The slow-motion erasure of the West Bank

Raids serve no purpose but to intimidate. Families whose children have been torn from beds by Israeli soldiers described children who afterward wet their beds, refused to sleep alone, and woke screaming from nightmares, with the youngest children left shaking and inconsolable.

These are not isolated aberrations but the machinery of a system. Israeli forces arbitrarily detain an estimated 500 to 1,000 Palestinian children every year, the overwhelming majority seized from their beds in terrifying pre-dawn raids. Save the Children found that 65 percent of detained children were taken between midnight and dawn, and that afterward 73 percent suffered insomnia and 53 percent recurring nightmares. The purpose is a permanent atmosphere of dread: no family knows which night the soldiers will come for their children.

Israel may dispossess Palestinians village by village, hilltop by hilltop, home by shattered home. But it will never erase the nearly 3.4 million Palestinians in the West Bank, nor break their claim to freedom, dignity, and nationhood. Every home demolished, acre stolen, and child terrorized does not secure Israel's future-it hastens its moral ruin.

On October 27, Israelis must decide whether to stop this descent or empower a government that is hollowing Israel from within-leaving it isolated, feared, and stripped of the moral legitimacy on which its future depends.