On 15 August last year, five weeks into the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Hagai El-Ad, the director of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, appeared on a morning radio show to discuss the conflict. Throughout the fighting, B’Tselem did what it has done for 25 years since it was founded during the first Palestinian intifada: document human rights violations by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza. It compiled film and testimony gathered by volunteer field researchers on the ground, tallied daily casualty figures that were used by the local and international press, and released names of individual Palestinians killed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

B’Tselem’s founders intended it to serve a purpose unlike any other organisation in Israel’s fractious political atmosphere: to provide pure information about the Israeli military’s treatment of Palestinians, without commentary or political agenda. But by last summer, this stance had become a source of controversy. For many Israelis, identifying human-rights violations by the Israeli military, but not its enemies, was tantamount to treason. When B’Tselem tried to run radio ads listing the names and ages of 20 Palestinian children killed in Gaza, Israel’s national broadcasting authority banned them on the grounds that they constituted a political message masquerading as neutral information. A group called Mothers of Soldiers Against B’Tselem was formed; Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, endorsed one of their protests.

That morning on the radio, the host, a journalist named Sharon Gal, pressed El-Ad over and over to agree that he believed Hamas is a “terrorist organisation”. El-Ad reminded Gal that B’Tselem, by its very core principles, declined to make that kind of characterisation because it believed doing so would be a political act. “We’re talking about armed Palestinian organisations; that is the professional term, and we criticise their activities when they are illegal,” he said. Gal responded that Israel was locked in a battle for its survival; at such a moment, he argued, refusing to call Hamas a terrorist group was a political – and disloyal – act. Newspaper columnists were still talking about it a month later. “Hagai El-Ad has essentially become a Hamas apologist,” one declared.

Three and a half months after the end of the Gaza war, in early December, I met El-Ad at Talbia, a wine bar beneath the Jerusalem Theatre. Forty-five years old, he looks barely over 30. He has a soft, almost hushed voice, glasses that press down on the tops of his ears, making them flop over like wings, and a frequent, mirthful smile. “Don’t sneeze,” he laughed, as a waitress propped a cork under a wobbly leg of our table, creating a fragile balance. El-Ad arrived at B’Tselem last May after spells as the director of Jerusalem Open House, Jerusalem’s premier gay-advocacy group, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

B’Tselem, in Hebrew, means “in His image,” from the line in the Book of Genesis: “And God made man in His image.” El-Ad possesses a fierce belief in Israelis’ ability – and duty – to live up to their human godliness by being just and manifesting an expansive empathy. “I self-identify as a Jew who cares deeply about the Jewish future and the Jewish identity,” he told me. “To be Jewish is to treat people with dignity.” He grew up in Haifa, on the Israeli coast, and takes as the basis for his personal creed an anecdote from a visit Golda Meir paid to the city during the 1948 Israeli war for independence, when she noted that scenes of Palestinians fleeing their homes reminded her of images of Jews fleeing Poland before the second world war. “If Golda Meir could notice the similarities,” he said, smiling, “then anybody can recognise Palestinians as human beings who ought to be treated with equal rights.”

For someone who holds these views in a society that does not, legally, extend legal rights to all Palestinians under its rule, El-Ad is also strikingly unemotional. He lays out his moral reasoning in proofs. Before he made a career change to work for the Jerusalem Open House, he was on track to become one of Israel’s leading scientists, accepted into an exclusive honours programme at Hebrew University called the Amirim. His subject was astrophysics: in the late 1990s, he spent several years on a fellowship at Harvard, studying parts of space void of galaxies. He left with impeccable English and the eyes-on-the-stars, even-keeled nature to appear on another radio show the morning after the Sharon Gal showdown and say the same thing, in the same neutral tone: “We criticise Hamas’s activities when they are illegal.”

Hagai El-Ad, the director of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group. Photograph: The Guardian

El-Ad has taken over B’Tselem at a precarious moment in its history. The group’s employees have always identified with the Israeli left and believed that the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza must end. They have also, historically, argued that it was important to remain objective and dispassionate in their work, to avoid full-throated political activism, in part because they believed neutrality would make their information impossible for Israelis to dismiss.

