A few years ago, Palestinian climbers had access to roughly half a dozen crags in the West Bank. Today, that number has essentially collapsed to just two. This tightening over Palestinian climbers exemplifies not only Israel’s broader settler-colonial annexation of the West Bank, but also the specific obstacles Palestinian climbers face in pursuing their sport.

The situation for Palestinian climbers is getting worse by the day, and it’s time for the climbing world to find its backbone and stand in solidarity with them by demanding boycotts, divestments, and sanctions of Israel, the Israel Climbing Association, Israeli climbers, and any company or organization that supports them.

Like a cancer, the Israeli occupation continues to spread deeper into Palestinian land. Climbing is far from the most devastating front in this conflict—but we are witnessing, in real time, how our sport is being weaponized as one of the tools within Israel’s colonization arsenal by folding Palestinian cliffs into their own guidebooks and erasing their origins.

Consider the case of Ein Yabrud, a good crag with 40 or so routes, just a short drive from the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Ein Yabrud is located on Palestinian land and was developed specifically for Palestinian climbers. Tim Bruns, Will Harris, and a couple of Europeans first bolted Ein Yabrud in May 2015 as part of their mission to develop a climbing scene in the West Bank, a story documented in our film, “Resistance Climbing.”

But since October 7, 2023, as the occupation forces have increased their presence across the West Bank, Ein Yabrud has effectively been “stolen” by some Israeli climbers who live in an illegal settlement nearby.

Evidence that Israeli climbers have taken over Ein Yabrud is found in this online Israeli guidebook. To the untrained eye, this may seem like any other guide to a local cliff. But for those who understand the political reality here, it’s a clear-cut template of how colonization works.

The first thing to note about this guidebook is its audacity in renaming the crag from Ein Yabrud to Beit El. Ein Yabrud is an ancient Palestinian village with deep roots, mentioned in Ottoman tax records and fondly described as a waypoint by historic travelers such as Yaqut al-Hamawi in 1710. Beit El is the name of a nearby Israeli settlement, illegally established in 1977.

This guide also cuts and pastes, without permission, materials from the Climbing Palestine guidebook. Some route names have been changed to Old Testament references. The word “Palestine” or “Palestinian” is scarcely mentioned. The guide makes a vague reference to Israelis having received a “blessing” from the “original climbers,” a characterization that is disputed by all of the Palestinians I spoke to. It asserts that the crag is closed to everyone on Jewish holidays. And logos for both the IFSC and the UIAA appear on the pages, giving Palestinians the impression that these organizations endorse stealing this crag.

To many in the West, publishing your own guidebook to a climbing area in your own language may not seem like such a big deal. But Palestinians painfully recognize these tactics as part of a more sinister pattern in which the audacious renaming of land, towns, and villages is a cynical ploy that allows settlers to pretend as if it were always theirs. In this case, it’s climbing topos being used to legitimize Israel’s presence and help lay claim to stolen land. This guide is not simply sharing the beta for a local cliff. It’s normalizing the occupation, one bolt at a time.

Interestingly, the guide also mentions that Israeli climbers received funding from the Beit El settlement council to bolt a few new routes here. Beit El is an infamous settlement of 6,500 ultra-religious, ultra-right-wing Israelis who believe that this is the location in the Bible where God promised Jacob the land of Israel. In the 2015 election, right-wing parties captured 97 percent of the vote here, according to Haaretz. This settlement has received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the likes of Donald Trump, Jared Kushner and his family’s Kushner Foundation, and the former U.S. Ambassador David Friedman, president of the Beit El Institutions. In other words, you can draw a direct line from the wallets of Donald Trump and Jared Kushner to the loss of a Palestinian climbing area.

Palestinians are worried about the precedent this sets.

“Because they got their money to develop climbs from the settlement, other settlements could follow in their footsteps to take more Palestinian land under the cover of ‘developing crags,’” observes Asia Zughair, a Palestinian climber.

I messaged the Israeli climber who has been most active at Ein Yabrud. He disputed my characterization that this crag has been “stolen.” He insists that Palestinians could still climb at Ein Yabrud. The only catch? They would need to coordinate with the Israeli military beforehand, which he explained is also what Israeli climbers need to do because of “security concerns.”

This is an absurd thing to suggest. The idea that Palestinians would feel safe coordinating with a military that has already murdered over 1001 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, just in the West Bank alone since October 7, 2023, is entirely unreasonable. More importantly, they shouldn’t have to. This military has no legal right to be here, on what is unquestionably Palestinian land, in the first place.

