"A woman stays awake all night so they won't burn her house down with the children"

Rabbi Benny Lau's article presents two parallel worlds in Judea and Samaria: on one side, the Libi family, settlers on a farm who believe in a settlement mission and mourn their son killed in Gaza; on the other, Aaliya, a Bedouin woman from the Mu'arajat community forced to leave her home after violent clashes with Jews. The article describes the vast gap between perceptions and reality on the ground.

Rabbi Benny Lau's article, from the book "On the Path of the Patriarchs," presents two parallel worlds in Judea and Samaria. On one side, Eliav and Sarah Libi, settlers on a farm in the Jordan Valley area, who see their settlement as a national and messianic mission. Eliav, who appears on an international sanctions list, describes his struggle to connect the hill settlements with the valley and create a settlement continuum. The couple mourns their son David, who was killed in Gaza while operating heavy engineering equipment for the IDF. On the other side, Aaliya, a Bedouin woman from the Ka'abneh tribe, tells of the Mu'arajat community forced to leave their homes after violent clashes with Jews from a nearby farm. The village, which had a school and a mosque, was abandoned in July 2025 after the mosque was burned and homes were damaged. Aaliya now lives in a temporary tent on the outskirts of Jericho. The article highlights the vast gap between perceptions and reality on the ground, and the difficulty of the encounter between the two worlds.