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✍️Essay on Festivals: Samples in 150, 250 Words

Updated on
Nov 2, 2023

Festivals are the special occasions celebrated in every religion and country to follow their tradition . They are generally celebrated worldwide to pay tribute to God and Goddesses and to spread joy and positivity. India, known for its diversity and multiculturalism celebrates many festivals throughout the year. Festivals are the best part of the year as they contribute to the unity of the nation and add prosperity to the life of the people. India celebrates different categories of festivals such as regional festivals, seasonal festivals , annual festivals, and national festivals. Stay tuned and read the following essay on festivals!

Also Read: Speech on Dussehra in English

Essay on Festivals of India 200 Words

Festivals in India are celebrated with great zeal. Indian festivals are worth witnessing as they are the most popular and colourful festivals. Be it Holi, the Queen Festival of Colours or Diwali the festival of crackers and rangoli, all are marked with great historical significance that tells about Indian Mythology. One of the most popular and biggest festivals in the world, Kumbh Mela, is also celebrated in India, where millions of devotees gather to offer their prayers.

Every festival has its own story and belief. People follow and respect their traditional values and do fasting on festivals like Chhath Puja , Govardhan Puja , Bhai Dooj , and Karwachauth. All these Indian festivals play an important role in uniting people belonging to different cultures in the same society.

Apart from these festivals, Onam, Dussehra , Christmas, New Year, Raksha Bandha, etc are also celebrated in India. Republic Day , Gandhi Jayanti , and Independence Day are the National festivals of India which are government holidays in the Indian Calendar.

Religious festivals include Eid-Ul-Fitr which ends with Ramadan celebrated by the Muslim community, Guru Nanak Jayanti held on 27 November 2023 to commemorate the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev Ji celebrated by Sikhs, and Christmas celebrated on 25 December every year by Christians.

Also Read: Why is Onam Celebrated: The Festival of Joy in Kerala

Essay in Festivals 250 Words

India’s rich diversity and festivals unite people from different backgrounds. It joins people from different states and religions in a single thread for the celebration. Every occasion in India and different countries is celebrated with happiness and joy. Festivals bring joy and prosperity and create a sense of oneness.

The Kumbh Mela is one of the largest festivals in the world, which takes place at four pilgrimage sites in India; Ujjain, Prayagraj, Haridwar and Nashik. On this occasion, devotees take a ritual dip in the holy rivers of Shipra in Ujjain, Ganga-Yamuna-Sarasvati in Prayagraj, the Ganges in Hardwar, and Godavari in Nasik.

People follow the tradition of exchanging sweets and gifts on special occasions. National festivals are marked as Government holidays such as 2 October celebrated as Gandhi Jayanti, 26 January celebrated as Republic Day, and 15 August celebrated as Independence Day.

One thing which you find common in all festivals is cleaning the house, decorating, and worshipping God. Festivals are auspicious occasions that bring good health, wealth, joy, and prosperity into the lives of people.

Apart from the National festivals, Pongal, Onam, Baisakhi and Bihu celebrated in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Punjab and Assam respectively are the seasonal festivals celebrated with very high energy by the people of that particular state. Farmers in India worship God and Goddess of agriculture on such seasonal festivals to seek their blessings and wish for good yields for the successive years.

Thus, the festivals in the given essay on festivals tell about various cultures and diversity in a particular country and about the customs followed by the people in festivals to make them grand and happening.

Also Read: Importance of Makar Sankranti

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Festivals hold a significant role in the human life. They are important to continue the traditional culture, religion, and practices of that particular religion and region. It plays a key role in uniting people and filling up the communication gaps thereby increasing the social dependency of people.

Festivals are extraordinary events celebrated to commemorate the traditions followed by our ancestors. It holds a significant role in joining the society and passing on the traditions to the future generations. They create an ambience of positivity, joy, and prosperity all around. Every region and religion follows their own festivals worldwide.

Festivals are the source of happiness. They are the best part of the year. Festivals are celebrated with people belonging to different cultures and religions and it helps in uniting them and enjoying the feeling of oneness and togetherness.

Here are 10 lines on why we celebrate festivals: Festivals are a chance for everyone to unite for a cause; It is considered auspicious to conduct prayers and worship God and Goddess. ; People of different religions follow different customs and practices to celebrate festivals.; Festivals create a happy atmosphere all around; In India, people celebrate many festivals throughout the year; Holi and Diwali are the two main festivals in India; Decorating the surroundings, cleaning the house, worshipping god, wearing new clothes, and sharing good wishes, and gifts are some of the important elements of any festival; Festivals are considered incomplete without sweets; The special occasion builds friendship among the people and increases interdependency; These special days are celebrated with utmost pomp and enthusiasm.

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Top Essays on Different Pakistani Cultural Festivals

Pakistan is the land of diverse people and ethnicity. The cultural and religious values are deep-rooted in its society. God has blessed this country with many cultural values and festivals. In addition to religious, cultural festivals, the country also takes pride in several cultural festivals and customs as well.

Being the land of festivals, Pakistanis observe these festivals throughout the year. These festivals are being observed from time immemorial.

The major Pakistani festivals are:

Eid al Fitr
Eid al Adha

Eid Milad-u-Nabi

Shab-e-barat.

Independence Day
Defense Day
Pakistan Day / Resolution Day
Alama Iqbal Day
Quaid-e-Azam Day
Mela Chirghan
National Horse & Cattle show

Here we are giving the details of some festivals and cultures in Pakistan:

Eid-ul-Fitr

Eid-ul-Fitr is a religious festival for Muslims, and it is celebrated at the end of Ramadan after fasting and on 1 st of Shawwal of every Islamic month. People celebrate this festival with a lot of keenness and joy. Girls wear henna on their hand on Chand Raat which is the last night of Ramadan.

Eid-ul-Azha

Eid-ul-Azha is another Eid is about observing the great sacrifice that was offered by Prophet Abraham (A.S.) celebrated on 10 Zilhaj on 12 th month of Islamic Calendar. People get together for collective prayers in Masajids and make the sacrifice of goats, sheep, cows or camels. Their meat is distributed among the family relatives, friends and poor.

Eid Milad-un-Nabi is celebrated to observe the birth of our beloved Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) on 12th of Rabi-ul-Awwal which is the 3rd month of Islamic Calendar. On this holy day, streets and mosques are decorated, and Milads are conducted.

This is another religious Cultural Festivals in Pakistan which is celebrated on 14 th of Shaban of Islamic Calendar. On this night, people offer prayers and send sweets and dishes to their relatives and children play with fireworks.

The above-mentioned festivals are religious festivals. Some other cultural festivals are also celebrated on the arrival of seasons. Like:

Independence Day (14 August)

Another important social festival which has great importance in the history of Pakistan is Independence Day (14th of August). On this day whole country pay homage and tribute to the people who gave many sacrifices for the built up this country. Also, pay tribute to those who work hard to make Pakistan and after that those persons whose contribution to make Pakistan in progress and save from enemies.

Basant is celebrated on the arrival of the spring season in the mid of February. Form last few years government has banned this Cultural Festivals in Pakistan due to security and its dangerous and life risk purpose but in few cities of Pakistan people still, celebrate this festival. On this day people fly kites, get together for parties, and arrange festive dinners.

Sibi Festival

(Last week of February) At Sibi (Balochistan). Traditional sports, handicrafts exhibition, folk music and dances.

Sindh Horse & Cattle Show

(Last week of February) At Jacobabad (Sindh). Similar activities as in Sibi Festival.

Jashan-e-Larkana

(Last week of February) At Larkana (Sindh). Traditional sports, an exhibition of handicrafts, folk music and dances.

(21-23 March) Celebrated only in Gilgit, Hunza, Skardu and Chitral. Polo, football, volleyball and hockey matches, folk dances and music.

Pakistan Day

(23 March) Commemorating the anniversary of Pakistan Resolution passed on March 23, 1940. Military parade in provincial capitals and Islamabad.

Mela Chiraghan (Festival of lamps)

(Last week of March) Held for 01 weeks outside Shalimar Gardens, Lahore.

Horse & Cattle Show

(End of March till 1st week of April). At Dera Ismail Khan. Local games, folk dances, music, cattle races and exhibition of local handicrafts.

Jashan-e-Shikarpur

In April for 01 week) At Shikarpur, Sindh. Cultural activities, local sports and handicrafts exhibition.

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Essay on Cultural Festival

Students are often asked to write an essay on Cultural Festival in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Cultural Festival

What is a cultural festival.

A cultural festival is a time of joy and celebration. It’s an event that shows off a group’s unique traditions. This could be a country, a city, or even a small community. People come together to enjoy music, dance, food, and art. These festivals help us learn about different cultures and their traditions.

Why are Cultural Festivals Important?

Cultural festivals are important because they help us understand others. They show us the beauty in diversity. These events bring people closer together. They teach us to respect and value different cultures. This helps to create a world where everyone feels accepted.

What Happens at a Cultural Festival?

At a cultural festival, you can see traditional dances and listen to music. You can taste delicious food and see beautiful art. Each festival is different. It depends on the culture it’s celebrating. Some might have parades, while others might have craft shows. It’s a fun way to learn and experience new things.

Benefits of Attending a Cultural Festival

Going to a cultural festival can be very rewarding. It can make you more open-minded. You get to learn about different ways of life. This can help you become more understanding and accepting. Plus, it’s a great way to make new friends and have fun.

250 Words Essay on Cultural Festival

A cultural festival is a special event that celebrates a certain culture or group of cultures. It’s a time when people come together to enjoy music, dance, food, and other things that make their culture unique. It’s like a big party where everyone is invited to learn about and celebrate a particular culture.

Cultural festivals are important for many reasons. First, they help people learn about different cultures. This can help us understand and respect people who are different from us. Second, cultural festivals can make us feel proud of our own culture. They remind us of our roots and traditions. Lastly, these festivals are fun! They bring joy and excitement to our lives.

At a cultural festival, you can see many interesting things. You might see people wearing traditional clothes, or you might hear traditional music. You could taste different kinds of food, or you might see dances or plays. You might also see crafts or art that people have made. All of these things help us understand and appreciate the culture being celebrated.

In conclusion, cultural festivals are a great way to learn about and celebrate different cultures. They help us understand and respect each other, and they bring joy and excitement to our lives. So, the next time you have a chance to go to a cultural festival, don’t miss it! It’s a chance to learn, have fun, and celebrate the wonderful diversity of our world.

500 Words Essay on Cultural Festival

A cultural festival is a special type of event where people come together to celebrate their culture. These festivals are full of joy and excitement. They give us a chance to learn about different cultures around the world. They are like big parties with food, music, dance, and art that show us how different and unique each culture is.

Cultural festivals are very important for many reasons. They help us understand and respect different cultures. By taking part in these festivals, we can learn about the traditions, customs, and values of other cultures. This makes us more open-minded and helps us to live in harmony with people from different backgrounds.

Cultural festivals also help to keep traditions alive. They remind us of our history and roots. They are a way for older people to pass on their knowledge and traditions to younger generations. This helps to keep the culture alive and strong.

At a cultural festival, there are many fun and exciting things to do. There’s often music and dance performances, where people wear traditional costumes and perform dances from their culture. There are also art displays, where people can see and buy traditional art and crafts.

