If you google ‘’what are the most famous hilltops in the world?’’ you may end up with results like Machu Picchu in Peru, Table Mountain in South Africa, and Mount Batur in Indonesia. In Europe, you find San Gimignano in Italy, Pueblos Blancos in Spain, and perhaps the Harz Mountains here in Germany. Many other names appear as recommendations in case you want to enjoy nature and learn about human history. This is what drives search engines: the naïve presumption that what you look for is a unique panoramic view that offers you a distraction, a spiritual or learning experience, and perhaps some inner peace.

But does the view always have to be pretty? Can a direct, unobstructed view of an atrocity in progress bring you the same joy? One that overlooks mass killing in real time – a front-row seat to a genocide? If your instinct is: ‘’no, obviously not,’’ because no pleasure comes to you from watching such scenes, or because you don’t believe such hilltops exist in the first place, then I invite you to reconsider your answer. Hilltops offering this exact experience exist, are sometimes accessible, and are apparently joyful (Minisini, 2025). If you’re curious enough to know more, all you need to do is two things: first, mute whatever inner voice you may have on human rights, and forget about international law. Second, pack your imaginative luggage and mind-travel with me to the only democracy in the Middle East – Israel, which happens to offer the only experience of this kind. But before we go, you should know that the road to the hilltop after crossing the borders isn’t just a road. It has its own attractions. So keep your eyes open on the way.

I will guide you through your imaginative trip. When you arrive at the borders, make sure to be as white, Western, and Zionist as possible. If you are cursed enough to have Palestinian roots – either through blood or through humanity – then prepare yourself for long hours of scrutiny, intense interrogation and humiliation (Ghaith, 2026), and a high chance of long imprisonment (Amnesty International, 2025; McNamee, 2026). If you have no Palestinian roots and no authentic claim to the land, you’ll most probably be fine. Start your journey on the Palestinian-free highways that carve up the occupied land, fragmenting Palestinian communities – and Palestinian life – into shattered pieces (see Haddad & Ali, 2024).

Imagine yourself in a tourist convoy crossing the land, coming from the Jordanian border in the east and heading toward the Gazan enclave in the southwest. Keep your eyes on the window. You’re now passing through the West Bank. Enjoy the scattered, fortified hilltop settlements looming over the isolated Palestinian villages and cities below. Notice how uniform and suburban they look next to the musty, hundred-year-old Palestinian ones. You’ll love the prominent red pitched roofs on the houses – designed, incidentally, to help Israeli air forces avoid them should they occasionally decide to bomb a nearby Palestinian village (Bramley, 2014). You’ll also admire the millions of non-native pine trees, imported straight from Europe to decorate these beautiful, eco-friendly settlements and roads (Qumsiyeh & Abusarhan, 2021), planted after uprooting the ugly old olive trees, and watered directly from Palestinian reservoirs. Haters of Israel say all this beauty is illegal (Jones et al., 2016; Khalil, 2026; UN Human Rights Office, 2026). Can you imagine?

Let’s move forward. You’re still on the highway, cutting through the occupied West Bank (or what’s left of it). If you’re afraid of Palestinians, have no fear: these roads are immune to them. Beside the security cameras, patrols, and checkpoints on the handful of entry and exit roads into Palestinian areas, the roads themselves are engineered to channel Palestinians away from your lane (B’Tselem, 2004, 2017). See that car with the yellow plate? That’s an Israeli car, properly armed with M16s and M4s, but don’t be intimidated. Those are mostly used against Palestinians (Al Jazeera, 2026). Now look over there: the car with the green plate. That’s a Palestinian car (Bishara, 2016), already channelled away from you, toward that hours-long queue at the checkpoint. Thankfully, you see fewer cars these days with the white plates that belong to Palestinian Gazans… I wonder why. Even if a Palestinian decides to walk instead of drive, the most moral army in the world has a way to spot them, because their IDs are color-coded too (Alsaafin, 2017; Hanhan, 2024). At the checkpoint, they show their orange ID, and that’s how they’re recognized as Palestinian. Everything, in the end, runs through a system called ‘’Hafrada’’ (Assi, 2017). They call it apartheid (Karam, 2017). Don’t listen to them. It’s not even close.

We’re halfway there now, and yes – this is the (in)famous wall. Magnificent, isn’t it? Seven hundred kilometres of it (OCHA oPt, 2022), built to keep Palestinians trapped inside their own identity’s original sin. Some Palestinians grow up knowing nothing behind it. But the only democracy in the Middle East has, for a long time, been generous with some of them, especially before October 7th. It handed out work permits so they could carry out dangerous, unprotected labour in the settlements built on their own stolen land – for 50% less than Israel’s minimum wage – with no health or social insurance whatsoever (Quzmar & Al-Labadi, 2025). Successive Israeli governments adopted this policy deliberately and systematically, tightening their grip on every aspect of Palestinian life. It is a long-lasting economic dependency that deepens the control any future Israeli government will inherit over Palestinian lives (Arafeh, 2023). After controlling their water, farmland, livestock, production, and trade, the next logical step was to control their bodies. Speaking of bodies. If you, or a loved one, god forbid, ever needed an organ – say a liver, a kidney, a cornea, even skin cells – the Israeli government can help you (Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, 2023; Healthcare Workers for Palestine, 2025). All you need to do is never ask where the ‘’donation’’ came from, or from whom.

