For the past twenty-four years David Shulman has spent many long days and nights in the West Bank as a protective presence activist—one of a small community of Israeli and international volunteers who document and disrupt the actions of Jewish settlers and soldiers as they attempt to expel Palestinian communities. Since 2009 he’s been writing dispatches for TheNew York Review about the worsening situation for Palestinians in the West Bank, in particular those who live under full Israeli control in Area C, as well as the “moral rot” of Israeli political life. His most recent essay, in our March 12 issue, documents the liquidation of Ras al-‘Ain, “the last large Palestinian village in the southern Jordan Valley” and his “home away from home” for nearly three years.

“In late December 2025, the settlers plowed a large expanse of the village land…and created the rudiments of another illegal outpost inside Ras al-‘Ain.… [They] also besieged several of the houses bordering the plowed field and the outpost, blocking the residents’ access to food, water, and electricity,” Shulman writes. “As our friend Salameh told me, ‘We have nothing left—no money, no food, no water, no medicines, no rest, and no hope.’ Within a few days of this torment, the families began the excruciating business of demolishing their houses. I witnessed it. It was perhaps the hardest day I have known in twenty-some years in the occupied West Bank.”

In addition to his activism in the West Bank, Shulman is also a world-renowned Indologist, having written more than twenty books on south Indian culture, music, and language, including Tamil: A Biography (2016). While he was the Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he wrote two memoirs, Dark Hope (2007) and Freedom and Despair (2018), about his work with Ta’ayush, a group of Arab and Jewish activists that agitates for peace and civil equality in Israel and the occupied territories. His most recent book, The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine (2024), is a collaboration with the art historian and photographer Margaret Olin.

I wrote to Shulman last week to ask about how he came to study India as a young oleh, or immigrant to Israel, how Iran’s recent air attacks on Israel have affected activists’ work with Palestinian communities, and how his thinking about protective presence has changed since he began spending time in the South Hebron Hills in 2002.

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Dahlia Krutkovich:You began your career writing for the Review with a delightful essay about Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. Could you tell me more about how you discovered Tamil and Sanskrit as an undergraduate at the Hebrew University? What were your first encounters with India like?

David Shulman: I came to India through a series of benevolent coincidences, without the slightest foresight or premeditation. In my undergraduate years at the Hebrew University, I studied mainly Islamic history, Arabic, and Persian. It was Persian that mattered most to me—I was drunk on the classical Persian poets, Hafez, Sa‘adi, Rumi—and in 1970 I went to Iran with my brother for the summer. In those days Iran was a close ally of Israel’s; we took an El Al flight to Tehran. I could even speak a bit of Farsi.

It was my main teacher of Persian, Yohanan Friedmann, who one day steered me toward India. The Hebrew University had a marvelous concentration of scholars of Islam, and the beginnings of Chinese and Japanese studies, but nothing in South Asian studies. Yohanan suggested that I go abroad and complete a Ph.D. in whatever branch of Indian studies I wanted, and perhaps when I was finished there could be a job for me at the university. I was at first not very receptive to this idea. I hardly knew where India was. But at that crucial moment, a good friend, Danny Sperber, a professor of economic history of Talmudic Palestine, told me that I was making a mistake. He himself had walked, literally, from Turkey to India seven times, learning all the languages en route. He loved India, and he began to bring me books about Indian civilization—I remember A.L. Basham’s The Wonder That Was India and a Hebrew classic from the 1950s, Azriel Carlebach’s India: Diary of a Journey—and leaving them on my doorstep. They kindled my imagination.

Around this time, an exquisite creative dancer named Eileen turned up and we got married, and we went off to India for a backpacking honeymoon. Eileen opened herself to the vibrant density of life in India, and when we arrived in Madras (now Chennai), the largest city in Tamil Nadu, it changed our lives. We loved the people, the strange sounds of rapid-fire Tamil, the food, the heat, the landscapes, the temples, and above all the classical music. So I chose Tamil as my specialty, and we went to London, where she went to art school and I studied with a great master of Tamil, John Marr, at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Sanskrit was an intrinsic part of the package.

When we came back to Israel in 1976, I began teaching at the Hebrew University, mostly Sanskrit language classes, sometimes Tamil as well. In later years I was drawn to Telugu, which is my best South Asian language. Velcheru Narayana Rao, the finest connoisseur of Telugu in our generation, initiated me into the mysteries of Andhra culture, and Eileen and I lived for long, happy periods, once with our youngest son, Edan, in Andhra Pradesh.

How did you get involved with protective presence activism? You write in The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine that at the beginning of 2002, “I was searching for some way for me and my conscience to survive in Israel.” What were the years leading up to that moment like for you, politically speaking? How did you come to found Ta’ayush?

Contrary to popular misconception (and Wikipedia), I was not one of the founders of Ta’ayush; friends of mine were there at the beginning, in 2000, and I joined them in January 2002, after returning from a year in Berlin.

