The grind of petty state aggression-of permit denials, intrusive searches, and arbitrary rules-still provides the backdrop for outbreaks of spectacular violence by Jewish settler organizations and the military, which often work in concert. The West Bank Wall, that monument to cowardice erected after the second intifada, still defaces the land. Yet in some ways the oppression is just more obvious now. The contradictions that plague any ethnonationalist project had all come to a bloody head with the reelection of Netanyahu last fall and his appointment of openly fascist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who have been encouraging settler rampages across the West Bank. It had been eight years since my last trip to Palestine, and on the face of it, everything had gotten worse. I spent the end of May and the beginning of June in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, first as a guest of the Palestine Festival of Literature, and then documenting daily life in my sketchbook.
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