Last weekend, as I stood in the ruins of Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian Bedouin village demolished by settler attacks, a car carrying armed men pulled up and blocked the road. 

After roughly 20 minutes, Israeli soldiers arrived. I assumed they came to help me and my aide pass. Instead, they moved one of their vehicles to block the road. I was with my aide Cam Kasky and seven others, including a driver, a New York Times photographer and security. We were held there for about 90 minutes, as the New York Times, the Jerusalem Post and many other media outlets have confirmed.

I was released because I am a member of Congress, and David Brownstein, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, heroically intervened. Palestinians do not get to make calls for such help. 

For three days last week I traveled through the West Bank and listened to Palestinians describe their lives. No one decided in advance what I would be allowed to see. I witnessed the indignities Palestinians endure, the contempt they are treated with every day and the violence of Israeli settlers. I’m sharing my experiences both to help people understand the horrors Palestinians are living through and to give context to my vote for a House amendment on Israeli aid that was defeated Wednesday.

In Bethlehem, the wall runs over 400 miles, most of it well inside the West Bank rather than along any border. It cuts through Palestinian villages and farmland, walling families off from their own fields, schools and relatives. On one side are Israeli settlers. On the other are Palestinians. Yet both sides are the West Bank.

In the old city of Hebron, Palestinians walk under a canopy of metal netting they devised. It is there to protect against the bricks and stones that settlers living above hurl down. It catches the solid objects. It does not stop the urine, acid or rotting garbage that are also heaved at fellow humans. 

I toured Hebron with Hisham Sharabati, a Palestinian journalist who was shot by the Israeli military in 1994. He led me past shops that have been welded shut on military orders and streets barricaded with barbed wire that used to hold bustling markets. Hebron is the third-largest Palestinian city and the region’s commercial hub. In the area the Israeli army controls, hundreds of businesses have closed and thousands of residents have left. The remaining residents live under constant restriction. People told me they are afraid to move through their own city. The army can declare any street a closed military zone at any time and order people back inside their homes.

In Beit Sahour, a man named George Rishmawi walked me to the edge of town, one mile from the Church of the Nativity. He showed me a settlement rising on the land where his community and American playwrights had planned to stage “The Passion of the Christ.” Settlers confiscated the land just a few months ago. Now the play cannot happen, and the town cannot build anything else.

This is also where the water runs out. In these hills a Palestinian family is allotted about 50 liters a day, or roughly 13 gallons, while a settlement a kilometer away is allotted 400 liters. This is apartheid. 

The theft is not limited to water. In Turmus Ayya, I met a lawyer from Anaheim, California, named Yaser Alkem. He told me that Palestinian Americans who split their lives between the United States and the West Bank own roughly 80% of that village. He walked me to the outposts going up on Palestinian land, outposts that are illegal even under Israeli law. One began as a single tent on the edge of the village. Now there are several tents, pushing inward. He showed me where the Israeli military seized some 10,000 acres. Soldiers arrive, declare the land a closed military zone and lock the owners out, he said. When I asked how settlers are allowed to live in a closed military zone, I was told that the Israeli army says they can. 

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Yaser has been attacked before. Settlers smashed his car and clubbed a female passenger. A man was detained for a week over the attack and then released. This is a microcosm for understanding how such coveted land changes hands — by making life frightening enough that the American owners stop coming back. Down the road in al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya, I heard similar horror stories. Americans there own the land they live on and said they have seen settlers burn their olive groves and set their cars on fire — and that when they called our embassy for help, they are usually ignored.

In Turmus Ayya, I sat with the father of a boy named Amer Rabee. Amer was born in New Jersey 14 years ago. On April 6, he was picking almonds with two friends when Israeli soldiers fired on them. The three boys were shot 36 times. Everything in Amer’s bedroom is untouched. An American child  was killed, and the U.S. government has not gotten his family so much as an investigation.

In al-Mughayyir, a school principal named Bassam Abu Assaf walked me to the place on campus where a 14-year-old student was fatally shot by a settler in April. Blood still stains the ground. Bassam reported the shooting to the Israeli police and army. There hasn’t been any justice or accountability.

My vote for Rep. Thomas Massie’s amendment was cast while thinking about 14-year-old Amer Rabee. Israeli soldiers killed him with American weapons, in defense of an apartheid regime that American aid keeps alive.

Over dinner, an American citizen named Zaher Ibrahim told me about his 16-year-old son, Mohammed, being held and tortured by the Israel Defense Forces for 10 months. Mohammed’s cellmate was Walid Ahmad, a 17-year-old he had known since childhood. Walid repeatedly asked for medical attention but was denied every time, Zaher said. Walid, suffering from severe, prolonged malnutrition, died in front of Mohammed. The day Mohammed was freed from prison, he learned that his 19-year-old cousin, Saifullah Musallet, another American citizen, had been beaten to death by settlers. 

In the Bedouin village of Umm al-Khair, I reached Salim’s house just after a settler attack. I sat with Khaleel Hathaleen and heard about his brother Awdah, a young activist whose work appears in the Oscar-winning film “No Other Land.” Awdah was shot in broad daylight as he recorded settler activity in the village. A settler named Yinon Levy was questioned by Israeli officials over the shooting. Levy has a long record of violence against civilians, for which he was sanctioned by the Biden administration; the Trump administration lifted the sanctions.

In Umm al-Khair, I was told that two kinds of people come to the village: ones who come to hurt residents and ones who come to help. Less than an hour after we left, at the same time Israeli settlers and soldiers were holding me on the road out of Khirbet Zanuta, settlers attacked the village in force. I spoke with one of the victims, Bob Suberi, a 78-year-old Jewish American who served in Vietnam. He said settlers “prevented the children from going to school for pretty much the whole of last year.” He asked that details of settler cruelty be shared in the U.S., “because without U.S. support, what [settlers] are doing here can’t happen.”

Apartheid is an institutionalized regime of domination by one group over another, maintained through law. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have all concluded that life in the West Bank meets that definition.

I saw firsthand how it works. Two people share one piece of land under two systems of law. The settler lives under Israeli civil law, with its courts and protections; the Palestinian a few hundred yards away lives under military law, with checkpoints, demolition orders and detention without charge. Land and water are allocated by ethnicity. Movement for Palestinians is totally controlled. Settler attacks are rarely stopped and almost never punished.

The rifles the settlers pointed at us last weekend were American M4s, and America provided the aid supporting the army that blocked our group on the road. 

I oppose selling weapons to Israel that are used to kill Palestinians or sending aid that furthers this status quo. 

My vote for Rep. Thomas Massie’s amendment was cast while thinking about 14-year-old Amer Rabee, whose bedroom remains unchanged. Israeli soldiers killed him with American weapons, in defense of an apartheid regime that American aid keeps alive.

Rep. Ro Khanna

Ro Khanna represents California’s 17th congressional district in the House of Representatives.