But if that has turned not out to be true – if it is less and less accepted in rightward-drifting Israeli society that there can be such a thing as non-political information, and B’Tselem’s traditional activities are dismissed as treason – what point is there in trying any more? Why not embrace their true beliefs and take projects such as the radio ads in a stronger, more explicitly political direction?

It’s a bind. For such a turn would enable Israelis to dismiss the group further: to say, it’s not us, it is you who has changed. Already, after the Gaza war, El-Ad told me, “people come to us and say, ‘You’ve lost us. You’ve become too extreme.’ We get that all the time.”

When El-Ad gave me a tour of B’Tselem’s office, in a residential neighbourhood not far from Jerusalem’s German Colony, he drew my attention to two things: a long, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with film of decades of protests and incidents in the West Bank and Gaza, the heart of the group’s work; and the many international awards B’Tselem has won. Inside the main conference room is the newest trophy, the 2014 Stockholm Human Rights Award, a heavy statuette El-Ad lugged home from Sweden in November.

B’Tselem was founded at a moment of concern over the face Israel presented to the world. When the first Palestinian intifada began in 1987, the sight of strikes, boycotts, and protests across the West Bank and Gaza distressed many Israelis. Until then, they had believed Palestinians were happy to be out from under Jordanian rule and that the Israeli military occupation was relatively “mild and light”, in the words of Einat Wilf, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and former Israeli Labor party member of parliament.

For Israelis like herself, Wilf told me last December, the government’s harsh reaction to the protests – Yitzhak Rabin, then the Israeli defence minister, instructed the 80,000 Israeli troops deployed into the West Bank to “break [the protesters’] arms and legs” – created an appalling “reversal of images” that deeply unsettled the sense of moral rightness Israelis had held dear since the country’s birth out of the ashes of the Holocaust. “The Palestinians were wielding the slingshot and the Israelis were in tanks,” she remembered. “It upended the Israeli founding myth, which was built on the David and Goliath story. There was a lot of questioning whether we are the ones who are right and they are the ones who are wrong.”

In response, a group of a hundred prominent politicians and intellectuals, including the novelist AB Yehoshua and the law scholar Amnon Rubinstein, signed a petition calling for the creation of a human-rights watchdog that would help Israelis police their own behaviour. “We wanted to try and to gain more direct and clear information about what was going on,” Haim Oron, a politician and one of the members of B’Tselem’s founding body, told me. “There was a lack of verified information that wasn’t propaganda.”

Oron was also a founding member of the Israeli NGO Peace Now, which advocated a total withdrawal of Israeli settlements and the military from the areas they had occupied after the 1967 six-day war. He believed the main obstacle to that withdrawal was most Israelis’ ignorance of the real conditions in the West Bank. Once they knew, he thought, they would elect governments dedicated to a two-state solution.

A protest in Tel Aviv against Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

This was called the “awareness theory”. To influence the widest range of Israelis, he felt it was crucial that B’Tselem “have a claim to non-partisanship”. In 1990, an interview in the Guardian with another B’Tselem founder noted that “the far left and the lunatic fringes have been deliberately excluded from its board”.

B’Tselem’s early work establishing incident records during the last several years of the first intifada was widely quoted in the local and international press, and more quietly relied upon by the Israeli army, which checked its own list of fatalities against those compiled by B’Tselem. The group was never uncontroversial, but it was also “central”, said Amir Tibon, a prominent Israeli journalist with the website Walla! News. Throughout the rest of the first intifada, which ended in 1993, and for the remainder of the 1990s, the group issued casualty information sheets (“Total fatalities in Intifada reaches 422. 27 killed in April. Nearly 700 houses destroyed”), reports on incidents between the IDF and Palestinians, and dispassionate analyses of various technical aspects of military occupation. Often topped by a single quote from article 3 of the universal declaration of human rights, “everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person”, the reports were dry in tone, heavy on numbers, and fastidiously situated within a sense of objective morals. A 1990 report on the occupation’s education system began with a Hebrew University professor’s explanation of the concept of the right to education throughout human history; a 1997 investigation of allegations of torture by Israeli interrogators included an exhaustive reprinting of penal codes.