Food is a big part of these festivals too. People can try different types of food from the culture being celebrated. This gives them a taste of the culture and its flavors.

There are also games and activities for kids. They can learn about the culture in a fun and interactive way. This makes cultural festivals a great family event.

How Can We Celebrate Cultural Festivals?

There are many ways to celebrate cultural festivals. We can go to these festivals and take part in the activities. We can try the food, watch the performances, and learn about the culture.

We can also celebrate these festivals at school. Schools can organize cultural festivals where students can learn about different cultures. They can have a day where students dress in traditional clothes, share traditional food, and perform traditional dances.

We can also celebrate these festivals at home with our family. We can cook traditional food, play traditional music, and talk about the history and traditions of our culture.

The Joy of Cultural Festivals

Cultural festivals bring a lot of joy and happiness. They are a time for celebration and learning. They bring people together and create a sense of community. They help us to understand and respect each other’s cultures. They remind us that even though we are all different, we can still come together and celebrate our differences. Cultural festivals are a colorful and exciting part of our world, and they make our world a more interesting and beautiful place.

In conclusion, cultural festivals are a wonderful way to celebrate and learn about different cultures. They bring people together, keep traditions alive, and help us to understand and respect each other’s cultures. They are a joyous and important part of our world.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Essay on Cultural Identity
Essay on Cultural Imperialism
Essay on Cultural Lag

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Cultural Festivals and Importance Across Nations

Mehrnaz Kameli

Celebrations and ceremonies are the essence of human culture, resonating with tradition, community, and significance. Whether it’s the joy of a festival or the reverence of a ritual, these events provide opportunities for connection and contemplation, intertwining the fabric of our shared history and identity. From weddings and graduations to religious observances and national holidays, each celebration and ceremony acts as a cornerstone, anchoring us in the present while paying homage to the past and igniting optimism for the future. In this Essay, we delve into two major celebrations, Nowruz and Diwali.

The part of my culture I am describing is the celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which is deeply rooted in Iranian culture and tradition. Nowruz has its origins in ancient times, dating back thousands of years, and its celebration marks the beginning of the solar year. It is one of the most significant festivals in Iran and holds great cultural and spiritual importance.

The participants in Nowruz celebrations are vast and diverse, encompassing people from all walks of life in Iran. Families gather together to mark the occasion, communities come together for festivities, and individuals partake in various rituals and customs associated with the holiday. Institutions such as schools, workplaces, and government organizations also acknowledge Nowruz as an official holiday, further solidifying its importance in Iranian society.

Nowruz holds immense significance for Iranians, symbolizing renewal, hope, and the triumph of light over darkness. It serves as a time for reflection, gratitude, and reconnecting with one’s roots and heritage. Now, as the largest annual Iranian celebration, holds a special place for me and my family, and every year 3-4 weeks before we prepare for it. The traditions associated with Nowruz, such as Cleaning the house, buying something new for home and changing old stuff with new, wearing new clothes, preparing special dishes for the first day of Nowruz, baking various traditional sweets, and many other activities keep us busy with family. Usually, my mother prepares a special dish for the first day of Nowruz, which is fish accompanied by rice, and she is very skilled in cooking it finally, the last step is setting the Haft Sin table. All of this activity with visiting tombs Day before Nowruz, carries deep cultural and spiritual meanings, fostering a sense of unity and continuity among Iranians both at home and abroad.

As an integral part of my culture, Nowruz holds a special place in my heart. Its rich history, meaningful rituals, and enduring traditions have taught me the importance of honoring and preserving cultural heritage. The event or celebration I want to describe in the essay is Diwali, also known as the Festival of Lights. Diwali is an annual Hindu festival celebrated across India and by Hindu communities worldwide. It holds great religious, cultural, and social significance, symbolizing the victory of light over darkness and the triumph of good over evil. The festival is characterized by elaborate preparations, colorful decorations, traditional rituals, and joyous celebrations with family and friends. Diwali is a time for reflection, renewal, and spreading happiness and prosperity.

Diwali is an ancient Hindu festival with its roots in India, although its exact origin date is not pinpointed. Over time, Diwali has evolved from simple oil lamp celebrations to elaborate festivities with colorful decorations, fireworks, and community gatherings. It has expanded beyond its religious origins to include broader cultural and social dimensions, celebrated not only by Hindus but also by Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists. Despite commercialization and globalization, Diwali remains a time for spiritual renewal, reflection, and celebration of light. During the festival, people make significant food like Freshly fried snacks like onion bhajia are served during Diwali in some parts of the country, especially in the north. Morales, C. (2023). A Golden Treat for Diwali. New York Times (Online),

Diwali is celebrated primarily by Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists. Families, religious institutions, and cultural organizations participate. The significance lies in its symbolization of light overcoming darkness and good prevailing over evil. For participants, it’s a time for religious observance, cultural heritage, family gatherings, and community bonding.I find discussing cultural events and celebrations like Diwali interesting because they provide valuable insights into the diversity of human cultures, traditions, and beliefs. I chose to describe Diwali because it is a widely celebrated and culturally rich festival that holds significance for millions of people around the world. Through researching and writing about Diwali, I’ve learned about its historical origins, religious significance, cultural traditions, and social impact. I’ve gained a deeper understanding of how festivals like Diwali serve as expressions of identity, community, and spirituality, fostering connections among people and preserving cultural heritage across generations.

When analyzing the cultural events of Nowruz and Diwali, we can observe both similarities and differences. These are big and important celebrations in these two Countries rich in culture. In this part, I will examine the similarities and differences between these two celebrations.Both festivals hold immense cultural significance within their respective communities. Nowruz, celebrated predominantly by Iranians, marks the Persian New Year and Diwali, is celebrated across India, and holds great religious and cultural importance for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists alike. Also, both Nowruz and Diwali symbolize themes of renewal, hope, and the triumph of light over darkness. One of the most important similarities between these two celebrations is that both of them are very suitable for family celebrations and family gatherings.

One of the biggest differences between these two celebrations is that a significant part of Diwali has its roots in religion and religious beliefs among different religious orientations among individuals. But regarding Nowruz, we can say that it is a traditional and ancient celebration rooted in history and tradition. In fact, it is an occasion for the renewal of the year and the daily calendar, accompanied by special cultural ceremonies.

“Prayer ceremonies during Diwali serve as a poignant reminder of spiritual devotion and gratitude. Families gather to offer prayers to deities such as Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, seeking blessings for prosperity and happiness. (Patel & Sharma,2019)

For a better understanding of this topic, for example, one could refer to the ceremonies of prayer and supplication held during Diwali, while there are no religious ceremonies in the Nowruz celebration.However, Ultimately, in my opinion, the significant aspect present in these two celebrations is the importance they hold among people and the emphasis on organizing them as splendidly as possible. For whatever reason, historical, traditional, religious, etc. What’s even more crucial is the coming together of families and the respect given to these traditions, as well as introducing them to the younger generation within the family. This greatly enhances the beauty of these celebrations.

In conclusion, the comparison between Nowruz and Diwali highlights both the commonalities and distinctions inherent in these culturally significant celebrations. While both festivals serve as occasions for renewal, hope, and familial togetherness, Diwali’s religious underpinnings set it apart from the more secular nature of Nowruz. The emphasis on prayer and spiritual devotion during Diwali contrasts with the historical and traditional focus of Nowruz, which lacks explicit religious ceremonies. However, despite these differences, both festivals underscore the importance of preserving cultural heritage and fostering family unity. Ultimately, whether rooted in religion, tradition, or history, the beauty of these celebrations lies in their ability to bring people together, transcending boundaries and enriching lives with shared meaning and cherished memories.

Patel, R.,& Sharma, S.(2019).The Significance of Prayer Ceremonies in Diwali Celebration. Journal of Hindu Studies,7(1),30-42.

Morales, Christina. “A Golden Treat for Diwali.” The New York Times, 2 Nov. 2023.

Cultural Festivals and Importance Across Nations Copyright © 2024 by Mehrnaz Kameli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Home — Essay Samples — Arts & Culture — Tradition — The Importance Of Cultural Traditions

The Importance of Cultural Traditions

Categories: Tradition

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Published: Mar 19, 2024

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Descriptive Essay: Cultural Festivals in The United States

Culture means different things to different people. For some it will be about heritage and respecting views and values of the past, for others it will be a way to live now- manners, refinement and activities that are enjoyed. As the United States has so many people with backgrounds from all over the world, cultural festivals will be very varied. Research has shown that there are at least 72 cultural festivals held in the United States each year.

2013 should see many interesting events unfold since it was announced that this was “The Year of Italian Culture.” Americans can expect to see events dedicated to eminent Italians dating as far back as Michelangelo and going through to the latest artists and scientists. Many cultural festivals will follow this format and be a way to show the pride people have in their ancestry.

Festivals dedicated to a nation will clearly be supported by those with the appropriate background, but the culture will have reached many others who will see the benefits of attending cultural festivals. The love of opera or country music, modern art or American Indian jewellery stretches way beyond the boundaries of where you were born and what your nationality is listed as on your passport.

Most of the festivals held each year are dedicated to individual cultures, but some encompass the country as a whole. One such event is the How Weird Street Faire, which is presented as a celebration of peace and funds raised are presented to the World Peace through Technology Organization. Participants turn up in costume and booths provide information on various ways the world should aim for peace.

Not all cultural festivals will have such a wide ranging theme as the peace festival and some will be to show how certain sections of society live an example being the Armish Arts and Crafts Festival. Cultural festivals do not have to be about being high brow and elitist, but can be based on the old ways of life and a more simple way of living.

The success of cultural festivals will depend on a number of things ranging from the location to the events involved to the fee charged. For some a true cultural festival will be priced so as to exclude many, but others see a free or low fee system as the way to make an event successful. For people who consider culture to be based on exclusivity the former will be the sort of events they attend the latter will be well avoided. For the people who see festivals as a way to bring people together and allow them to absorb other cultures, the latter will be the perfect solution. Whatever the view on culture, The United States will have a suitable festival.

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Crafting the Perfect Festival Essay: Step-by-Step Writing Guide

Table of Contents

Festivals are an integral part of every culture around the world. They are celebrated w it h great enthusiasm and fervor, bringing together people from all walks of life. Whether it’s a religious festival, a cultural celebration, or a simple get-together, festivals play a vital role in shaping our social fabric . But what makes a festival special? Is it the food, the decorations, the music, or something else altogether? In this essay, I will explore the various aspects of festivals and their significance in our lives.

How Do You Write a Festival Essay?

