gallup between June and August believe peace is achievable. Only 23 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem agree. The figures are up slightly from recent years, but not by much.
Indeed, in the West Bank violence in the annual olive harvest has been growing. As Reuters reported, Palestinian monitors have counted 158 attacks across the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the harvest began in early October. Activists and farmers say the violence has intensified since Hamas triggered the war in Gaza.
The settlers target the harvest because Palestinians depend on it economically and see olive trees as symbols of their connection to the land. As NPR’s Daniel Estrin reported from the West Bank, the U.N. says this season has been the most dangerous in five years, with settler attacks in 70 towns and villages and more than 4,000 olive trees and saplings vandalized.
For us in her family, Abi’s choice to put herself on the line to help the West Bank Arabs was not a welcome one. The danger was obvious and the gain elusive. The effort by her colleagues in Rabbinical Voice for Human Rights and the liberal rabbinic group T’ruah seemed at best idealistic and at worst provocative, even though the RVHR has been doing this for some 20 years.
But to be a rabbi, perhaps, is to be an idealist. Taking on the role of a religious teacher may demand a certain Utopianism, requiring that one believes he or she can make a difference in the world. So, my daughter is consistent.
Still, she stepped into one of the most fraught arenas in the world. In a sad coincidence, the day of the drone assault, Nov. 4, marked 30 years from the date when a Jewish extremist assassinated then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. As former Mideast negotiator Dennis Ross recently wrote in The Atlantic, Rabin “was the rare Israeli statesman who understood that Israel can advance its interests and address the Palestinian cause at the same time. Indeed, he was killed because of his efforts to broker peace, a prospect his killer couldn’t tolerate.”
The assassin, like many on Israel’s right, was enraged by Rabin’s support of the Oslo Accords. Those agreements were aimed at creating a two-state solution. They called for Israeli withdrawal from parts of the West Bank, which was anathema to rightists who argued that no part of G_d-given lands could be surrendered to non-Jews.
While condemnation of Rabin’s assassination was swift and widespread, it was not universal. Some right-wing rabbis contended that Rabin’s death was a legitimate, even a religious goal. They argued that Jew-on-Jew violence could be acceptable, with some rationalizing that a Jew who sought to yield any of the Biblical land of Israel had given up his Judaism.
For instance, the late Rabbi Abraham Hecht, then head of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, held that surrendering any land violated Jewish religious law. Thus, assassinating Rabin and all who assisted him, was “both permissible and necessary.” Hecht in October 1995 told New York Magazine: “Rabin is not a Jew any longer …. According to Jewish law, it says very clearly, if a man kills him, he has done a good deed.”
A decade ago, the American Council for Judaism published a piece that spelled out such sentiments. In a review of the book, “Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel” by journalist Dan Ephron, it reported: “The assassin was not a lone psychotic gunman but, instead, was a young man nurtured within Israel’s far-right religious institutions. After the murder, he was hailed as a hero by many, not only in Israel, but among kindred spirits in the U.S.”
Moreover, since Rabin’s killing, the politics in Israel have moved relentlessly rightward. The settler movement – which Rabin once called “a cancer” — more than doubled in size in the 20 years after the assassination. And the killing of the peace-seeking prime minister set the stage for today’s government.
“Assassination is an unpredictable act,’ journalist Dexter Filkins wrote in The New Yorker. “Yet the killing of Yitzhak Rabin … bids to be one of history’s most effective political murders. Two years earlier, Rabin, setting aside a lifetime of enmity, appeared on the White House lawn with Yasir Arafat … to agree to a framework for limited Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territories … Within months of Rabin’s death, Benjamin Netanyahu was the new prime minister and the prospects for wider-ranging peace … were dead.”
In Rabin’s pocket at the time he was shot was a blood-stained sheet of paper bearing the lyrics of an Israeli song, “Shir LaShalom“ (”Song for Peace”). The song, which had been sung at the rally, focuses on the impossibility of bringing a dead person back to life and, therefore, the need for peace. This reasonable, if idealistic, tune mirrors the efforts of my daughter and her groups.