A few days after I met El-Ad in the wine bar, I drove with him and his lead field researcher, Kareem Jubran, a burly, chain-smoking B’Tselem veteran, out of Jerusaelm towards a region in the West Bank called Bir Nabala. Late autumn, but still warm, the old city’s green caper-bushes tumbled like the wild hair of a mermaid down the white-stone ramparts. Tour buses spilled out pilgrims in T-shirts. Minarets stretched alongside cypresses to touch the sky. At a stoplight, a cluster of Haredim in their black felt hats hurried across Jerusalem Brigade Street as a backpacker with a guitar loped in the other direction.

El-Ad, sitting in the back of the car, leaned into the space between the two front seats and tapped me on the shoulder. “There’s the Jerusalem Cinematheque,” he said. He wanted to point it out because it was a local treasure, completed in the early 1980s and a hub for arty Jerusalemites – but also because it illustrated a concept he had been thinking about a lot lately: the deeply abnormal nature of the whole of Israeli society, despite its superficially normal, even happy appearance.

In 2011, he explained, the Israeli parliament passed a piece of legislation called the Nakba Law. Supported by right-leaning NGOs, it authorised the government to penalise any state-funded institution for organising events connected to Nakba day, which Palestinians observe alongside Israel’s independence day, in mid-May, to commemorate their displacement at the founding of the state. (“Nakba” means “catastrophe”.) “If a budgeted entity spends part of its resources on commemorating the Nakba, then the minister of finance has the authority to deduct up to three times the amount on the said action,” El-Ad said. No institution had yet run afoul of the law. But, to understand it, El-Ad continued, we needed to take a flight of the imagination. “If I’m the director of the Jerusalem Cinematheque,” he said, “and you suggest a film festival with documentaries of the Nakba, I have to think: it could cause me trouble. So I just don’t do it. And it’s not even going to be in the news. You’re not going to know about it.”

“So,” he concluded, as we zipped over a hill and the theatre vanished from sight, “even an institution like the Cinematheque isn’t free in this country. It operates under restrictions. But people don’t see that.”

He and Jubran wanted to show me Bir Nabala because it represented a change in the focus of B’Tselem’s work – an effort to make visible what has remained out of sight for Israelis. There have been no recent incidents between the IDF and Palestinians in Bir Nabala. But the security barriers Israel has built since 2000 have divided what was a fairly contiguous swath of territory into what El-Ad called “bubbles”: areas separated by gates, walled highways leading to Israeli settlements, and checkpoints. Farmers had been divided from their olive groves, and passages between villages that used to take 10 or 15 minutes now took hours, requiring roundabout drives through traffic-choked Ramallah. The goal of showing me Bir Nabala, El-Ad said, was “to expose the daily reality of the occupation. How things are, day in day out, year in year out, for Palestinians.”

Last October, B’Tselem published a report on Burqah, an area of the West Bank just east of Ramallah, to illustrate the daily humiliations of Palestinian life under Israeli military control. “We chose to focus on Burqah precisely because it is unexceptional,” the report says. A “rather unremarkable village,” it nevertheless “endures severe travel restrictions [and] massive land grabs,” according to the report. “The Israeli authorities always put the interests of the settlers and the settlements before those of the Palestinian population.” The report begins with a biting piece of testimony from a Palestinian Burqah resident, highlighted in a grey box: “We think a thousand times before we build, go on vacation, study, work, trade, or grow crops. It’s not because of laziness, or inability. It’s because of concerns about the obstacles, about harassment and attacks by the Israeli military or by settlers. It’s as if we live in a big prison, with invisible walls.”

Before we descended into Bir Nabala, we stopped on a ridge and got out to look at the valley that stretches out from northern Jerusalem up to Ramallah. Behind us was Ramot, an old Israeli settlement of red-roofed houses. “In 1982, for 17 days, I was a construction worker here,” Jubran said, and gave a short laugh.

The valley was a patchwork: pale-green hills striated with chalky ribs of rock, olive groves, and a geometrical square or two of dark pine. Starting in the 1900s, Jews have planted more than 240 million trees all over the Holy Land. It’s one of the things Israelis are proudest of about their country: Israel is one of only two nations on Earth that ended the 20th century with more trees than it had at the beginning. Locals mention it to tourists all the time.

