Israel’s colonization of the West Bank was the subject of a lecture last Monday, Sept. 15, by Israeli ethnographer Irus Braverman, a Professor of Law, Adjunct Professor of Geography and Research Professor at the Department of Research and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. The lecture, “Bad Samaritans: Settlers, Sheep, and Land Grabbing in the Israeli-Occupied West Bank,” was sponsored by the Geography and International Studies Departments.
For 23 months, Israel has undertaken a brutal assault on the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian people, killing over 65,000 Palestinians—83 percent of whom have been civilians. This official death toll of 65,000 may be an undercount of over 40 percent, for a total of over 90,000 Palestinians. Israel’s war on Gaza and its people has been named a genocide by multiple offices of the United Nations, multiple renowned human rights organizations, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and numerous other experts.
As Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza has intensified over the course of nearly two years, a settler colonialist project has been advancing in the West Bank, another Palestinian territory that has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. According to the newspaper Al Jazeera, there are currently some 600,000 to 750,000 settlers living in at least 250 settlements and outposts throughout the West Bank. Israel’s formation of these settlements is in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which reads, “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” In July 2025, the Israeli Parliament approved a symbolic measure calling for the West Bank’s annexation.
In her presentation, Braverman argued that since 2010, and especially since October 2023, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have used shepherding as a tool of rapid land seizure and dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank. The most common image of illegal Israeli colonization in the West Bank is of built settlements: rows of prefabricated houses, curving suburban roads and swimming pools. Yet as Braverman stated, settlers grazing sheep across wide swaths of land have effectively dispossessed Palestinians of significantly more land than their construction of buildings and neighborhoods.
A December 2024 report by Peace Now and Kerem Navot found that settlers have seized 786,000 dunams, or about 195,000 acres, of West Bank land using shepherding outposts—14 percent of the entire territory. Per the report, 70 percent of all land seized by West Bank settlers has been through shepherding. Braverman described, “These attacks which have targeted not only Palestinians, but also their sheep, have been at least a decade in the making, and already resulted in the largest displacement of Palestinian communities from this space since 1967… Roughly 80 percent of the Palestinian communities in these areas have had to stop accessing their lands and their grazing practices.”
According to Braverman, the Israeli shepherds carrying out this massive land seizure see it as a major escalation in settler activity in the West Bank. Braverman quoted one shepherd whom she interviewed in the Jordan Valley as saying, “Jewish shepherding is the most important development in the Zionist settlement over the last decade. It is a revolution.”
Braverman sees this nascent colonization by sheep as part of “settler ecologies,” a term she coined in her 2023 book “Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel.” “Backed by the State of Israel, such Jewish herding practices are a device for violently undermining and dispossessing Palestinian communities, on the one hand, and for re-indigenizing and resettling Jewish settlers in their place,” Braverman said. She added in an email to The Miscellany News, “On the other hand… The declared objective of the Jewish herding farms is to protect state lands. In practice, however, they are designed, I argue, to uproot Palestinian grazing farming communities from Area C of the West Bank and turn them into the hands of the settlers for their exclusive use.” In the 1990s, the Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into Areas A, B and C, each with different degrees of Palestinian and Israeli administration. Area C, which covers 60 percent of the West Bank, remains under full Israeli military and civilian control.
Settler dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank is, according to Braverman, “directly and explicitly violent.” She showed a video during her presentation, made by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, of settlers armed with assault rifles expelling Palestinian shepherds from their lands and scattering their flocks using ATVs, drones and motorcycles. Some are dressed in military fatigues. As Braverman explained, they are soldiers, many of them recently returned from Gaza yet continuing to commit violence in military uniform with military weapons. One soldier says in Hebrew, “Fuck international law.”
A recent episode of the radio program “This American Life” about the West Bank included a vivid instance of a settler attack on Palestinian shepherds. A Palestinian man, Ali Awad, described four masked settlers armed with sticks and rocks threatening his uncle and aunt, then stealing their flock of about 300 sheep. Ali began recording the theft on his phone and pleading with the settlers, which distracted them enough for the sheep to run, on their own, back home.
As Braverman explained, Israeli shepherds see themselves as reconnecting with the ancient Israelites, who were also shepherds, while simultaneously redeeming the Promised Land.
The spiritual valence of the settler colonial project creates what Braverman called “sheepwashing”: “By reclaiming ancient pastoral practices from their biblical forefathers, the settlers come to imagine themselves as the original Indigenous peoples in this land. Effectively, through shepherding, they transform into the old-new Indigenous people to whom this land was promised by God.” By email, Braverman added, “This ‘washing’ is also of Palestinian presence, undermining the position of Palestinians themselves as shepherds and pushing them out of Area C of the West Bank.”
Students who attended the talk related Braverman’s research to material in their classes. “Violence doesn’t have to be dropping bombs or shooting guns—I mean, they’re probably shooting guns as well,” said Cate Merriam ’28, who is taking Professor of Geography Joe Nevins’ “Geographies of Mass Violence” class. “It can also be just mass displacement and illegal settlement. Someone’s presence can be violent, as opposed to ‘I’m going to murder you’ violent.”
Amritha Dewan ’28, a Geography major taking both “Geographies of Mass Violence” and Professor of Geography Yu Zhou’s “Spaces of Global Capitalism,” said of the talk, “It seemed really interesting and relevant to a lot of the things that I’m learning in both of those classes, such as the way that space, and place and the landscape play a role in the politics, and the violence, and the changes and the human choices that play out on that landscape.”
Gracie Durgin ’28 connected the talk to a Native American Studies class she took last year. “A big thing that we talked about in the colonial process is the idea of becoming the Indigenous, or inheriting the indigeneity of the actual Indigenous people,” she said. “So I found in her talk that that is what is currently happening with Israelis in Palestine. I found that very interesting, and just how that is a common thread in colonial regimes.”
Students also expressed that Vassar should use more of its resources to bring experts and scholars on the Palestinian–Israeli conflict to the College. “I feel uneducated about the situation, and I would like to rectify that,” Durgin explained. “But I think it’s relatively hard to find academic discussion if that’s not happening in my classes, and if it’s not happening on campus, I find it relatively hard to find that out in the world. It’s mostly major news headings.” Dewan commented, “It’s really essential for us as students, not just to be learning what we’re learning in class and then go on with our day, but to see how it plays out and applies in the real world. I just think that being informed is really important, and when there are resources available to be informed about current events in a more academic, scholarly way, I think there’s no reason not to take advantage of it.”