A festival is a time for celebration, joy, and revelry. It brings people together, creates a sense of unity and belonging, and provides an opportunity to express oneself through art, music, dance, and food. However, if you are tasked with writing an essay about a festival, how do you go about doing so? Here are some tips to help you write a compelling festival essay:

Choose a topic: The first step in writing any essay is to choose a topic. When it comes to a festival essay, your topic should revolve around the theme of the festival, its history, its significance, or its impact on society. For example, you could write about the origins of Halloween, the evolution of Carnival, or the cultural significance of Diwali.
Research thoroughly: Once you have chosen your topic, it’s essential to conduct thorough research. Read books, articles, and online resources to gain a deep understanding of the festival and its context. Talk to experts, attend festivals, and observe the rituals and practices associated with them. This will help you develop a rich and nuanced perspective on the subject matter .
Develop a thesis statement: Your thesis statement should clearly state the main argument or point of your essay. For instance, “The festival of Holi symbolizes the triumph of good over evil and the victory of love over hate.” This statement sets the tone for the rest of your essay and helps guide your arguments.
Outline your essay: An outline is a useful tool for organizing your thoughts and ensuring that your essay flows logically. Divide your essay into introductory, body, and concluding paragraphs. Each paragraph should focus on one aspect of the festival and build upon the information presented earlier.
Use de script ive language: Festivals are sensory experiences, so it’s important to incorporate vivid descriptions of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures into your essay. Use metaphors, similes, and other literary devices to create engaging imagery. For example, you might describe the colors of Holi as “a kaleidoscope of hues,” or the flavors of Indian cuisine as “a symphony of spices.”
Provide historical context: Festivals often have a rich history, so don’t neglect to include details about their origins and evolution. Explain why certain customs and practices were adopted and how they have changed over time. This will add depth and complexity to your essay.
Discuss the significance of the festival: Every festival has a purpose or meaning behind it. Explore this significance in your essay and explain how the festival reflects the values and beliefs of the culture it originates from. For example, you might discuss how the festival of Christmas represents the birth of Jesus Christ and the message of love and redemption he brought.
Conclude with a thoughtful ending: Finally, sum up your main points and leave your readers with something to think about. End your essay with a thought-provoking quote, a personal reflection, or a call to action. For example, you might conclude by saying, “As we continue to face challenges in our globalized world, festivals offer us a chance to come together, find common ground, and celebrate our differences. Let us embrace the power of diversity and unite under the banner of love and respect.”

By following these steps, you can craft a compelling festival essay that explores the history, significance, and impact of a particular celebration. Remember to stay focused, use descriptive language, and provide historical context to make your essay stand out. Happy writing!

How Do You Research a Festival for an Essay?

Researching a festival for an essay involves gathering information from various sources to create a comprehensive overview of the event’s history, significance, and impact on society. Here are some steps to follow:

Start with online search engines such as Google or Bing and look up articles related to the festival. Use specific keywords such as the name of the festival, its location, and any notable events or traditions it may include.
Check out websites dedicated to cultural heritage, tourism boards, or local government pages for more information. These resources often provide valuable insights into the festival’s origins, evolution, and current practices.
Consult books or academic papers published on the topic. Look for works by experts in the field who can offer in-depth analysis and historical context.
Talk to people involved in organizing or participating in the festival. They can share their personal experiences and perspectives, which can add richness and depth to your understanding.
Attend the festival if possible. Observing the event firsthand will give you a better sense of its atmosphere, rituals, and overall vibe. Take notes and ask questions to further inform your research.
Keep track of your sources and references. Make sure to properly cite them in your essay to avoid plagiarism and maintain academic integrity.

Remember to approach your research with an open mind and be willing to learn. The more diverse your sources and perspectives, the stronger your essay will be.

What Are Some Tips for Writing a Festival Essay?

When writing a festival essay, here are some key tips to keep in mind:

Choose a clear thesis statement that summarizes the main argument or point of your essay. This will help guide your writing and ensure coherence throughout.
Organize your ideas logically. Consider starting with an introductory paragraph that provides background information and sets the stage for your discussion. Then, break down your essay into sections that address different aspects of the festival, such as its history, significance, or cultural importance.
Provide concrete examples and evidence to support your arguments. Draw upon your research to illustrate how the festival has evolved over time, its role in shaping local culture, or its impact on community engagement.
Analyze the festival within its broader social and cultural context. Examine how it reflects or challenges societal norms, values, or beliefs. This will help you develop a nuanced understanding of the festival’s meaning and relevance.
Use descriptive language to bring the festival to life. Incorporate sensory details, quotes from participants, or vivid descriptions of performances or rituals to make your essay feel more immersive and engaging.
Edit and revise your work carefully. Ensure that your sentences flow smoothly, your transitions are logical, and your conclusions are strong and thoughtful.

By following these guidelines, you can craft a compelling and well-structured festival essay that showcases your knowledge and critical thinking skills.

How Do You Structure a Festival Essay?

The structure of a festival essay typically includes an introduction, body, and conclusion. Here is a general outline to get you started:

Introduction (approx. 10% of total word count)

Introduce the topic of the festival and its significance
Provide background information or context
Clearly state your thesis statement

Body (approx. 70% of total word count)

Discuss the festival’s history and evolution
Describe its cultural significance and symbolic meanings
Explain its role in shaping local customs and traditions
Highlight its impact on community engagement and participation
Analyze the festival within its broader social and cultural context

Conclusion (approx. 20% of total word count)

Summarize your main points
Reiterate the significance of the festival
Offer recommendations or suggestions for future research

Remember to adjust this structure based on your research and the requirements of your assignment. The most important thing is to present your ideas clearly and persuasively, while also demonstrating your mastery of the subject matter.

How Do You Write About the Cultural Significance of a Festival?

When it comes to writing about the cultural significance of a festival, there are several key points to consider. Firstly, it is important to understand the historical context of the festival and how it has evolved over time. This can involve conducting extensive research into the origins of the festival, its evolution through different eras, and any significant events or traditions that have shaped its development.

Additionally, it is essential to explore the role that the festival plays within the local community and how it brings people together. This could include discussing the ways in which the festival promotes social cohesion, celebrates cultural heritage, and provides opportunities for cultural exchange.

Finally, it is also important to examine the symbolism and meaning behind the festival’s rituals, customs, and practices, and how these contribute to its overall cultural significance. By taking a comprehensive approach to understanding the cultural significance of a festival, writer s can create engaging and informative pieces that highlight the importance of this unique aspect of culture.

What Are Some Festivals That Are Celebrated Worldwide?

There are many festivals that are celebrated worldwide, each with their own unique characteristics and meanings. Here are just a few examples:

New Year’s Day (January 1st): Celebrated around the globe, this holiday marks the beginning of a new year and is often observed with fireworks, parties, and other festive activities.
Christmas (December 25th): A religious holiday that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, Christmas is widely observed across the world and features gift-giving, decorations, and special meals.
Diwali (various dates): A Hindu festival of lights that takes place in autumn, Diwali is celebrated throughout India and by Indian communities around the world. It involves lighting lamps, exchanging gifts, and eating traditional sweets.
Chinese New Year (varies): A lunisolar holiday that falls between late January and mid-February, Chinese New Year is one of the most important holidays in the Chinese calendar. It is marked by parades, firework displays, and family gatherings.
Ramadan (varies): The Islamic holy month of fasting, Ramadan is observed by Muslims around the world during daylight hours from dawn to sunset. It culminates in the festival of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting period.

These are just a few examples of the many festivals that are celebrated worldwide. Each one offers a unique insight into the diverse cultures and traditions that exist across our planet.

How Do You Write About the Environmental Impact of Festivals?

The environmental impact of festivals is an increasingly important topic, particularly as concerns about climate change and sustainability continue to grow. When writing about the environmental impact of festivals, it is important to take a balanced approach that acknowledges both the positive and negative aspects of these events.

On the one hand, festivals can bring people together, promote cultural heritage, and support local economies. On the other hand, they can also result in waste, pollution, and resource depletion. To address these issues, writers should focus on finding solutions that balance the needs of the event with those of the environment.

For example, organizing recycling programs, reducing energy consumption, and choosing eco-friendly vendors can help minimize the environmental impact of festivals while still allowing them to thrive. By presenting a nuanced view of the issue, writers can inspire readers to make more informed choices about their own involvement in festivals and advocate for greater sustainability in future events.

What Are Some Festivals That Have a Negative Impact on the Environment?

While many festivals have a positive impact on the environment, others may have unintended consequences that harm the natural world. Here are a few examples of festivals that have been criticized for their environmental impact:

Burning Man (Black Rock City, Nevada): While Burning Man is known for its art installations and creative expression, it has faced criticism for its reliance on non-renewable energy sources, water usage, and waste management practices. In response, organizers have implemented measures such as renewable energy generation, water conservation initiatives, and expanded recycling efforts.
Rio Carnival (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): One of the largest and most famous carnival celebrations in the world, Rio Carnival generates massive amounts of waste, including plastic bottles, food scraps, and confetti. In recent years, city officials have taken steps to reduce waste and encourage sustainable practices among participants.
Tomatina (Buenos Aires, Spain): During this annual tomato fight festival, thousands of kilograms of fresh tomatoes are thrown at each other, resulting in widespread damage to property and the environment. Organizers have since introduced measures to reduce waste and promote sustainability, such as composting and recycling programs.

By examining these cases and others like them, writers can identify areas where festivals may need improvement and offer suggestions for more sustainable practices. At the same time, they can emphasize the potential benefits of festivals for building community, fostering cultural exchange, and supporting local economies. By striking a balance between these competing interests, writers can help ensure that festivals remain vibrant and sustainable for generations to come.

What Are Some Festivals That Have a Positive Economic Impact?

There are many festivals around the world that not only bring communities together but also have a positive economic impact on local businesses and communities. Here are some examples of such festivals:

The Tomatina Festival in Spain – This annual event attracts thousands of visitors who come to throw tomatoes at each other in a friendly game of slop fight. It has become a major tourist attraction and generates significant revenue for the local economy through hotel bookings, food sales, and souvenir purchases.
The Burning Man Festival in Nevada – This week-long event is known for its art installations, music performances, and community-driven ethos. It has grown into one of the largest and most influential alternative events in the world, generating millions of dollars in revenue for local businesses and artists.
The Rio Carnival in Brazil – This two-week celebration takes place before Lent and features elaborate costumes, parades, and street parties. It is considered one of the biggest tourist attractions in South America and brings in significant revenue from foreign visitors.

When writing about the economic impact of festivals, it’s important to include data and statistics to support claims. For example, you could mention the number of visitors, revenue generated, and job creation opportunities provided by the festival. Additionally, highlight any specific initiatives or programs put in place to ensure sustainability and environmental responsibility during the festival.

How Do You Write About the Social Impact of Festivals?

Festivals can have a profound social impact on communities, bringing people together and fostering a sense of belonging and connection. When writing about the social impact of festivals, consider including stories and anecdotes from individuals who have attended the festival and experienced this positive effect firsthand.

For example, you could interview locals who have been coming to the same festival every year since childhood and ask them how it has shaped their identity and sense of community. Alternatively, you could speak with visitors from different backgrounds and cultures who have come together at the festival to share experiences and form new connections.

It’s also important to acknowledge any potential negative aspects of festivals, such as overcrowding, noise pollution, and safety concerns. However, overall, the benefits of festivals far outweigh the drawbacks, making them an essential part of our cultural landscape.

What Are Some Festivals That Bring People Together?