“Not a small number of forests in Israel are planted over destroyed Palestinian villages,” El-Ad told me as we gazed down at the pine grove. On many weather-friendly weekends for the last decade, he’s competed in the amateur sport of orienteering. Organisers set up a navigational course through different terrains and woodlands, which competitors navigate using only a map and a compass. “In the beginning, I was so naive,” he smirked. It took him a long time to realise the ruined walls that made for such interesting way-points along the courses were relics of what he now views as a tragedy.

El-Ad grew up with virtually no awareness of Arabs. On the slope of Mount Carmel, where his father, a journalist and environmentalist, had settled the family, “life was 100% Jewish,” he said. “It seemed completely natural.” As a “geeky” young boy, he loved Star Trek and Israel in equal measure. Of all the Israelis I’ve met, he still retains some of the purest eagerness about the country’s landscape and innovative spirit. His Facebook page features photographs he takes of natural features in the Negev desert. During my visit, he peppered me with restaurant recommendations, touting a new inventiveness in Jerusalem cuisine.

At age 10, he queried his father about “the terrible thing that happened in 1948 with the Arabs that you were not supposed to ask about.” His father said, “There was a war, many of them fled, some were convinced to leave, and some were forced.” It was a turning point for him. “That last bit: ‘Forced.’ At that time, in 1979, the [Israeli founding] story didn’t have that many holes in it. The first crack in the story is a very powerful moment.”

After coming out as gay while at Hebrew University, he involved himself in the gay student union, becoming its chairperson in 1997. The organisation welcomed both Jewish and Arab students. “I began to get a bigger picture” of life in Israel, he said. His experience in gay activism also gave him the idea that an initial backlash against changes in Israeli society could, in time, die down. At the 2005 Gay Pride march in Jerusalem, a religious objector stabbed three marchers with a kitchen knife; in 2006, the march required the second-largest police mobilisation that year in the country after the disengagement from Gaza. After that paroxysm, though, much of the opposition vanished, he remarked. “Now they accept the change of status quo in the city.”

His growing awareness of the Palestinian condition corresponded with the unfolding of the Oslo peace process, which seemed to bring glimmers of hope. In 1999, he told me, B’Tselem convened a conference on the occasion of its 10th anniversary. It was called “Whither B’Tselem?” “They thought about all the possible things B’Tselem could do once Israel doesn’t control the West Bank. One was simply shutting up shop. Another was transferring the organisation and its assets to a Palestinian group. Another was transferring the organisation into Israel and applying its expertise to another human-rights issue, like domestic violence.”

He wasn’t there, but the conference has become a piece of B’Tselem lore because it seems, in retrospect, fantastically naive.

Down in Bir Nabala, off the Ramot ridge, the weather changed. There were far fewer trees; the heat rose and made beads of sweat pop out on our faces and the backs of our necks. Dust swirled around the Qalandia checkpoint, a huge bottleneck of beat-up cars and sagging trucks that divides East Jerusalem from Ramallah. It was midday, and the drifting grit had the effect of making things look brighter, catching and holding the sunlight like the dust-plumes around a star. It was so bright that El-Ad, Jubran, and I squinted at each other.

Israel’s separation barrier in Jerusalem. Photograph: APAImages/REX

The famous barrier Israel has been constructing to separate Jewish population areas from Palestinian areas is often referred to as a “wall,” calling to mind an unbroken rampart, like the Great Wall of China. In fact, it is many walls set at angles to each other, this way and that. Some are tall, some are shorter. Some are mesh, some solid. The West Bank is increasingly penetrated by Israeli settlements, and as more settlements and roads leading to them are built, the more the wall becomes a labyrinth. We stopped before one section, overlooking some olive groves. It was steel netting topped with barbs. Far in the distance, we could see Jerusalem, high on the hill from which we had come.

Beyond that fence, the Bir Nabala “bubbles” become smaller and smaller. A walled-off highway divides the bigger bubble, a formerly bustling commercial area, now sepulchral thanks to its separation from Jerusalem, from a smaller one. A heavy gate with a security camera divides that smaller bubble from the smallest one, which is nothing more than a single home surrounded on all sides by the Israeli settlement of Givon Ha’Hadasha.