And here we are: Kobe’s Hill. The cherry on top of all the beauty you have seen so far. It is one of multiple hilltops located in Sderot city – which, like other Israeli cities, was not built on the ruins of Palestinian villages at all (Fisk, 2012; Khalidi, 1992; Pappe, 2007). Yes we’re that close to Gaza, less than a mile from the multi-layered Iron Wall that surrounds the enclave and seals Gazans off from the outside world. I know what you’re thinking: this barrier, together with a naval blockade now two decades old, makes the enclave look like an open-air prison for Palestinians. You might be right. But remember, this prison, just like in the West Bank, is the only possible way to guarantee Israel’s security; aside from the overwhelming, disproportionate use of military force every time the Israeli government decides to escalate, of course.

Speaking of escalation – I know what you think. The bombardment show may have ended with the ceasefire agreement of October 2025. But do not worry, you are not missing anything. The Israeli army continues to annihilate as many Palestinians as possible to keep the show going. Since the ‘’ceasefire,’’ it managed to successfully kill a further 1,100 Palestinians (OHCHR, 2026) including 265 children (UNICEF, 2026), expand its territorial control over 70% of the strip (Baba, 2026), and prevent their access to basic necessities (Doctors Without Borders, 2026). This is nothing new, just a continuation of the art of ‘self-defence’ that Israel has been practicing since its establishment. An art you can now stream directly to your phone but also observe first-hand here on the hilltop. For over a decade, locals have come to Sderot’s hilltops, including Kobe’s Hill, to watch the most courageous, noblest army in the world clear out Gazan neighbourhoods every now and then. But since October 7th, thanks to the relentless round-the-clock bombing campaign, this place has boomed with onlookers gathering to watch a ‘’war movie under production’’ (תיירות שדרות, 2022). Look around: local and foreign tourists, school groups, freshly recruited soldiers, all following their tour guides (Krämer, 2025) to learn the benefits of retaliation and mass killing; to understand why committing genocide against one people is a necessity for the survival of another. But don’t worry, it’s not as heavy as it sounds and it’s certainly not boring. People cheer, take photos, eat popcorn, network over coffee (MIFTAH, 2009; Minisini, 2025; Sherwood, 2017; The Huffington Post UK, 2014), all while mushroom clouds rise over Gaza, decorating their selfies.

One way to get the full experience is to use one of the public telescope binoculars mounted along the edge, facing Gaza. Come closer! You can look too. But first – look north, toward that whitish mountain range behind the security fence. That’s not really a mountain. It’s an accumulation of destroyed buildings in Jabalia and Beit Hanoun. More than half of it used to be residential housing (World Bank et al., 2026). The rest belonged to schools, hospitals, water systems, and other ‘terrorist’ infrastructure that, in the minds of Israeli officials, shouldn’t have been built in the first place. Now take a closer look through the binoculars. Scattered across that white wreckage are Palestinian belongings. Their books. Their toys. Their clothes. And their bodies. Try not to be moved by what you see. The most moral army in the world had no choice but to bury the dreams, hopes, and stories of more than 70,000 Gazans under one-ton bombs, in order to create the best show for you, leaving behind this mixture of cement and blood. It’s hardly the army’s fault that Gazans are everywhere and that there are simply too many of them; all it did was deliberately pack them into one confined strip of land for generations. Yes, 70% of Gazans are displaced Palestinians, descended from the surrounding depopulated, renamed villages, but that doesn’t make the Israeli regime responsible, nor historically criminal at all (Pappe, 2007).

Now tell me what you think about this view. You have beautiful weather with a soothing breeze. Nice company of friendly non-Palestinian tourists. And live scenes of real violence elegantly perpetrated by Israel’s air jets. What’s not to like? It is a unique experience you only get here. Before we end this trip, if you enjoyed any of this, congratulations. You’re a true friend of the State of Israel. The Israeli government wants to thank you for your support – not because of your visit, but because every time you stop questioning where your tax money is going, or what your government is doing to stop its contribution to the Israeli war machine, you help Israel kill more Palestinians (and nowadays Lebanese and Syrians) and occupy more land to build more attractions like Kobe’s hill. That is the real innovation of this spectacle. Not that it offered people a space for genocidal entertainment up close, but that it made every Israel-supporter a stakeholder in its hilltop market. It is absurd, therefore, to think that the tourists on the hill are an aberration. They are simply the honest edition of every person who chose – quietly or loudly, intentionally or unintentionally – to support Israel.

References

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