Festivals are inherently designed to bring people together, whether it’s through shared traditions, music, dance, or food. Here are some examples of festivals that promote unity and inclusivity:

The Kumbh Mela in India – This massive spiritual gathering takes place every 12 years and attracts tens of millions of pilgrims. It is a symbol of religious harmony and diversity, showcasing the richness of Indian culture and tradition.
The Pride Parade in New York City – This annual event celebrates lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other marginalized identities, promoting acceptance and equality. It has become a global phenomenon, inspiring similar events across the globe.
The World Food Day Festival in Italy – This culinary extravaganza celebrates the diversity of Italian cuisine while raising awareness about hunger and malnutrition. It brings together chefs, restaurateurs, and food enthusiasts from around the world, fostering cross-cultural exchange and understanding.

When writing about festivals that bring people together, focus on the ways in which they promote unity and inclusivity. Highlight the diverse participants, the shared values and beliefs, and the sense of community that arises from these events. Emphasize the importance of festivals in breaking down barriers and building bridges between different groups of people.

How Do You Write About the Personal Impact of a Festival?

The personal impact of a festival can vary greatly depending on individual experiences and perspectives. When writing about the personal impact of a festival, try to capture the emotional resonance and significance that it holds for those involved.

For example, you could describe the transformative power of a music festival that helped someone overcome addiction or find their passion in life. Or, you could recount the joy and nostalgia felt by someone returning to their hometown festival after years away.

To make your story more compelling, incorporate sensory details and vivid descriptions that evoke emotion. Use active voice and present tense to create a sense of immediacy and engagement. By sharing personal accounts, you can help readers connect with the festival on a deeper level and understand its lasting impact.

What Are Some Festivals That Have Impacted Your Life?

As a writer, I have had the privilege of experiencing many festivals throughout my travels. Each one has left an indelible mark on me, teaching me something new about myself and the world around me.

One of the most memorable was the Glastonbury Music Festival in England. As a young journalist, I covered the event for a national newspaper, and it was there that I discovered my love for live music and journalism. The energy and creativity of the festival inspired me to pursue a career in writing, and I continue to attend whenever possible.

Another pivotal festival was the Holi Festival in India. As a child, I had never seen anything like it – the colors, the laughter, the sheer exuberance of the crowd. It was a reminder that even in the midst of chaos and conflict , we can still find beauty and joy in the world.

These experiences have taught me the value of stepping outside my comfort zone and embracing new experiences. They have shown me that festivals are not just entertainment; they are opportunities to learn, grow, and connect with others. And they have given me a lifelong appreciation for the power of music, color, and community.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, festivals are a reflection of our values, beliefs, and traditions. They provide us with an opportunity to come together, share our joys and sorrows, and connect with each other on a deeper level.

Whether it’s a family gathering, a religious ceremony, or a public celebration, festivals remind us of the importance of community and togetherness. So let us embrace the spirit of festivals and make the most of these special moments in our lives.Consider reading >>>> How Do Film Markets Work? to learn more.

I am a highly experienced film and media person who has a great deal to offer to like-minded individuals. Currently working on several exciting projects, I am a film and media practitioner for over a decade. I have achieved a great deal of success in my professional career.

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Essay On Festivals in Pakistan...

Published by admin on 27th September 2022

Essay On Festivals in Pakistan

Fesitivals are the beautiful celebration that makes a nation follow its values and culture. We celebrate different festivals to promote our culture by sharing and revising the reasons of events tha took place. There are numerous fesitivals we celebrate in Pakistan. However, if we look at past, there we less events that were celebrated than today. As the globalization has taken place many we have adopted many festival from the west.

If we talk about the religion on which this Country was establish is Islam. According to our religion there are only two beautiful festivals that are obligatory incldues, Eid ul fitr,and Eid ul azha. While, there are different religion sectors that follow many other festivals following their ancestors. Here we will list few of the revitalizing festivals of pakistan that makes us happy and let us socialize in that period of the year.

Eid ul Fitr

This beautiful festivale is celebrating on 1st shawal, after the islamic month Ramadan. People celebrate this eid by preparing delicious food, as following the fasting month. This eid brings a lot of colors and everyone prepare new clothes for this eid. Not only is Pakistan, muslim all over the world celebrate this festival with full zeal and happiness. This festival teaches us to be patient and show love and care to our other muslim brothers and sisters.

Eid Ul Azha

The festival that teaches us to sacrifice for the sake of Allah. This fesitval has the sacred islamic histroy associated with it. This month increase our love for almighty by reminding us why we have been sent to this world, i.e. to worship almighty and instinct the sacrificial emotion.

Shab-e-barat

This festival is celebrated almost by all the reglious sectors of Pakistan but in different ways. Muslim sectors believe that at this auspicious night the past deeds of muslims are taken into account and the destinies for the next year is decided. Many people do fire works, share sweet dishes with one another and offer prayers for the night.

Eid-Milad-un-Nabi

This festival is also celebrated by some of the religious sectors however, others put fast and do a lot of prayers at this event. Milad is celebrated at many places on big scale. According to some sources this festival is celebrated because many muslim believe that 12th of Rabi-ul-Awal is the birthday of Holy Propher (P.B.U.H), however, it is not confirmed with the reliable sources.

Shab e meraj

This is considered as another blessed night when Holy Prophet (P.B.U.H) traveled to skies to meet Almighty Allah. He was accompained by the angel Jibreel. There were many other pledge that took place at this blessed night.

If we see islamic history it is full of amazing stories that makes us strong muslim if we follow the real meaning of them. There are more information that you can get with Research paper writing service in pakistan . Anyone can also ask them to write the paper on islamic history or any other festival they want. Festivals are very previous and every country should promote them in a healthy way inducing knowledge to young generation.

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Life should be a continual celebration, a festival of lights the whole year round. Only then can you grow up, can you blossom.

To celebrate a festival means: to live out, for some special occasion and in an uncommon manner, the universal assent to the world as a whole.

Spiritually, life is a festival, a celebration. Joy is of the essence of life.

The greatness of a culture can be found in its festivals

Life is a festival only to the wise.

Festivals become a family because you start seeing the same people.

You are invited to the festival of this world and your life is blessed.

The festivals are cool because you make a lot of connections at the festivals.

For the wise man, every day is a festival.

Life is a happy thing, a festival to be enjoyed rather than a drudgery to be endured.

This is our festival and on this day we are all Indians. We celebrate the festival by maintaining the spirit of brotherhood.

Festival of the impassioned efforts and manifold ambitions of all forms of youthful activity of every generation springing from the threshold of life.

As far as playing playing festivals and everything, I feel like that's what I was born to do. I'm an entertainer, hopefully in the best sense.

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

I always say that as church falls into demise, we still have the inclination to congregate whether by a night of music or a festival, or just sitting down to listen to some vinyl.

Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.

For every rockabilly festival staged here, there are 10 held overseas.

But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each other in music.

He who has no light in his heart, what will he gain from the festival of lamps.

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.

Sometimes success is just limited to festival circuit.

Now you are seeing electronic dance music producers on TV, on talk shows. It's so great to see the festivals growing bigger and bigger, it's like one big family that's all partying with each other. I love being a part of that.

We have to change this whole earth into a tremendous festival, and it is possible because man brings all that is needed to transform this earth into a paradise.

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122 Festival Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

A festival is a celebration of some holiday, achievements, or other occasions for one or several days. Festivals can be religious, national, seasonal; they can be dedicated to arts, food, fashion, sports, etc. When working on a festival essay, it is essential to consider several aspects. For example, research the history and cultural meaning of an event.

In our compilation of festival topics, we included many topics about festivals (Woodstock, Richmond Folk Festival, Film Festivals, and others). You will also find broad issues about festivals’ cultural heritage and history.

🏆 Best Festival Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

🥇 most interesting festival topics to write about, 📌 simple & easy festival essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on festival, ❓ essay questions about festivals.