We paid a visit to that final bubble. It was almost surreal: a rather elegant, terracotta-roofed home, with herb gardens and children’s SpongeBob SquarePants shorts fluttering on a laundry line, entirely enclosed by heavy steel webbing some eight metres tall, like the protective netting around a kid’s backyard trampoline, or a birdcage. Unlike his neighbours, the house’s owner, Sabri al-Ghorayeb, refused to move to make way for the Israeli settlement, and he had the paperwork he needed to prove he had a right to stay.

Six children, five boys and one girl, ran back and forth along one length of the fence, looking out at Israel. “The wall encloses them,” El-Ad said, setting up one of his proofs. “But what’s less easy to see is that it encloses Israelis, too.”

On our way to al-Ghorayeb’s house, we had driven under the Menachem Begin Expressway, a sleek intra-Jerusalem freeway that also helps link the city to settlements to the north. El-Ad had asked Jubran to stop the car. He got out and, for several minutes, stood and stared up at the overpass. “I’ve driven on the highway so many times, and I wanted to be close to it from the other side,” he said when he climbed back into the car. The highway was surrounded by its own high walls. “When you pass through,” he said, “you see nothing of what’s here below. You only see the concrete borders.”

The events of the last 15 years have created new emotional barriers between Israelis and Palestinians to rival the physical ones, and dramatically narrowed the space for public debate in Israel over matters of security. The writer Yossi Klein Halevi documented the change in an essay published last year in the New Republic: “I moved to Israel from New York in 1982 ... and Israeli society was tearing itself apart” over the asymmetrical war the army was fighting in Lebanon, he wrote. By contrast, this summer, “according to one poll, 95% of Jewish Israelis backed the war with Hamas – this, in a country where there is rarely consensus on anything.”

Einat Wilf, the former Labor member of parliament, was one of those transformed. “I belong in terms of my upbringing to what’s called traditional Labor Zionism,” she said. “I was of the view in the ‘80s and ‘90s that the day the Palestinians get their own state is the day we have peace ... Like many people of my background, though, the last 15 years have been years of growing scepticism and the rethinking of what the conflict is really all about.”

First came the 2000 Camp David summit. Both Ehud Barak, then the Labor party prime minister, and Bill Clinton publicly blamed the failure of the Camp David talks, and the final collapse of the Oslo process, on Palestinian unwillingness to accept a two-state solution. Wilf called that moment “devastating” to the Israeli left, because it was Barak, a liberal, who shattered the concept that Palestinians could ever be good-faith negotiating partners.

Shortly after that, the second Palestinian intifada broke out. Unlike the first, it pushed the conflict into Israel. In 2001, there were 40 bombings within Israel, many of them suicide bombings, up from five in 2000. In 2002, there were 47.

A sunken road on the West Bank. Photograph: Dirk-Jan Visser/Hollandse Hoogte/eyevine

A sense of normalcy in ordinary life is something Israelis treasure, visible in the atmosphere of the trendy German Colony near B’Tselem’s offices, where people tuck into pasta on fairy-lit patios. The second intifada’s targeting of restaurants and buses contributed to the sense that what Palestinians could not endure was the everyday routine of Israeli life. “I remember thinking, ‘What do they want?’” Wilf recalled. “If they want a state in the West Bank and Gaza, I’m prepared to support their cause in Israel.

“But if what they want is for my life not to exist, then I will fight them. And the amazing thing is where the first intifada was a time of kind of moral grey and moral questioning, the second intifada – and this is why the left collapsed politically – was a moment of moral clarity. A lot of Israelis said, ‘If you’re telling us we need to choose between them and us, then we choose us, without any compunction.’”

Everyone I spoke to about B’Tselem acknowledged that the second intifada had made the group’s fundamental message – that Israelis ought to care about the human rights of individual Palestinians and recognise the military occupation’s abuses as the primary human-rights violations in the region – much, much harder for Israelis to accept. Yaron Ezrahi, a liberal professor of political science at Hebrew University, told me that in the past 15 years the Israeli public had come to believe that the Palestinians are “ontological adversaries”, possibly bound to oppose Jewish Israelis forever. The answer is to contain them – and wall off one’s own heart. An old friend of mine who moved years ago from the US to Israel remarked that he consciously avoided interactions with individual Arabs because it would weaken his political resolve against them as a collective, which he believed was necessary to protect his family’s safety.