It was interesting to see how this Israeli climber justified the annexation of this crag to himself, invoking the threat of “terrorism” that he genuinely believes he lives under, as a way of rationalizing his country’s military presence at the crag. I could tell he wanted to come off as being “cool” with Palestinian climbers; as having no problem with them, per se. I could tell he was trying to say the right things to make himself seem reasonable, but all I could hear was the racist subtext screaming in the space between each of his careful, plodding words.

Far from an anomaly, his attitude is pretty representative of how Israelis justify their oppression of Palestinians. They don’t question it or even really think about it. The subjugation and humiliation of Palestinians is as mundane to them as the weather. They might say they don’t like it—after all, who likes the rain, let alone can control it? Lots of so-called “liberal Zionists” have this casual supremacist attitude, shaped by decades of cultural and state messaging. In their racist, supremacist paranoia, they view themselves as forever victims under constant threat, which makes it seem completely “reasonable” to hold Palestinian necks under the proverbial authoritarian boot and demand submission to their own rules designed to control, restrict, and humiliate. Above all, they never question the source of this pathology: the ideology of Zionism and its promise of one day achieving “peace” through the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the destruction of Palestinian society, and the complete erasure of Palestine.

The Inherent Risk of Climbing While Palestinian

Lots of people don’t really understand what “settlements” are. What they look like, how they work, and how banal roads and infrastructure projects are used as a tool to commit crimes against humanity. I certainly didn’t understand it myself until I saw it firsthand. But it’s essential to understand the way settlements and their technocratic descriptions are deployed because it helps understand how climbing areas are being stolen from Palestinians.

The West Bank is divided into three designations by the occupation: Area A, B, and C.

Area C is under complete Israeli control, including with respect to land registration, planning, and zoning. Over 60% of the West Bank is Area C. Every one of Area C’s 250+ settlements, with their 700,000-some residents, is illegal.

According to this paper by the Norwegian Refugee Council:

“Israel uses its planning regime to effectively ensure Area C is completely hostile territory for Palestinians—a place where they should neither live nor thrive—with the aim and effect of pushing Palestinians off the land and into the overcrowded and the less resource-rich areas of the West Bank, and so that Israel can annex Area C and thus have access to its abundant resources. Israel denies Palestinians access to 99 percent of the land in Area C, including their own agricultural lands and private property. Palestinians are also prevented from constructing, renovating, or upgrading homes, and even from receiving humanitarian aid and development assistance for social infrastructure. Meanwhile, the experience of Israelis is entirely different, with settlements growing at a rapid rate, and building permits being regularly issued, and on a large scale.”

Ein Yabrud, the crag, is located in Area C, although the top of the cliff is in Area B, so it’s right on the border.

“We always knew that this cliff was a risk because it’s Area C,” says Tim Bruns, who helped develop Ein Yabrud and wrote the climbing guidebook to Palestine, whose materials were used in the online Israeli PDF without his consent. In 2015, Tim et al. received permission from the Ein Yabrud village council to climb here. It was one of the first crags in the West Bank that he and his crew began bolting.

“It’s hard to grasp the magnitude of the loss,” he says. “I spent so much of my life bolting routes, building trails, teaching beginners here. It’s a magical place, too. Located in a steep, lush valley, with nice places to hang out. It’s great for families. Losing Ein Yabrud—and now also Yabrud—is the nightmare we had 10 years ago, now coming to fruition.”

Yabrud—a different crag from Ein Yabrud—has also become unsafe for Palestinian climbers since a lone settler has staked a claim on top of the cliff line.

Yabrud is the crag in “Resistance Climbing” that I specifically reference in my voice-over narration as being a safe spot for Palestinians to come. But in the past year, that’s changed because there is now a deranged lunatic armed to the teeth with guns who is squatting near the crag as he works to establish the foundation for yet another settlement.

For anyone unfamiliar with how settlements are established, this is one of the ways it can happen: settlers set up an outpost on a hill, and then the Israeli military begins building infrastructure to it, hoping that in due time the Israeli government “approves” the settlement. Then it becomes “legal” under Israeli law. In 10 years, that outpost will have turned into a gated community of heavily subsidized suburban housing. Various organizations around the world work to fill these homes with Zionist settlers from Eastern Europe and America. What this new infrastructure means for Palestinians is more checkpoints and roadblocks, the loss of their farmlands and olive trees that they’ve worked for generations, the loss of water and resources, the erasure of villages, and increasing constrictions on space, squeezing Palestinians into ever smaller (some might say ever more concentrated) camps.