Music Festival Project Management The project is concerned with planning a one-day Music Festival that will take place on the 4th of June 2011, in Greenwich Park.
Arts and Crafts Festival Event In addition to informing the people on the huge variety of arts and crafts the company has been able to collect from various parts of the world over time, this event will be a good […]
School Music Festival Concert The preliminary rounds will be designed to ensure that only the participants who measure up to the high standards of the competition are allowed to go on to the next stage of the competition while […]
Ramadan Celebration: The Religious Festival To conclude, Ramadan month, a religious festival, is my favorite and most memorable event of the year. Individuals behaving better and kinder towards others during this month is another part of the festival that I […]
The Negative Social Impacts of “Tomorrowland Music Festival” Despite the benefits of this festival for the local community, such as increased economic activity and employment, “Tomorrowland” has also been criticized for the presence of drugs on-site, the issues with cleaning up the location […]
Woodstock Music Festival Even though the Woodstock Music Festival was intended to be a ticketed event, ultimately, the planners stopped collecting the tickets because the crowd started to cut away and to trample the fences which made even […]
Summer Music Festival: Event Project Management Plan The main objective of the festival is to raise funds for the Children Society of the United Kingdom. People below the age of fifteen years have low power and less interest in the event because […]
Spring Festival Gala Event The festival has led to massive public awareness on the Chinese culture The culture movement led to the realization of the importance of the support received from the mass media and the role the popular […]
Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in Australia The Melbourne Food and Wine Festival is held throughout Melbourne showcasing the urban and regional life of the city and its various food and wine offerings to reinforce the position of the city of Melbourne […]
Lantern Festival and Rice Ball Moreover, the rice balls are an essential component of the Lantern festival because they are the reason why the fire goddess spared the city of Chang’an.
History of Mexican Festival The experience of attending the Mexican festival stretched my cultural perception as I discovered that Mexicans have a rich culture in terms of food, art, and music.
Management in Action: The Fyre Festival Case The process begins with a practical idea and a budget that aligns with the resources needed for the event. The standard event planning procedures will be used in getting the resolution to the challenges faced […]
Ajyal Film Festival and Youth Empowerment The DFI organizes the Ajyal Film Festival to present the film products of its most talented young actors and producers to the government and the business community, as well as the rest of the world.
Food Safety Policy for a Music Festival Several food businesses are expected to be at the festival thus posing a threat to the health of the participants should the right measures fail to be implemented to avoid the spread of food-borne diseases.
Festival of Britain, Its History and Success The rationale behind it was to point to the reconstruction of London and the incorporation of futuristic buildings in the architecture of the city.
Edinburgh Festival: Art, Culture, and Unique Experiences The Edinburgh Festival follows a mission of being the most exciting, innovative, and accessible festival in the world in the realm of the performing arts, promoting the cultural, educational, and economic well-being of the people […]
The Global Festival of Halloween or Hallow Eve The festival’s roots came from the traditions of religious attention to the edge between the world of the living and the dead.
A Maslenitsa Festival as a Cultural Event In the video, one could see how people sing, dance, play the accordion, cook and eat pancakes, play team games, such as tug of war and king of the hill, and build a fortress out […]
The San Joaquin Asparagus Festival in California People from around the region travel to Stockton to join the locals in the celebration of the food that is currently regarded as belonging to individuals in the high-class category.
Ultra Music Festival Twitter Marketing The first step of the marketing strategy development in this respect is the choice of a platform that corresponds to the goals of marketing.
The Woodstock Music Festival’s Organizational Challenges For the next Woodstock in 1994, the organizers decided to review their strategies, setting the $135 ticket price. After such a disaster, the festival’s project in 2019 was doomed to fail.
Transformative Festival Experience: A Comparative Analysis Other important aspect of the transformative component within the leisure experiences is, according to the article, the contrast between the event the question and the general daily experience of a tourist.
The Orange F.O.O.D Week Festival in Australia Provenance refers to the origin of a particular object or phenomenon, and in this case, it is of food and wine of the Orange Region.
Food Provision at the Annisburgh District Music Festival It will promote the careers of the local and international artists who will be performing at the event and raise the profile of the district leading to a positive reputation. Over the course of the […]
Ottawa Folk Festival Management Issues If the festival’s management would implement a no change scenario to the problem of a low level of attendance by young people, the state of affairs will stay the same: the festival will be only […]
Santa Barbara International Film Festival In its eleven-day span, the festival aims to enrich the local culture and enhance the awareness of film as a form of art.
Statistics. Exploring the Festival Data From the histogram, we can observe that the festival data of day one is normally distributed about the mean of the data.
Independent Arts and Crafts Festival: Event Safety However, for a festival of such to be successful much legal documentation has to be put in place and some of these are contracts and fees agreements and the acquiring of some legal documents for […]
Flavours of Chittering Food & Wine Festival: Analysis As some of the local restaurants are based on cooking the food from the products grown in the valley, people are likely to learn about the real tastes of food in those restaurants because the […]
Benefits of a Non-Profit Bookfair Festival for a Major US City A book fair in San Antonio would be attended by panelists whose interest would be to discuss the future in books, lovers of poetry who would listen and enjoy recitations and publishers. Considering the fuss […]
Woodstock Music and Art Fair During the fun and revels of the Woodstock festival, the hippies and flower children were treated to an incredible roster of talented and legendary musicians.
The Chicago International Film Festival As a matter of fact, the festival’s website points out that it has had a consistent objective that still remains to this moment, “…to discover and present new filmmakers to Chicago, and to acknowledge and […]
Auckland Lantern Festival Event Management Plan The festival will supply the entertainment as well as the props necessary for the performers, but stallholders will have to pay for their spots at the venue.
Lunar Vietnamese New Year’s Event: Flower Festival It should be noted that the festival is held for several days, and its primary purpose is to prepare the visiting people for the main celebration. The center of all activities that bring the majority […]
Calvin Jones Big Band Jazz Festival The most interesting feature of the show was the participation of bands from three different colleges the University of the District of Columbia Jazz Ensemble, the Howard University Jazz Ensemble, and the University of Maryland […]
The Dragon Boat Festival on Qi’ao Island The origins of the holiday are unknown, but there are many popular theories that suggest the holiday to be associated with the death of Qu Yang a famous Chinese thinker and poet.
Qasr Al Hosn Festival Press Release The festival has been celebrated since the development of the fort in the 1760s. Apart from celebrating the Emirati history, the festival aims to give visitors a chance to appreciate the Emirati heritage that is […]
Dubai Jazz Festival Press Release James Blunt, who will be in Dubai for the third time, will perform on the first day of the festival together with Christina Perri.
African Circumcision Festival and Western Attitude I would make sure that I want to visit this event for the elders to be sure that I am interested in the supportive environment at the workplace and the place, I am living.
Richmond Folk Festival Performances The major goal the organizers of the festival pursue is to present the best traditional musicians found all across the country and to let the audience enjoy their unique talents.
Made in America Musical Festival Planning Overall, festival planning involves many steps and stages that are crucial to the success of the event, as well as to the safety and security of all visitors.
Michael Jackson Festival’s Start-Up Business The primary goal of this paper is to develop a detailed start-up business for the Michael Jackson festival with the assistance of the business model canvas.
Festival Organization Service Operations The increasing number of festivals in both Europe and other parts of the world reduces the efficiency and organisational mechanisms of the events leading to the emergence of other organisational bodies such as the American […]
The 2014 Joondalup Festival Details In addition, the report focuses on identifying the theme of the event, objectives associated with the event and the philosophy of the event, among other event aspects.
The Wollongong Music Festival Arranging The paper analyses the roles of the key stakeholders in the Wollongong music festival. Because of the location, the festival may cause major conflicts with the businesses adjoining the venue.
College Students’ Satisfaction of Music Festival in China Aquinas says that one of the reasons why music festivals are popular among the students is because they offer them the opportunity to express their feelings.
Moomba Festival in Melbourne: Event, Significance of the Place, Infrastructure, and Effect on the City Image The reason for the event includes a number of factors that reflect the events that were held in the early 1950s and predestined the start of the festival.
Promotion Strategy for a Green Festival The main reason for planning the green festival is to get residents of Dubai and its environs to realize the importance of environmental conservation. Secondly, the venue of the green festival and how people will […]
Charity Softball and Cultural Festival While the main event in the festival will be the softball tournament, the organizers of the charity softball and cultural festival hope to raise funds through several ways.
A Travel Into the Korean Culture: 2012 Korean Festival in Houston One of the most vivid and memorable events in the Korean culture, the Korean Festival in Houston makes one dive into the Korean culture and understand the essence of the Korean dances.
Woodstock Music and Art Festival In this paper, we will explore on Woodstock Music and Art festival, the challenges that were faced, and the impact of the festival to the music industry.
The Mimir Chamber Music Festival Concert The three characteristics were the dynamics, intonation and ensemble where the intonation was brought about by the string quartet playing, the dynamics brought by the careful modulation and the ensemble bringing in a complete experience […]
The Live Concert by Aleksandr Rybak and the Electo Zoo Festival The lighting and the special effects became a valuable contribution to the performance, intensifying the impression from the beautiful music and the personal charm of the talented performers.
How to fund a non profit community book festival Through online forums, the visitors of the website can be made aware of the community book festival and be requested to donate funds for the activity.
Festival in Greektown, Chicago: Due to the fact that this district is one of those that make up the community area, the festival offered to its citizens has to be community based. It is necessary to take care of […]
The Tibetan Freedom Festival Drives Forward the Cause for Tibetan People
The History of the Bands of America National Concert Band Festival
The Venice Film Festival And The Cannes Film Festival
Understanding the UK: David Cannadine at Edinburgh International Book Festival
The History and the Symbolism of the Festival of Pesach
Tradition in Our Culture: the Mid-Autumn Festival
Tomorrowland: Electronic Music Festival
The History and Cultural Importance of the Dragon Boat Festival in China
The Songkran Festival: Traditional New Year’s Day
The Three Days of Peace and Music During the Woodstock Festival in 1969
The San Fermin Festival And The Running Of The Bulls
The On Matsuri Festival Of Kasuga Wakamiya Shrine
The Festival of Politics: Karl Marx Lecture with Professor Gareth Stedman Jones
The Role of Green-Festivals Affecting Pro-Environmental Attitudes: The Case of Glastonbury Festival
The Epa headdress of the Yoruba Epa Festival
The Impact of Edinburgh International Festival
The Deployment of Mobile Base Transceiver Station During Lisabi Festival at Abeokuta
The Role Of Festival In The Mayor Of Casterbridge
The Implication of Road Toll Discount for Mode Choice: Intercity Travel during the Chinese Spring Festival Holiday
Vietnam: Lunar New Year Festival
The Yulin Dog Meat Festival and American Views
The Flaws and Brilliance of the Sundance Film Festival
The Impact of the Woodstock Festival in America during the 1960’s
The Concert At The International Chamber Music Festival Concert
The Diwali Festival, Its Importance to Hinduism, and Pollution in Diwali
The New Music Festival : Sound, Light, And Healing
The Invalid American Views on the Yulin Dog Meat Festival
The Evolution of Woodstock: A Rock Festival
The Origin and History of the Interesting Festival of Halloween
Woodstock Music and Art Festival
The Largest Cultural Activity in Pakistan: Folk Festival or Lok Mela
The Marketing of the Melbourne International Film Festival
Western Festival in China
The Traditions, Practices and the Processes in the Thaipusam Festival
Whatever: Culture and Niagara Wine Festival
The Cultural Impact of the Woodstock Music Festival to Society
The Effect of Food Tourism Behavior on Food Festival Visitor’s Revisit Intention
The Love Parade Festival Stampede 2010
The Woodstock Festival and the Music of the 60s: A Peaceful Rock Revolution
The History and Impact of Woodstock Music Festival
The New Year Festival in Vietnam and in America
The Night Nation Run – the World’s Running Music Festival
Are Film Festivals Still Necessary?
What Are the Negative Effects of Festivals?
What Problems Do Music Festivals Cause?
Are Religious Festivals Just an Excuse for a Party?
Why Are Festivals Bad for the Environment?
How Much Waste Do Festivals Produce?
How Are the Religious Festivals Harming Our Ecosystem?
What We Can Do for the Environment on Festivals?
Why Do the Researchers Called Pollution the Flip Side of Festivals?
How Much Waste Do UK Festivals Produce?
What Do Festivals Do With Leftover Tents?
How Do You Recover From Festivals?
Where Are Some of the Largest Festivals Held in the United States?
How Many Music Festivals Are There in the USA?
How Rituals and Festivals Played a Crucial Role in Traditional European Life?
What Are Traditional Festivals?
What Are the Three National Festivals?
Why Are American Festivals Important?
What Are the Most Important Festivals in French Culture?
How Do Festivals Bring Us Together?
How Many Regional Festivals Are There?
Are Festivals Important for a Country?
What Are the Hidden Dangers of Music Festivals?
What Is the Largest Attendance at The Music Festivals?
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Chicago (N-B)

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Festivals Of India Essay

Festivals of India Essay

500+ words essay on the festivals of india.

India is a land of fairs and festivals. People of different religions and communities live here and therefore, many festivals are celebrated in India every year. One can capture the Indian tradition and culture best at its fairs and festivals marked by dance, music, sweets, etc. All the festivals are celebrated with great enthusiasm and happiness in a colourful atmosphere. An Essay on Festivals in India is a very common topic and is expected to be asked in the English exam. So, students are recommended to practise essays on this topic to score high marks in the writing section. This sample Essay on Festivals of India will give them some ideas and tips to organise their thoughts to form an effective essay.

Different Types of Indian Festivals

India is well known for its cultural and traditional festivals all over the world. As it is a secular country full of diversity in religions, languages, cultures and castes, every month, some festival celebration happens. Among these festivals, some are religious, some are based on the seasons and some are of national importance. Each and every festival is celebrated uniquely in different ways according to the various rituals and beliefs. Each festival has its own history, legend and significance of the celebration. Festivals bring bonding, love, cross-cultural exchange and happiness among people.

National Festivals

Festivals and fairs are significant parts of Indian cultural life. Some of the festivals are celebrated at a national level, whereas others are at a regional level. National festivals such as Gandhi Jayanti, Independence Day and Republic Day are celebrated by people of all religions across the entire nation. These festivals fill us with great pride and remind us of the freedom fighters who sacrificed their lives to make India independent and free from British rule. The whole nation unites together to celebrate these festivals and the spirit of togetherness, patriotism and nationalism can be found everywhere.

Religious Festivals

There are some religious festivals which are celebrated as a whole by different communities.

These include Diwali, Dussehra, Rakhsha Bandhan, Eid-ul-Fitr, Eid-ul-Zuha, Christmas, Ganesh Chaturthi, etc., which are accompanied by religious rituals of one kind or the other. These traditional festivals have two aspects. One is worship which is performed according to specific religious norms. Another is composite culture, as the members of any community can participate in and celebrate these religious festivals. Thus, our festivals represent unity and encourage social bonding.

