I didn’t choose to make my identity political. But for Palestinian journalists, even naming our own grief and experiences gets branded as ‘ideological’.

We need to collectively rethink describing Israeli settlers as “terrorists.” The label was designed to serve imperial interests, and it implies that settler violence is an aberration, not a systemic part of Zionist settler colonialism.

Israel’s use of so-called “shepherding outposts” to seize Palestinian land through settler herders is now being exported to Syria, as an Israeli settler, supported by the state, occupies Syrian pastureland in Wadi Toemm with a herd of 140 cattle.

The arrest and detention of Philadelphia resident Hussein Jabarin is one example of the broader escalation of violence Palestinians are facing across the occupied West Bank.

Fathi Khazem, a father of two slain resistance fighters and once regarded as a symbol of resistance, was killed by Israeli forces in his home, despite having an understanding mediated by the Palestinian Authority that Israel wouldn’t pursue him.

For seven months, Israeli settlers have besieged three Palestinian homes on a hilltop near Nablus, but the families refuse to leave. “We will lose ourselves if we lose Ras al-Ain,” a village leader told Mondoweiss.

For months, Palestinian farmers in the northern West Bank have watched their water lines cut and their wells marked for demolition in Israel’s slow strangulation of Palestinian agriculture, as farmers tell Mondoweiss “there is no tomorrow” for them.

For generations, Palestinian farmers timed the wheat harvest by the stars and the rain. Now, Israeli settlers set the harvest instead, as their cows graze freely in Palestinian wheat fields across the West Bank after displacing Bedouin herders.

Amid escalating raids and statements by Israeli officials promising a massive military operation against refugee camps in the West Bank, Palestinians in Ramallah-area camps say it’s not a question of whether their turn will come, but when.

Israel’s “decisive” plan to annex the West Bank is coming to a head as the Israeli government pushes to depopulate Palestinian villages throughout the territory. Once a hub of resistance, the West Bank’s Palestinians now find themselves defenseless.