Back inside the bubble of Bir Nabala, we drove past a statue the residents had recently erected. Shaped like the entire territory of Palestine, it said, “The history of my homeland teaches me that blood draws the borders.” Even the B’Tselem employees agreed that the last decade had hardened Israeli concerns about security. “When a million and a half Israelis are in and out of bomb shelters fearing Qassam rockets, it’s hard to talk about human rights,” Sarit Michaeli, B’Tselem’s spokesperson, told me. “It’s hard to talk about the human rights of somebody who deliberately ran over someone’s family member.” Jubran, towards the end of our drive, suddenly confessed that “I don’t think there is a place for real peace in the region here.” Another B’Tselem field researcher, Iyad Hadad, pointed to the rising support among Palestinian intellectuals and activists for “anti-normalisation,” which encourages Palestinians not to work with Israeli groups at all.

To explain why Israelis feel they are in an existential struggle to survive, Wilf pointed to events like a student rally last November at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, which, according to an account published in the Atlantic, “featured actors playing dead Israeli soldiers and a row of masked men” making a “stiff-armed salute”. I have spent the past six years working in South Africa, and my experience of that country is that a great deal of what appeared to be existential antipathy against white South Africans vanished once whites no longer controlled black people’s movements.

Wilf told me she could only entertain the human-rights message of B’Tselem once she felt absolutely certain Palestinians had accepted that Jews “are indigenous to the land of Israel, that they have emerged from it, that they have returned home”.

“What will lead them to accept that?” I asked.

“Time,” she said. “And Israeli power.”

One sunny morning on Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, the site of some of the bloodiest fighting in the six-day war, I met Ronen Shoval, a blue-eyed former philosophy student from outside Tel Aviv, who has dedicated himself to bolstering Israeli power. The hill now houses a museum honouring the IDF. “The purpose of the IDF is to ... foil attempts by its enemies to disrupt normal life within the State of Israel,” a plaque declared. A month and a half earlier, three blocks away, a Palestinian drove his car into a light-rail station, killing a baby.

Shoval, born in 1981, experienced the 1990s in Israel as a time of unsettling, even disappointing, calm. His grandfather fought in the Haganah, the early-20th-century Jewish militia that preceded the IDF. “When I was 16 years old, I had the feeling I was born in the wrong time,” he told me, as we settled into a little amphitheatre displaying a map of the Israeli military’s successes. “We had already created Israel. We won the 1948 war. I couldn’t even fight in the [1973] Yom Kippur war. Everything had already happened. Then, buses started to explode because of Oslo. I began to understand I didn’t only have to read history. I could take part in history.”

Shoval came to believe Israelis risked a dangerous complacency towards the threats they faced and had lost faith in the beauty of Zionism. “It was a miracle, that we came home after 2,000 years,” he said with emotion. In 2006, he decided to create Im Tirzu, a lobby group dedicated to promoting a “second Zionist revolution.” Like B’Tselem, Im Tirzu takes as the inspiration for its name a Hebrew phrase central to Israeli life: Theodor Herzl’s famous line, “If you will it, it is no dream.”

Just like Hagai El-Ad, Shoval said he believed Israelis had a unique moral duty. “To be what’s called in the Bible a light unto the nations,” he said. “If I close my eyes and think about Italy, I have an idea of pasta. If I close my eyes and think about America, I think of capitalism. If I close my eyes and think about Israel, I think of moral character.”

For Shoval, though, that means a love for Zionist ideals, rather than a bent for self-criticism. “We are fighting against people who tell you it’s not OK to love your land, it’s not OK to have pride in your heart, day after day,” he said. Because self-defence is essential to Israeli survival, he said, any human-rights organisation that repeatedly and principally criticises Israeli soldiers ultimately espouses the view, “Let’s cancel Israel as a Jewish state.”