Seasonal Festivals

In India, most festivals are seasonal in nature. They announce the change in the season and mark the harvesting seasons. All the seasonal festivals are celebrated during two harvesting seasons, Kharif and Rabi. Besides, spring is another period of seasonal festivals. In Punjab, the Lohri festival indicates the harvesting of the winter crop. Pongal, Bihu and Onam celebrations mark the harvesting of paddy crops. Similarly, Holi and Baisakhi are celebrated to mark the harvesting of new rabi crops. Thus, these festivals symbolise the arrival of joy and wealth to farmers’ lives.

It is said that the “Greatness of a culture can be found in its festivals”. India has proved this saying as a variety of festivals are celebrated with full joy and happiness across the country. Different cultures and religions get tied together in bonds of love with invisible threads of celebrations. That’s why India is also known for unity in cultural diversity. Festivals teach us how to fight evil and falsehood and establish the truth. The festivals are marked by fervour, hope, and prayers for a better tomorrow.

Keep learning and stay tuned with BYJU’S for the latest updates on CBSE/ICSE/State Board/Competitive Exams. Also, download the BYJU’S App for interactive study videos.

Frequently Asked Questions on Festivals of India Essay

Why are festivals given so much importance in india.

India has several religions and Indians enjoy celebrating these festivals. Festivals also involve the worship of various deities and also increase the interaction between family members.

What are some of the largely celebrated festivals in India?

Some of the festivals celebrated in India: 1. Diwali 2. Christmas 3. Ramzan 4. Ganesh Chaturthi 5. Dussehra/Vijayadashami

What are some of the values associated with the celebration of festivals?

1. Family bonding and interaction 2. Charity and helping the needy 3. Thanksgiving and showing gratitude

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Essay Samples on Festival

4th of july festivals: celebrating independence day across america.

The 4th of July is a beloved American holiday celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. This star-spangled holiday is marked across the nation with fireworks, parades, barbecues, and community gatherings. One of the best ways to celebrate Independence Day is to...

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Summerfest 2023: The World's Largest Music Festival Showcases an Eclectic Lineup in Milwaukee

Milwaukee's Summerfest has held its position as a venerable summer music tradition for over half a century. Recognized as "The World's Largest Music Festival," Summerfest curates top-tier musicians from diverse genres, gracing multiple stages over several days. The Summerfest 2023 lineup guarantees to maintain the...

Analysis of Challenges and Plans of the Hokitika Wildfoods Festival

In the assignment, I will reveal one of the weirdest festivals worldwide located in New Zealand. The Hokitika New Zealand Wildfoods festival represents a unique and differentiated festival model with no near equivalent in New Zealand, Australia or even worldwide. It contributes to the civic...

Analysis of the Douz Festival: to Feel the Spirit of Sahara

Camelback riding, rabbit hunting, storytelling and Bedouin wedding ceremonies all mark a specific type of nomadic lifestyle. The small town of Douz in Tunisia also considered the 'gateway to the great Sahara' where many nomads have passed, has turned the nomadic lifestyle into an international...

Ecological Restoration Through Waterfire Festival in California

“Ecological restoration is not only the rehabilitation of the environment, it is a celebration of a new relationship with nature and can be regarded as in some sense a new genre of ritual”. The restoration of the environment thorough embarking on new projects to celebrate...

Environmental Protection

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One of the Most Popular Festival - Halloween

One apon a time, there stood a huge mansion,one where nobody dared to enter.It was outdated the grass was outgrown and very old. There was just one thing that always seemed off about the place. Everyday I passed by it ,it always seemed to get...

Carnival as a Form of Popular Performance

The practice of carnival, no matter where or when you find it, is richly steeped in tradition and ritualistic practices. To make clear the juxtaposition of practices within this article, Burke discusses various popular performance practices that have manifested in carnival historically and cross culturally....

The Festival Known as “Mattu Pongal” or the “Pongal”

The second day of the festival is known as “Mattu Pongal” or the “Pongal” for cows, specifically bulls. We are thankful to the bulls because they are the animals who plough the land which men farm on to obtain their food. On the bulls we...

One of the Major Holiday Events: Halloween

As the seasons begin to change from Summer to Autumn, society begins to look forward to three major holiday events: Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. All of these holidays have traditions and customs that we continue to follow every year. The one that I want to...

American Culture

Holi Festival and Vibrant Celebration of Colors

Holi is a very vibrant celebration of colors. We have to wait for a whole year. So we can enjoy the festival of color. Although, Holi is fun and joyous. It's also immensely damaging to your skin. The colors are not extracted from flowers but...

Holi Festival

Indian Festivals And Importance Of Diversity

One of my favorite quotes is “The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.” I love partaking in conversations, particularly if it is intellectually stimulating. It makes me reevaluate my perspectives and further enhances my ability to relate to others. Given my life journey,...

The Origin Of Carnivals And How They Developed Worldwide Throughout The Centuries

Introduction In ancient Italy and Greece before the emergence of Christianity, people were called pagans and these pagans celebrated the end of winter and spring solstices and autumn and spring equinoxes. (Blešić et al., 2014) They continued these celebrations even after the birth of Christianity....

Ancient Civilizations

The Nature and Customs of African Masquerades

Festivals are usually celebrated to mark the beginning or an end of a significant cultural or historical event. For Africans, almost all their festivals are done to celebrate the gods or their community heroes. During the slave trade, as Africans were enslaved in Caribbean plantations...

African Masquerades

Count Down to August: Nigeria Major Festivals

The approach of a festival celebration in Africa can be liken to the coming of the bridegroom. It is a way of commemorating and celebrating African rich cultural heritage while strengthening the sense of belonging and community. The month of August is around the corner....

The Culture and Customs of Ganesh Chaturthi Festival

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Culture and Festivities of the Hopi Tribe

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The Hopi People

Pongal and Bhogi: Festival of New Crops, Changing Weather and Human Preparations

Sankranti Festival celebrates for three days in South India. Bhogi is the first of them. Bhogi Dhanurmas - the last day. There is a saying that Goddevi, born as part of Bhudevi, who fasts for Dhanurma, incarnates as the wife of Srirannat, is called Bhogi....

Connecting the Body and Spirit in Pongal Harvest Festival

When looking in depth at the ritual, gender roles are portrayed by what is seen to be ideal for a women and a man to do. In other words, gender is a socially constructed perspective that portrays what is expected of the behaviour, occupation or...

Cultural Background of the Day of the Dead in Mexico and U.S.

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Indian Holidays: Diwali and Durga Puja

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Experiencing Sikh and Hindu Cultures Through Festivals (Vaisakhi, Diwali, Maha Shivaratri)

My partner, Piyush Dhir, and I chose to explore our cultures main celebrated festivals for our first cultural outing. Since our cultures originated in the Indian Subcontinent, we thought it would be interesting to explore the similarities and differences surrounding our topic. We chose to...

The Symbolization in Mardi Gras Festival

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The Establishment of the Republic Day and Festival in India

Republic Day is one of the great national festivals of India. It is celebrated on January 26th every single year to celebrate the day when the Constitution of India came into place. India was under the British’s rule for over hundreds of years, and Indians...

Globalization Impact on Festival Economy of India

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Holi Festival: “Festival of Colors” or the “Festival of Love”

Holi, the “Festival of Colors” or the “Festival of Love”, is the celebration of the outset of the spring season, the welcome of warmth and happiness and symbolizes the victory of Good over Evil. It is the perfect occasion to boost your business by modernizing...

History of Holi: India’s Festival of Colors

Imagine standing in the middle of the crowd where all you can see is a burst of vibrant colors, upbeat dancing, and big smiles on others' faces. That will be the scene you’ll experience if you attend India’s Festival of Colors, which will happen on...

Holi: the Festival of Colors in India

Did you ever thought there could be a festival devoted to throwing colored powder at people and getting dirty, or we could say, colorful, on purpose? Well, there is. The Hinduism festival, Holi, is one of the most colorful festivals in the world, literally. In...

Holi Festival Or World's “Festival of Love”

The Holi Festival is a day that is celebrated all across the world. It can also be called the “festival of love”. All of the color brings joy to everyone and all forget all the hate they have for others. Through Three of Ninian Smart’s...

An Independent Perspective of Attending the AmericanMuscle Mustang Show

The American Muscle Mustang Car Show is a daylong event in Maple Grove Pennsylvania, at the Maple Grove Raceway. This is a place where die hard mustang enthusiasts gather to show off their cars, attend events, meet prestige vendors, compete in the car show, and...

The Variation in Geographical Perspectives of Hanuman

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Tokyo In Spring: Sakura And Festivals

Like everywhere in Japan, spring in Tokyo means sakura (cherry) blossoms. This is an obvious reason to visit but by no means the only one. There are also traditional festivals, sumo, seasonal delicacies and a whole lot more in bloom in the city's parks and...

Concert Report: Wide Open Bluegrass Festival

For my concert report, I attended the Wide Open Bluegrass festival in Raleigh, North Carolina on September 29th. I arrived around four o’clock, four hours after the festival had opened up. The main stage was located at the Red Hat Amphitheater, there were other small...

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The Benefits Of Nuit Blanche Festival For Artists And Audiences

Nuit Blanche is an experience for new audiences as they are given a glimpse of different art institutions in Toronto and Scarborough. Another insight is that Nuit Blanche has become a huge attraction as it gave artists an opportunity to exhibit new ideas. My thoughts...

Symbiosis Between Nature & Music On The Festival Of Visual Music Of Lanzarote

The Festival of Visual Music of Lanzarote is an event that in 2018 celebrated its fifteenth edition. It was Ildefonso Aguilar who created it in 1989 with the sole intention of mixing music with a surprising natural environment, thus creating a different visual experience. To...

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Best topics on Festival

1. 4th of July Festivals: Celebrating Independence Day Across America

2. Summerfest 2023: The World’s Largest Music Festival Showcases an Eclectic Lineup in Milwaukee

3. Analysis of Challenges and Plans of the Hokitika Wildfoods Festival

4. Analysis of the Douz Festival: to Feel the Spirit of Sahara

5. Ecological Restoration Through Waterfire Festival in California

6. One of the Most Popular Festival – Halloween

7. Carnival as a Form of Popular Performance

8. The Festival Known as “Mattu Pongal” or the “Pongal”

9. One of the Major Holiday Events: Halloween

10. Holi Festival and Vibrant Celebration of Colors

11. Indian Festivals And Importance Of Diversity

12. The Origin Of Carnivals And How They Developed Worldwide Throughout The Centuries

13. The Nature and Customs of African Masquerades

14. Count Down to August: Nigeria Major Festivals

15. The Culture and Customs of Ganesh Chaturthi Festival

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71 Top Festival Quotes + Captions to Match Your Festival Vibe

Posted on Last updated: May 30, 2023

If you just had the time of your life at a festival and are looking for some festival quotes to encapsulate the great vibe, here are some great ideas for festival captions for Instagram and beyond that you can use with your photos and videos.