But, given the realities of Israel today, it would seem that such groups at best are tilting at windmills, at worst courting disaster for themselves. Yes, they garner a few headlines. And, yes, they show both Israelis and Palestinians that some are interested in getting to a meaningful and enduring peace.
Indeed, most Israelis want peace above all else. Some 66 percent of Israelis polled in September wanted an end to the war in Gaza, including 93 percent of Arabs and 60 percent of Jews. And in mid-October, tens of thousands of Israelis celebrated the return of hostages in the deal brokered by President Trump. While my daughter was being harassed by settlers, some 80,000 people attended a memorial rally on Nov. 4 in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.
And yet, we’re a long way from peace.
My daughter’s trip ended with visits to the massacre sites in southern Israel where Hamas killed some 1,200 innocents, taking a couple hundred more hostage in the worst attack on Israel since the 1948 war. As a Jew committed to Israel, she mourned those losses, recounting an emotional tour her group was given by a guide at the Nova concert site whose two best friends were murdered by the terrorists there. At Kibbutz Nir Oz, she saw a photo of a couple and their three young kids, all killed when their home was burned.
Our family rabbi is idealistic, but not naïve. She knows that the ugliness of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has persisted for more than a century, marked at its beginning most starkly by the 1929 Hebron massacre. Nearly 70 Jews were murdered then and dozens more were injured by their Muslim neighbors after the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spread lies that Jews wanted to take over the Al Aqsa Mosque. Many more attacks have occurred since then, which may partly explain the fevers that drive the West Bank settlers.
Soon after the Trump peace plan was signed by many countries in the region experts differed on whether it has a prayer of success.
“This is a deal reluctantly agreed to by still-irreconcilable foes,” noted Shibley Telhami of The Brookings Institution. And the institute’s Hady Amr argued that “seeking peace without equality is an illusion. Israelis today enjoy security, freedom, and one of the world’s strongest economies—wealthier per capita than France, Japan, the UAE, or the U.K. Palestinians live under military control and are 20 times poorer. That immense imbalance in a tiny territory the size of New Jersey is a recipe for recurring conflict.”
But others cautiously applauded the moves. “Trump and his team of real estate wheeler-dealers broke that stalemate with creative and energetic diplomacy,” argued Suzanne Maloney. “For the plan to succeed, Washington will have to invest even more energy and political capital in advancing the next phases of the plan.”
Will Trump and his aides make such investments? The president is fond of photo-ops that make him look good, but does he have a capacity and persistence to see his 20-point plan to fruition?
More recently, with bloodshed continuing anew in Gaza, albeit at lower levels, a resolution seems even more distant. Will Hamas disarm, as the plan demands? “The more likely view is that Hamas is unlikely to fully relinquish its arms, according to people who have studied the group and understand its psychology,” London-based writer Akram Attaallah wrote in The New York Times. “It would cut to the core of its identity. For a movement that built its legitimacy around what it called resistance, giving up its weapons is not just a tactical concession; it is an existential unraveling.”
On the Israeli side, some on the far right want full-scale war on Hamas to resume, especially in light of Hamas dragging its feet on returning Israeli bodies and faking the recovery of at least one of them. “The fact that Hamas continues to play games and does not immediately transfer all the bodies of our fallen, is in itself evidence that the terror organization is still standing,” said Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli security minister. “Now we don’t need to ‘extract a price from Hamas’ for the violations. We need to exact from it its very existence and destroy it completely, once and for all …”
Recall that Trump’s peace deal was trumpeted just under a month before settlers menaced my daughter and her group. Their goals and that of groups such as my daughter’s still couldn’t be further apart. So, unless miracles occur, I dearly hope she feels no need to return to the West Bank for next year’s harvest.