The loss of crags is just one of the barriers Palestinian climbers face living under occupation and apartheid. Already, several climbers in recent years have been held hostage by the Israeli military under the policy of “administrative detention,” which allows Israel to throw Palestinians in black-site torture prisons without trial for a period of time, which can be renewed indefinitely. Palestinians go before military courts, and a judge reviews secret evidence against them that they are not allowed to see. Some 10,000 Palestinians are currently being held hostage by Israel under the vague accusation that they present a “security threat” to Israel.

At least one climber is among those 10,000 hostages being held in an Israeli dungeon: award-winning filmmaker Abdullah Motan. I met Abdullah when I went to Palestine, and he had a genuine and sweet enthusiasm for everything from climbing and filmmaking to photography and art. He had the zeal of a puppy and was about just as threatening. The notion that he presents a security threat to anyone or anything is ridiculous. It is just another excuse to continue silencing the voices of those who are exposing Israel’s daily brutality against Palestinians.

Another climber, Yara Abu Hasheesh, a young woman, was arrested last year and held for three months before being released.

Israeli soldiers routinely raid the homes of Palestinian climbers to harass and intimidate them. Soldiers have stolen their climbing gear during these raids. This happened to my friends Abu Shams and Urwah in 2016.

Just leaving the house to go climbing is a risk for Palestinians because, for every single one of them, there is a real risk that they could be arrested and thrown into a torture prison without due process, for any amount of time. Or even be killed.

All this, and I haven’t even mentioned the Gaza Genocide…

How are Palestinian climbers supposed to thrive under these conditions? How can the climbing world pretend to support access, equality, tolerance, and opportunity when it refuses to help them by standing in solidarity with firm boycotts, divestments, and sanctions of their oppressor?

Why the IFSC Ban Matters Most

When the IFSC recognized Palestine in 2024, I was thrilled to see that a pathway, however remote, had been opened for Palestinian climbers to compete as Palestinians on the world stage.

At the time, while celebrating this decision, I also observed the IFSC’s double standard: the IFSC had just banned Russian and Belarusian athletes from competitions merely two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Meanwhile, more than two years into the Gaza Genocide, the IFSC has still not taken any action against Israel. In fact, they’ve only continued to platform them prominently with a spot in the IFSC Nations Grand Finale.

The sting of this hypocrisy has only grown as scores of dead Palestinians pile up, as 92% of Gaza’s homes have been flattened, as most hospitals and 95% of schools have been systematically targeted and destroyed, as the remaining population is deliberately starved to the gleeful cheers of more than half of the Israeli public, and as all credible experts, including the most important Jewish and Holocaust scholars, have long since come to the consensus that Israel’s utterly sadistic and depraved war crimes do indeed amount to a genocide.

The IFSC’s deafening silence in the wake of a GENOCIDE makes their inclusion of the Palestine federation now feel hollow and performative. How can you possibly claim to be supporting the development of the Palestinian climbing community while you simultaneously welcome the banner of the country that is executing their genocide and play their national anthem in your events?

I was once skeptical that sports bans and boycotts could have any meaningful impact on intractable political situations—until I read about the history of how sports boycotts played a pivotal role in helping end apartheid in South Africa. This history changed my mind and stands as an example of what happens when athletes and sports organizations possess the moral courage to take a stand against injustice. The goal of a sports ban is to say that “this is not normal,” which is an interesting statement to make in the context of Palestine, where, after 77 years, the military occupation, settler terrorism, land theft, dispossession, and apartheid can all feel quite “normal.” But having a genocide live-streamed in 4K to our phones over the past two years has awakened many people to the reality of what kind of cruelty Palestinians have faced. Many people have woken up. And it is our moral duty at this moment in history to reject the Zionist project as the racist, supremacist, genocidal endeavor that it is. The tide is shifting. As the title of this book aptly states, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This.”

Sports bans can help usher in that day. That’s why I believe that climbers have a moral duty right now to engage in this capacity, with the goal of not normalizing Israel’s actions by not welcoming this country into the good graces of an international competition until their country ends its genocide, ends its apartheid, and ends its colonialist aspirations for overtaking all of Palestine.