I think festivals are truly one of the happiest places on earth. They’re a place where weirdness is the norm, everyone has a love of music in common, and the only thing you have to worry about is which artist you want to see next and whether to go get another beer or put more glitter on your face (a festival quote by me :P)

After leaving a festival it can sometimes be hard to put these feelings into words as you reintegrate the experience you just had into your normal life. But I think these music festival quotes will help you do just that.

Here are some of the best quotes on festivals from around the world – from artists and musicians, authors, celebrities, and general festival lovers like me who have been changed by the world of festivals and know what a special place they really are. Check the photo captions for more content and guides on my website from my travels to festivals around the world!

Top 10 Festival Quotes of All Time

Here are some of the best quotes about festivals that encompass why they are so incredible and very important to us all.

“Festival Season is a perfect time to reflect on our blessings and seek out ways to make life better for those around us.” – Unknown
“If festivals were free, you’d never see me again.” – Unknown
“Music can change the world because it can change people.” ― Bono
“Here’s to the nights that turned into mornings, and the friends that turned into family.”
“Festivals are great because you get to just walk around the corner and see a new band that you’ve heard but not had the chance to check out.” — Johnny Marr
“Festivals are happy places, and you don’t really want to enjoy them on your own.” – Christine and The Queens
“ Festival season only comes once a year, so let’s celebrate while it’s here.” – Unknown
“I just want to travel all over the world and go to music festivals”
“It’s a place where we can forget about our problems for a little while.”
“There’s nothing like a music festival. People are ready to have a good time. I don’t think anyone comes to a festival going, I’m gonna be a complete bummer today.” – Gary Clark
“Generally, when I come to festivals , I just wander freely and see what happens.” — St. Lucia

Best music festivals in Australia Beyond the Valley

Music Festival Quotes

These are some music festival quotes from artists and music lovers that speak specifically about why music festivals are always a special place for anyone attending them – from performers to attendees.

“At festivals, you can go a lot bigger than a club and have a massive euphoric moment because there are so many people there all feeling the same thing.” — Jamie XX
“Clapping your hands when you like a band is way better than clicking some ‘like’ button.” – Unknown
“There’s just a completely different vibe at festivals. Everyone gets to hang out and enjoy their favorite music all day. I really do try and play as many festivals as possible!” — Kygo
“Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.” — Henry Ward Beecher
“Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” -Berthold Auerbach
“Festivals are a time to play the songs people know and are looking forward to hearing.” – Scott Hutchinson
“I love that there’s always something happening at festivals. it takes some of the pressure away, too, because you’re one person on the bill.” – Sigrid
“I discovered after going to music festivals, that I am a rock fan. I love the guitars, the phrasing and the abandon of rock fans. ” — Beyoncé Knowles
“Music is the poetry of the air.” – Ritchet
“Festivals are fun for kids, fun for parents, and offer a welcome break from the stresses of the nuclear family. The sheer quantities of people make life easier: loads of adults for the adults to talk to and loads of kids for the kids to play with.” – Tom Hodgkinson
“But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each other in music.” – Yo-Yo Ma

Envision Festival Guide Review breath of one breathwork meditation gregorio

Festival Vibes Quotes + Captions for Instagram

Here are some shorter festival captions for Instagram and other social media posts to fit your posts perfectly. There are some perfect quotes about music from famous songs or simple festival vibes captions you will love.

“I’d rather wear flowers in my hair than diamonds around my neck.”
“Someone told me there’s a girl out there with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.” — Led Zeppelin, Going To California
“Not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand.”
“Everyone has their thing, music festivals are my thing.”
“Music is a safe kind of high.”
“Let the Good Vibes Roll”
“I don’t follow the crowd – I move through them.”
“I don’t want this song to ever end.”
“You can’t buy happiness but you can buy festival tickets and that’s pretty much the same thing.”
“Rave till the grave.”
“Holdin’ nothin’ back, like it’s our last dance.” — Dua Lipa, “Last Dance”
“Festival season should never end.”
“Sometimes music is the only medicine the heart and soul need.”
“You belong among the wildflowers.” — Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Wildflowers”
“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.” ― Confucius
“Over here slaying festival style like…”
“We’re here because of the music.
“Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts.” — Billy Joel
“Keep calm and sing with the crowd.”
“Music is a weapon in the war against unhappiness.” — Jason Mraz
“Feels like I just got back from a festival”

More Festival Captions Ideas

Here are more festival captions that should work for many kinds of different festivals.

“Respond to every call that excites your spirit.” —Rumi
“Go where the good vibes are.”
“Behind every girl’s favorite song there is an untold story.”
“Let’s go where the music takes us.”
“All it takes is one song to bring back a thousand memories.”
“Take me to the desert.”
“Imagine if I wore this outfit to work.”
“May you never be too grown up to dance your heart out.”
“It’s more than music to us.”
“I feel invincible when I’m at a festival.”
“It’s not just a festival, it’s an experience.”
“I just wanna party all night in the neon lights.”
“We lose ourselves in the arms of this crowd.”
“There’s no place like the festival grounds.”

Funny Festival Captions and Quotes

If you’re looking for something a little more light-hearted and silly, here are some funny festival quotes and captions that will make you smile.

“I just want someone who will take me to a festival instead of a fancy dinner.”
“Why be moody when you can shake yo booty?”
“Keep calm and dance ’till sunrise.”
“Missy Elliott was right. Music makes you lose control.”
“Life’s Short, Go to a Festival.”
“I want a boyfriend that will buy me festival tickets….or maybe just the festival tickets.”
“If you still look cute at the end of the festival, you didn’t go hard enough.”
“A moment of silence for all the festivals we miss because we can’t afford the tickets.”
“Mood: Techno.”
“Hey Alexa, take me to Coachella”
“A little party never killed nobody, so we gon’ dance until we drop.” – Fergie
“Life Isn’t perfect, but your outfits can be”
“I’d rather be at a festival.”
“This song is gonna be stuck in my head forever, but I’m not complaining.”
“Kiss my bass.”

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Short Essay on Our Culture Our Identity [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

Culture is the most significant identity of human beings. So, knowing own culture is very much important. In this lesson today, you will learn how to write an essay on the popular phrase: Our Culture Our Identity.

Feature image of Short Essay on Our Culture Our Identity

Short Essay on Our Culture Our Identity in 100 Words

Culture plays an important role in our lives. Every person is unique and different from the other. It is mainly because of their culture. People belong to several nations and communities. So their language changes, their dresses are different, their habits also do not match with each other. All of these happen because we belong to several cultures.

Our culture builds us to be complete human beings. It is our identity. Culture affects our behaviour, manners, and style. It includes the nature we have. Also, it comes from our family background, the teachings we receive and the moral education that we are given. If we are well cultured, then everyone will praise us.

Short Essay on Our Culture Our Identity in 200 Words

The line ‘ Our culture our identity’ comes from the country Nepal. Nepal is a land of diversity. It has various types of flora, fauna, festivals, food, dresses, and culture. But now this is applicable to every country living on Earth. Culture is a part of our identity. It builds our character and manners. If we are cultured, then we are praised by all.

Culture also includes language and our behaviour. It also contains our social activities. Culture differs from person to person. It happens due to different nations. We grow up under a definite culture. It affects our moral development. Culture comes both from our family and also from our surroundings.

Culture Whatever we believe comes from our culture. It remains throughout our life. Nowadays, several people are going to different countries. They study or work abroad. Then the culture of that foreign land affects the person. He mixes the foreign culture with his own. Everything in our life is controlled by culture. It makes us what we are. Our wishes are also part of our culture.

When we succeed in our life, our culture is praised. Culture includes our religions and festivals. Durga puja is now an important festival in foreign countries. All know about Durga Puja. So this helps the Hindu religion and Indian culture get more popular. We live for our culture. Our culture is our pride.

Short Essay on Our Culture Our Identity in 400 Words

We are Indians and we are proud of our nation. We are proud of its people, culture, diversity, independence, nature, and surroundings. What is important for us is the culture we have. Culture makes our identity. As Indians, we have a specific culture. It is different from what others have.

Our culture separates us from others. It is something that makes us unique. It teaches the right and the wrong. We start learning about our culture from childhood. So that we can forever remember it. So culture is our strength. If we follow our culture and its rules, then we will be praised forever.

The identity of a person is formed by his culture. Whatever we believe comes from that. If we have plans for the future, then our culture helps us in it. When we work for our nation, our culture is praised. Every culture has its own value. We cannot forget that. As we grow up, we have to maintain those values. It helps to grow our lives. It makes our lives more beautiful.

These values are different from one another. Every country has its own culture. It has its own values and morals. We see different habits, people, their practices, festivals, foods, clothes, and language. All of these happen because of culture. Our behaviour and manners are also important. It shows how beautiful our culture is.

We are taught about our culture from our childhood. Parents always teach their children about the cultures of their country. Even a small society has a separate rule. Culture comes from our family. If we are well behaved, then people praise our family background. Our grandparents also give us lessons on our culture. They are old and wise.

They know a lot about the culture of the nation. Our environment plays an important role in building us as well. If we have a bad surrounding, then it affects us. We do not learn good manners, we become rough, and also go the wrong way. It becomes very difficult for us to adjust if our culture is not good. So culture creates good and strong personalities.

The line ‘our culture our identity’ comes from Nepal. Nepal is a land of diversity. It has a different language, nature, clothes, food, festivals and people. But now this is applicable to all countries. Culture is very important for us. We must know about it. It makes us proud of what we have. A cultured person is always the best human being on Earth.

In this session today, you have learned how you can write essays on the popular topic: Our Culture Our Identity. In this lesson, I have tried to discuss the topic from a very easy perspective to make it easier to understand for all kinds of students. If you still have any doubts regarding this context, post them in the comment section below.

Join us on telegram to get the latest updates on our upcoming sessions. Thank you for being with us. See you again, soon.

CGRS Winners for the 2024 Travel Writing Contest

The 2024 CGRS Travel Writing Contest results are in and the winners of this year’s contest are:

1st Place: “Ti’n Siarad Cymraeg?” by Lydia Montgomery

2nd place: “my cat, cloyd” by anna frankel .

3rd Place: “Agnès” by Sarah Raman
Honorable Mention: “Home” by Narjis Nusaibah

Congratulations to the winners and to all those who participated in the writing contest this year!

A special thank you and shoutout goes to the CGRS Travel Writing Contest sponsors: Cross-Cultural Studies, Dean of Students, Off-Campus Studies, The Center for Global and Regional Studies, and The Writing Center!

Additionally, we want to extend a warm thank you to this year’s internal and external judges, as well as those who played important roles in putting the contest together, including our student workers, Monica Law and Alex Mazur. The external judge for this year, Heather Maher, has spent more than 20 years as a senior journalist at national and international media outlets – reporting, editing, and writing news and features for ABCNews.com, The Atlantic, Radio Free Europe, MSNBC, CNN, The Rotarian, and The Prague Post, among others. While based in Prague, Heather was a visiting journalism instructor in Bosnia for young aspiring reporters from across Eastern Europe, convened the first training conference in CEE for reporters covering trials at the international Criminal Court, and led a writing internship program for students identifying as Romani at the Soros-funded Transitions Online. She also co-authored several city guides to Prague, contributed to a National Geographic Czech Republic travel guide, and wrote for Sawday’s Best Small Places to Stay. As a professional writer and editor, Heather has authored published opinion pieces for an ambassador to the U.S. and head of state, and edited reports for UNESCO. She is currently a senior writer/editor for the Humane Society of the United States-Humane Society International. With all Heather’s experience and accomplishments, we are incredibly grateful and appreciative of her time spent as this year’s external judge. Thank you again, Heather!