For me, life in Israel changed when the right came to power in 1977 under Menachem Begin. I was sick at heart. In my childhood home in Iowa, there was a strong belief that the core of Judaism lay in empathy with the suffering of the oppressed and the enslaved. For me that also meant solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation on the West Bank and in Gaza, and that feeling intensified when I went into the army in 1977 and saw, with horror, the reality of life in the territories. In those years, like nearly all my friends, I took part in the Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) demonstrations demanding Begin sign a peace agreement with the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. But I have always detested demonstrations—I feel foolish standing around holding up a sign—and so eventually I found ways to get involved politically that included sustained contact with Palestinians.

During the first intifada (1987–1988) I volunteered at HaMoked, a human rights organization located in Jerusalem. Mostly we helped Palestinian women whose husbands or sons or fathers had been arrested during the riots and disappeared without a trace. There were no cell phones in those days, and the families were never notified by the army when someone was arrested (and thousands were arrested). So we would call, one by one, all the prisons in Israel, trying to locate the missing person; we never failed, even once, to find him. I was moved by the Palestinian mothers who would sit, crying, across from me while I worked the telephones.

Then when the Oslo process began in the 1990s, groups that promoted dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians sprang up all over, especially in the Jerusalem area. I joined a group of Israelis that partnered with the Christian village of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. Those were heady days. We met Palestinians who came out of the Israeli prisons completely committed to nonviolent resistance to the occupation. And for the first time I experienced life on the West Bank, staying over in Palestinian homes, sharing meals with my hosts, navigating the labyrinthine system of army checkpoints and roadblocks that tried to prevent us from reaching the village. A whole new horizon opened up for me. I entered into that life, its personal friendships, its language, its ravishing landscapes, and its evident suffering. All of it felt meaningful and real.

So when the violence of the second intifada erupted after the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000, I was ready for something more grounded in action in the field. Ta’ayush was a godsend to me. From the very first time I went to the South Hebron Hills—we were carrying blankets to Palestinian villagers whose homes had been destroyed by the army, it was a bitter winter, and we had to push through the blockades put in place by the soldiers and the settlers—I became committed to a mode of nonviolent action in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

How has your activism affected your life in Jewish Israeli society? In academia?

There is no problem in academia. The universities have mostly moderate, left-leaning faculty who know that the government sees them, correctly, as enemies. There are some exceptions, of course; occasionally I walked into a classroom to find flyers on the tables saying “evil weeds,” which is to say left-wingers, “need to be exterminated.” 

Together with colleagues and students I helped set up an organization called the Campus Will Not Be Silent, and we managed to bring several groups of students, faculty, and activists—sometimes hundreds of people—into the Palestinian territories for solidarity and nonviolent actions of resistance. Although I am alienated from Israeli politics and horrified by its chauvinistic, militaristic ethos, I am mainly surrounded by truly remarkable, good-hearted people. In the West Bank villages, however, extreme right-wing Jewish fanatics, many of them incredibly violent, see me as one of those evil weeds.

Israel is now on the front lines of a regional war, and most people within the country’s 1948 borders are spending days and nights sheltering from Iranian attacks. How does the work of protective presence change during a crisis such as this? How do activists support Palestinian communities that do not have access to shelters? Do settlers take advantage of the chaos?

Indeed, there are no bomb shelters anywhere in the Palestinian cities and villages on the West Bank. The people are exposed to whatever comes at them. And the settlers take advantage of the war; there are now daily, perhaps hourly, pogroms, including killing Palestinians in cold blood and with total impunity. Our activists are also brutally attacked. But we cannot abandon the villagers—some of them are by now very close friends—to their fate. Ethnic cleansing in Area C is almost complete, but we are still standing by the remaining families and doing what we can to protect them: sleeping in their homes, staying with them through the days, standing between them and the settler thugs.

The other day I was talking to a younger activist who leads excursions to the West Bank. She told me, “We’ve been losing for a long time, but we may decisively lose in the next few years.” She was talking about a range of outcomes, from de jure Israeli annexation to complete expulsion of Palestinian communities. How has your thinking about protective presence changed as circumstances have become more dire?

I think your friend is right, but it’s not a matter of years; it’s more like months. We are not able to stop the violence and the expulsions. We are like a gossamer sheet, a cobweb, between the settlers and their victims. The police and the army in the territories have sold their souls to the devil and offer no recourse when innocent people are being hurt or killed. The government is totally complicit in these crimes. But we are continuing our protective presence as best we can, taking the risks.

Those of us on the front lines learned long ago that one cannot judge a moral act by its immediate results. I have seen cases where a moment of loving kindness bears unexpected fruit after many months or years. Sometimes I think that there is a strange beauty about struggling uphill against sheer wickedness, whatever the cost. It is also important to bear witness and record what we see for the next generation. That kind of struggle is rooted in love, in the face of extreme hatred. The main virtue required is a kind of dogged perseverance.