WALKING TO RIFQA (UMM) AL KURD’S home is a journey into violence. To visit the 92-year-old matriarch, one must enter through a narrow walkway past a dwelling she owned until 2009. She built a concrete two-bedroom home for her eldest son and his family adjacent to her own. She envisioned a residential space for her family adorned by green grass, a garden of plants and flowers, and an outdoor patio. Today that grass is mostly dirt with yellowed shrubs, the walls are splashed with threatening graffiti demanding that she leave, and the patio furniture is soiled with feces and urine.

In 2009, a group of Jewish-Israeli settlers walked into Umm Al Kurd’s home and declared it their own by divine decree. They were dressed as if they were going on a camping trip, but they were not going camping. Funded by the Israeli state and protected by its police forces, they were taking over Umm Al Kurd’s home, in the East Jerusalem suburb of Sheikh Jarrah, one inch at a time — expanding and entrenching Israel’s settler-colonial project.

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