This critique is supported by the current Israeli government. In the campaign the Israeli elections on 17 March, Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party released an advertisement that shows two black-flag-waving Isis fighters hurtling along a highway in a pickup truck. They stop to ask an Israeli motorist for directions to Jerusalem. “Go left!” the motorist replies, as they cheer and fire guns into the air. “The left will give in to terrorism,” it concludes. “It’s us or them.”

Though Im Tirzu’s explicit mission, according to its own website, is to build “positive Zionism”, it largely works to tear down groups like B’Tselem. “B’Tselem is at the tip of the spearhead against Israel,” Shoval told me. Im Tirzu writes pamphlets, drives social-media campaigns against human-rights groups, and, in happy-warrior style, openly embraces cloak-and-dagger tactics to demonstrate that outfits like B’Tselem constitute a fifth column to be resisted by any means necessary. In 2013, it emerged that Shoval had hired private investigators to dig up dirt on the leaders of several human-rights organisations. When asked by a lawyer whether he had personally dispatched spooks to the offices of the New Israel Fund, a US-based NGO “dedicated to religious pluralism and civil rights in Israel,” he replied, “No, but it’s a good idea.”

Im Tirzu is one of a number of organisations founded after Oslo’s collapse that treat human-rights groups as Israel’s subtlest but most dangerous enemy. There’s NGO Monitor, which critiques both international and local humanitarian groups for presenting a skewed picture of Israelis as the perpetual oppressor and Palestinians as the victims, and the Israel Project, which “fights to get the truth out about Israel”. These groups are now players in mainstream politics: in the upcoming election, Shoval is a parliamentary candidate for Jewish Home, the insurgent religious Zionist party led by the current minister of economy Naftali Bennett. Netanyahu himself has identified Israel’s chief problem as one of “hasbarah,” or PR.

That’s why the fact that B’Tselem’s figures about Palestinian injuries and deaths at the hands of Israeli soldiers are so regularly quoted in the western press – something that gave the group credibility at its founding – now provokes particular distaste. “During the Gaza war, Hagai El-Ad was going from al-Jazeera to the BBC attacking our right for self-defence,” Shoval spat, when I asked him about El-Ad.

“I have children aged eight, four, and two, who were sitting in bomb shelters, terrified. And he was criticising the IDF, which wants to preserve my life. He is a traitor.”

I have children aged eight, four, and two, who were sitting in bomb shelters, terrified. And he was criticising the IDF

Sarit Michaeli, the B’Tselem spokeswoman, described the Israeli public atmosphere in which the group operates as a “boxing ring”. The melee last summer over the radio ads reading the names of dead Palestinian children was a turning point. “We thought it was the most banal thing imaginable,” she claimed. (“Everyone tries to claim they’re nonpolitical, but everyone is always political,” Wilf told me. “To think otherwise is naive.”) The ads did essentially reproduce, in spoken form, B’Tselem’s very first press releases in the late 1980s, which listed the names of Palestinians killed in the first intifada – publications for which the group won plaudits. But in the contemporary moment it was banned as an act of incitement.

Michaeli also thought El-Ad had approached his radio interview with Sharon Gal in a manner keeping with B’Tselem’s core principles. “B’Tselem doesn’t use the term terrorist. We don’t use that kind of language. But that was twisted into accusing him of being a terrorist sympathiser.”

As the left has become publicly marginalised, its ideas about what would be required for peace have become more radical, making the right’s assertions that the left wants to dismantle Israel as we know it a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. On a walk El-Ad and I took together through Jerusalem’s new Train Track Park, a historic railway converted into a pedestrian path decorated by benches and plantings, he pointed out the whitewashed houses that abutted the park, the fragrant citrus trees, a man in Spandex zipping by on a racing bicycle. It’s important to understand all of this could be imperilled in a just solution, he said. “It will be tremendously difficult, and dangerous, and costly, and challenge basic assumptions of people here in a broad array of ways. And ask deep questions about Jewish privilege here in this society.”

When I asked El-Ad whether he thought a moral society in Israel could remain Jewish, it was the closest I ever saw him to expressing anger. “I think the narrowing of Jewish identity to demographics – that’s profoundly un-Jewish,” he snapped. “When you build a wall in this city to expunge, reject, thousands of people on a demographic basis, that’s un-Jewish.”

