Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is John Ross. I am the digital editor of Current Affairs

Magazine. We're joined today by the journalist Jasper Nathaniel, who reports from the West Bank

and has published his reporting on the substack, Infinite Jazz. His work has also appeared in the

Paris Review, The Drift, and the Baffler. Jasper has been doing some of the most important on the ground reporting

on settler violence and life under occupation in the West Bank, and we're very grateful to have

him with us today. Jasper, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you for having me.

So you've been reporting from the West Bank. You were last there for the month of October for the olive harvest.

And last year you wrote that, quote,

you could take Gaza out of the picture entirely,

and what the Israeli state is doing in the West Bank

would still be one of the gravest crimes against humanity

happening anywhere in the world today. Why do you think this is?

And what do you think Americans who might not be following this so closely need to understand

about what's happening in the West Bank? That's a great first question. Well, I think to take a step

back, to me, the occupied West Bank has always been the sort of clearest

expression of the Zionist project in its most pure form.

And so what I mean by that is the settlers in the West Bank and their allies at the highest level of the government

and in the military, they really are going back to Zionist first principles to justify

the systematic land theft operation and ethnic cleansing.

They frequently use archaeology as a pretext for

for Scyllian land there by citing events from the Old Testament, which, you know, nominally

happened in, you know, what they called Judea and Samaria. And, you know, when you talk to

...