Maltese doctor witness to Jewish extremist’s attempted land-grab

Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza have obscured the silent land-grab of Palestinian territory by Jewish extremists with a Maltese doctor bearing witness to one such attempt. 

Alexander Clayman, who is based in Jersualem, recently joined a group of activists offering a voluntary ‘protective presence’ service to Arabs threatened and hurt by the actions of the Hilltop Youth settler movement. 

The Hilltop Youth is the name given to young religious hardliners who attempt to set up illegal outposts throughout the West Bank. They often use violence against Palestinians and their property. Although no formal organisation exists by that name, the ‘group’ was sanctioned by the EU, the UK, and Australia last year. 

Writing in MaltaToday, Clayman recounts his experience of having to stand with other volunteers between Palestinian farmland and a flock of sheep led by a young Jewish settler to graze on the food source of the Bedouin community. The presence of the volunteers, who also film the attempted incursion on their phones, helps mitigate the consequences. 

“Our young shepherd attempts to lead his sheep this way, and then that, and the volunteers stand between the herd and the houses. We do not touch the animals and certainly do not touch him. Occasionally, he comes up to us and stares at us from a distance of 2cm, sometimes he slowly digs his elbow into our chests,” Clayman writes. 

The standoff lasts a few hours before the shepherd leads the herd back up to the watch-tower which has been built a few hundred metres above the village. 

Clayman adds: “I am observing a land-grab and forcible expulsion of a local population, the means of which are cynical use of at-risk youth and farm animals.” 

The Israeli settler movement has been slowly and forcibly grabbing Palestinian territory in the occupied West Bank and in the process threatening the viability of a future Palestinian state. The land grabs and violence have intensified since October 2023, in the aftermath of the Hamas’s attack on Israel and the Israeli military retaliation in Gaza. 

Israeli settlements on land that was militarily occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-day War are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.