“What is Jewish?” I asked.

“Treating people with dignity,” he answered. “I think that’s enough.”

In mid-December, I had a conversation with Raja Shehadeh, the Orwell prize-winning Palestinian writer and lawyer, who founded Al-Haq, the Ramallah-based human-rights group that shared the 1989 Carter-Menil Human Rights Award with B’Tselem. Throughout B’Tselem’s 25 years of existence, he said, “they did excellent work”, noting a particular report on “the theft of land and explaining the law. It was very clear and very helpful. It was very good for them to do that report.” But, he added, “the effect, in tactical terms, of this report was nil”.

Shehadeh wondered whether in continuing to espouse the principle of neutrality in a society that decreasingly recognises the possibility of it, B’Tselem was trying to “preserve something that isn’t there. It might be time to consider taking the thing further and crossing that [neutrality] border. And calling for an end to occupation and perhaps even supporting a recourse to international courts. Or how about a public discussion on how Israeli society is unwilling to consider the human aspect of their neighbours?” He paused. “Of course, that will also be politicised,” he added.

An Israeli soldier photographs a riot in the West Bank city of Hebron on March 6, 2015. Photograph: Mussa Issa Qawasma/Reuters

On our walk through Train Track Park, El-Ad and I stopped for a minute and gazed together at the houses lining the route. Their window-shutters were shut up tight against the heat, disclosing nothing within. “In my most optimistic moments, the violent backlash [against B’Tselem] I see as a sign of weakness,” he remarked. He said he believed the public image of a singular, closed Israeli mind disguised a more complex reality: that behind sealed shutters many Israelis still objected to the military occupation but kept quiet.

Everywhere I went in Israel, I was struck by how much the private discourse among ordinary people differed from the public stance of martial unity. It became difficult to believe the single poll claiming 95% of Israelis backed the war, or at least that they backed it unreservedly. A great range of Israelis, young and old, expressed serious reservations about the whole way their country related to Palestinians. But they felt there was no political alternative, no way to make a difference; 15 difficult years after Oslo’s collapse, there no longer appeared to them to be any other solution besides this fraught containment. The left’s political energies have drained out of the security situation and into intra-Israel issues like food prices.

“Israeli society is self-involved,” Shehadeh told me. “There is a security problem. They believe they’re in an area where nobody wants them and nobody accepts them. I don’t think there’s a possibility this will change through more reports – whatever level these reports may be – reports won’t make a difference. I think the only thing that will make a difference is if the sense of impunity is broken.” El-Ad, though, still believes it’s possible to reach people, to persuade them of the necessity of deep changes. He told me he wants to “narrow the space of avoidance” between Jews’ moral duties and their actions. “People need to make a choice,” he said. “Five hundred children died in Gaza. These are the consequences of the way things are here.”

In this way, he remains a liberal Zionist at a time when this species has almost completely faded from view. But an aspect of the classical stance, the hesitation to be combative, is changing. “We’ve decided we need to get in Israeli society’s face,” he told me. In the coming months, B’Tselem will be “making a shift from ‘just facts’ to a place that also speaks a language which is more emotional.”

This January, B’Tselem released its final report on the recent Gaza war. Instead of legalese, it began with a beautifully written, heart-wrenching personal story of one Palestinian family’s experience at the hands of the IDF. “I lost my whole family, and my home. I have nothing left,” the segment began. The report concluded that the killing of civilians became “one of the appalling hallmarks” of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza and that the military appeared to have targeted residential homes on purpose. At a press conference, El-Ad emphasised the report’s conclusion that the Israeli military violated international humanitarian law. In keeping with Ronen Shoval’s fears about B’Tselem’s impact on the narrative coming out of the Middle East, the assertion was reported by al-Jazeera and the BBC. “Israeli Group Says Military Attacks on Palestinian Homes Appeared to Violate Law” was the headline in the New York Times. What the Israelis behind the shutters took from the report, we have yet to see.

Eve Fairbanks has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Foreign Policy, and other outlets. She is working on a book about post-apartheid South Africa. Twitter: @evefairbanks

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