The Gaza Genocide is reason enough to ban Israel from climbing competitions. But so is the status quo reality that all Palestinians have faced in the West Bank for decades. They are being denied access to crags on their own land—with the knowledge, and silence, of the Israeli Climbing Association, a member of the IFSC.

Palestinian climbers face mortal threats from settler terrorists who are occupying their crags. They live under the constant threat of military violence, and face the continuous grind of a system of apartheid designed to displace, intimidate, and humiliate them, from grueling checkpoints to scary midnight home raids. At any moment, they can be abducted, imprisoned without due process, and subjected to torture.

I reached out to the IFSC for comment. Fabrizio Rossini, their media and communications director, sent a canned response affirming their commitment to peace and neutrality in general and explaining that they must follow the lead of the International Olympic Committee, which has thus far resisted calls to ban Israel.

“The choices made by the IFSC cannot fail to reflect its membership of the Olympic world and the need to follow the sports policy lines coming from the International Olympic Committee, which gave precise instructions to the International Federations in the months leading up to the Paris Olympics, even regarding any ban request for Israel,” wrote Rossini.

Unsatisfied with this reply, I spoke to a couple of sources at the IFCS, who requested anonymity.

“The IFSC is absolutely using the IOC as both a shield and a weapon,” they said. “And here, deferring to the IOC is obviously a way to shield them from having to take action.”

Describing the moment in March 2022 when the IFSC banned Russia, they said, “It was just an easy decision, because it was clear that Russia was the ‘bad guy.’ But here, it was not as clear-cut to many people, no international federation had taken action, and then the IOC said they’re not banning Israel from the Olympics, so that was that.”

The notion that Israel-Palestine is “complicated,” or that there are equally valid “two sides,” is not a neutral assessment—it’s a cynical narrative engineered by design. Mainstream outlets and political leaders consistently present the reality as a complicated conflict between two equal sides—ignoring the overwhelming asymmetry of power, resources, and violence. It’s no wonder people are confused. The confusion is precisely the point, and the reason that this Zionist project has gone unchecked and unquestioned by most people for 80 years.

Even as a Palestinian-American, but one who grew up in a strong Zionist context, I didn’t realize how deeply these narratives were part of my own psychology until I actually visited Palestine myself, and saw the situation with my own eyes. As Ta-Nehisi Coates says, “I was told Palestine is complicated.” To go there is to realize it’s not. So many people have had this experience of taking a trip to Israel but coming home from Palestine.

Beyond the widespread ignorance and moral fog surrounding the situation in Palestine, a couple of different sources at the IFSC point to deeper sources of friction:

According to them, raising this issue feels awkward in part because a well-liked Israeli climber currently sits on the IFSC Athlete Commission. Athletes are hesitant to speak out for a range of reasons—some personal, others systemic. The IFSC athlete license explicitly prohibits social media posts deemed to “demonstrate or any form of political, religious or racial propaganda.”

Meanwhile, political repression is escalating beyond the climbing world. In the United States, the Trump administration is intensifying its crackdown on speech critical of Israel, falsely labeling it antisemitic. This undoubtedly has had a chilling effect: international athletes worry that voicing solidarity with Palestinians could get them barred from entering the U.S.—or other countries that may follow its lead.

The IFSC, however, is not beholden to the IOC and does not need to follow its lead passively. A ban on Israel can be initiated through a clear, actionable process: the National Federations—such as USA Climbing, the BMC, and others—can submit a formal request for the Executive Board’s review. That request would then go to a vote. While the next IFSC General Assembly is scheduled for April 2026 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia—ironically, a location where Israeli athletes are already barred from attending—the National Federations don’t have to wait. If they choose to act, they can convene at any time. I encourage them to do so immediately.

The power lies with them.

Next Steps

I’m a writer, not an activist, and I don’t possess the tools to know what it would take to bring some of these ideas to bear. But here are some thoughts.

• Visit BanIsraelFromIFSC.com
• Encourage athletes to wear watermelon or Palestine flag pins during competitions. According to the IFSC media contact, “I’m not aware of penalties for pins or similar items.”
• Share this article. Encourage the conversation and make it part of our discourse.
• Always engage respectfully and understand the difference between criticizing political ideologies and not conflating that with individuals, religions, and ethnicity.
• Read more about Sports, Palestine, and the intersection of justice.