And lastly, congratulations again to our winners; your entries were a joy to read, thank you for sharing your adventures and travel with us! Read our external judge’s comments below!

Exhilarating. I disappeared into Wales as I read, but not just Wales: I went to a festival, stood in a gravel parking lot at dusk, rode a nearly empty bus over a hilly peninsula, and wandered a night garden of fruit trees. I also rode an emotional rollercoaster: exhaustion and despair, frustration, hope, resignation, and relief, and was 100% invested in the author reaching their destination safely.

As a piece of travel writing, this succeeds. The semi-desperate situation of trying to find the right transportation and arrange emergency lodging will be familiar to anyone who has roamed solo in a remote part of the world seeking adventure and enlightenment, only to be defeated by logistics and loneliness. I loved the honesty of the author’s account and appreciated the lack of hyperbole and self-pity. The interweaving of destination-specific details was also done well; illuminating facts about the geography of Wales, the Welsh language, and Celtic history gave context and a sense of place.

There’s a small joy in coming across one’s own experience in another’s text—maybe it’s getting a glimpse of our shared human condition. What solo traveler hasn’t felt frustration trying to converse with kind strangers in another language, fear watching a phone battery drain, or hollowness when you realize you’ve stayed too long in a place that once appealed but suddenly seems strange and awful?

More importantly, if a reader hasn’t experienced such things, the author writes in such a warm and inviting way that it’s effortless to stand in their shoes. That’s good travel writing.

❤️ FAVORITE SENTENCE ❤️

“I have been at turns fascinated, overjoyed, deeply lonely, and awed. And now, I really needed to leave.”

I liked the pacing and structure of this essay; it pulled me in and kept my interest throughout. Right at the outset, the vivid description of the interior of the house produced an accompanying image in my mind, answering in the affirmative the inevitable question that hangs over every new piece of writing for me: do you trust the author’s voice? I was transported to a new place, a crucial element of travel writing.

I loved the small observations about Marcella: her fuzzy slippers and Mickey Mouse blanket, how she shared her Oreos, talked to the cat when she thought no one was listening, fed strays, worried about chewed-up hair ties. These are well-chosen, endearing details that reveal Marcella’s deeper nature: she cares about the people and animals who come into her life. It was notable to me that while the author is at the center of the essay—writing from the POV of a student on a homestay abroad—they don’t center the essay on themselves. There are keenly observed descriptions of behavior and scenes of domestic contentment that don’t read as filtered through a personal lens. I was as curious about Marcella and José—not to mention Cloyd!—as I was about the writer.

That’s why I wished this essay had revealed more than it did about the author’s personal experience and where they were for three months. We only get a hint of the former at the end, when we learn they are “trying to forget about the suitcase and duffel bag that sat packed and ready by the front door,” and become teary-eyed knowing the stay is over. I wondered why they were sad to leave instead of eager to get home. And whether, as with Cloyd, the author had struggled with feeling accepted in other situations during their time in Chile, and if so, why, and if not, also why? Either example would have widened the essay out and provided an interesting contrast or relevant parallel to the central focus of the essay: the evolution of their relationship with Cloyd, which by the end, felt a bit anticlimactic.

Beyond that, I wanted more detail about where they were in Chile. Even mundane experiences like shopping for groceries or interacting with locals become interesting in a new and foreign place because they challenge us and test skill sets we mastered long ago. Writing about how you overcame (or were stymied by) those challenges, and maybe more interestingly, how they made you feel , is a natural jumping off point for writing about where you are: the people, the place, the language, the traditions, the food, anything. Even the weather. So, ultimately for me, though I enjoyed reading it, this piece lacked something essential for it to be placed firmly within the travel writing oeuvre.

“But I occasionally peered over to find Cloyd perched on Marcela’s lap, the two of them looking oddly similar with their black hair, straight backs, and wide eyes fixed on the TV screen.”

3rd Place: “Agnès” by Sarah Raman

I first want to acknowledge that this essay concerns what seems to have been a difficult life experience for the author. I appreciate the work and emotional effort it must have taken to write about it.

This read to me more like a short story than personal travel essay because it focuses almost exclusively on a strained friendship and the location—Paris, one of the world’s most fascinating cities—is so lightly evoked. There are some missed opportunities to bring the reader to France: a quick tutorial on French political controversies when Agnès refers to the yellow vest movement, some insight into traditional French meal planning in the (well-written) scene that peeks into shoppers’ baskets in the bio co-op.

The essay strays further from form with its use of word-for-word dialogue. One or two quotes or memorable exchanges sprinkled in an experience-based essay can really make a section sing or resonate with a reader, but multiple exact quotes almost inevitably begs the question: how did the author remember whole conversations verbatim? Paraphrasing things said to you, that you heard, or that you yourself said, almost always reads as more authentic. As I passed the front desk, the owner asked me if I had an umbrella, saying the forecast had turned. No, no, I told her, I loved walking in the rain. She looked at me skeptically.“Do you, now?” she asked, in a lilting brogue. I knew to expect rainy weather when I decided to hike in the Highlands in October, I said, pointing to my sturdy waterproof boots. She just nodded. I had no idea what I was in for, but she did.

The author makes it clear at the start of the essay that their trip to Paris curdled the instant their old friend expressed some unexpected political and social views. That unbridled disappointment sets a heavy tone for the rest of the piece, one that ultimately ends up weighing it down; there’s nowhere for it to go because there’s no hope for redemption. That’s a bit of a risk if you want readers to keep reading.

There’s also a risk in portraying a woman who has lost her marriage and her home, shares a bed with her daughter in a tiny flat and works at a grocery store, as a sort of caricature. Many heavy-handed passages cast Agnès in a negative light: she refers to her daughter as “a real bitch” and snaps and frowns at her, is “disappointed” no one wants to drink wine with her at lunch, sneaks cigarettes at work, and suggests things with “such finality” the author feels she’s lost her free will. At one point, I felt my sympathies shift to Agnès, which is surely not what the author intended.

I thought the scene on the bus that ends, “I turned my eyes to the window and wondered what she saw” was excellent and wanted more. I wanted the author to go on—why did they feel so tense (e.g., I was appalled by her views and knew I couldn’t separate them from our friendship)? What did Agnès’ spartan flat and bitterness toward their ex teach them about the toll life can take on a person? Or what they learned about why French workers protest the government’s policies, based on their friend’s lived experience? I was sure the author would have interesting things to say—their’s is a sharp and observant voice.

“ I nodded and set to work, reveling in the novelty of the task. Me, at a French grocery store, on a Sunday morning, hard at work! I fixated hard on the brussels sprouts, tuning out the small talk happening around the store. For the first time in twenty-four hours, I found a sense of calm.”

Honorable Mention: “Home” by Narjis Nusaibah

The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.

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By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti

May 16, 2024

This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.

By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.

Listen to this article, read by Jonathan Davis

Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now.

Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.

Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy.

The interviews, along with classified documents written in recent months, reveal a government at war with itself. One document describes a meeting in March, when Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, gave a withering account of the efforts by Bezalel Smotrich — an ultraright leader and the official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank — to undermine law enforcement in the occupied territory. Since Smotrich took office, Fox wrote, the effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled “to the point where it has disappeared.” Moreover, Fox said, Smotrich and his allies were thwarting the very measures to enforce the law that the government had promised Israeli courts it would take.

This is a story, pieced together and told in full for the first time, that leads to the heart of Israel. But it begins in the West Bank, in places like Khirbet Zanuta. From within the village’s empty ruins, there is a clear view across the valley to a tiny Jewish outpost called Meitarim Farm. Built in 2021, the farm has become a base of operations for settler attacks led by Yinon Levi, the farm’s owner. Like so many of the Israeli outposts that have been set up throughout the West Bank in recent years, Meitarim Farm is illegal. It is illegal under international law, which most experts say doesn’t recognize Israeli settlements in occupied land. It is illegal under Israeli law, like most settlements built since the 1990s.

Few efforts are made to stop the building of these outposts or the violence emanating from them. Indeed, one of Levi’s day jobs was running an earthworks company, and he has worked with the Israel Defense Forces to bulldoze at least one Palestinian village in the West Bank. As for the victims of that violence, they face a confounding and defeating system when trying to get relief. Villagers seeking help from the police typically have to file a report in person at an Israeli police station, which in the West Bank are almost exclusively located inside the settlements themselves. After getting through security and to the station, they sometimes wait for hours for an Arabic translator, only to be told they don’t have the right paperwork or sufficient evidence to submit a report. As one senior Israeli military official told us, the police “exhaust Palestinians so they won’t file complaints.”

And yet in November, with no protection from the police or the military, the former residents of Khirbet Zanuta and five nearby villages chose to test whether justice was still possible by appealing directly to Israel’s Supreme Court. In a petition, lawyers for the villagers, from Haqel, an Israeli human rights organization, argued that days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, a raiding party that included settlers and Israeli soldiers assaulted village residents, threatened murder and destroyed property throughout the village. They stated that the raid was part of “a mass transfer of ancient Palestinian communities,” one in which settlers working hand in hand with soldiers are taking advantage of the current war in Gaza to achieve the longer-standing goal of “cleansing” parts of the West Bank, aided by the “sweeping and unprecedented disregard” of the state and its “de facto consent to the massive acts of deportation.”

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and the relief the villagers are seeking — that the law be enforced — might seem modest. But our reporting reveals the degree to which decades of history are stacked against them: After 50 years of crime without punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have become one.

Separate and Unequal

The devastating Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, the ongoing crisis of Israeli hostages and the grinding Israeli invasion and bombardment of the Gaza Strip that followed may have refocused the world’s attention on Israel’s ongoing inability to address the question of Palestinian autonomy. But it is in the West Bank where the corrosive long-term effects of the occupation on Israeli law and democracy are most apparent.

A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the activists as “anarchists.” A spokesman for the Israeli National Police declined to respond to repeated queries about our findings.

The violence and impunity that these cases demonstrate existed long before Oct. 7. In nearly every month before October, the rate of violent incidents was higher than during the same month in the previous year. And Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, looking at more than 1,600 cases of settler violence in the West Bank between 2005 and 2023, found that just 3 percent ended in a conviction. Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000 — speaking out now because of his concern about Israel’s systemic failure to enforce the law — says this singular lack of consequences reflects the indifference of the Israeli leadership going back years. “The cabinet, the prime minister,” he says, “they signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”

Ayalon’s assessment was echoed by many other officials we interviewed. Mark Schwartz, a retired American three-star general, was the top military official working at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021, overseeing international support efforts for the partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “There’s no accountability,” he says now of the long history of settler crimes and heavy-handed Israeli operations in the West Bank. “These things eat away at trust and ultimately the stability and security of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s undeniable.”

How did a young nation turn so quickly on its own democratic ideals, and at what price? Any meaningful answer to these questions has to take into account how a half-century of lawless behavior that went largely unpunished propelled a radical form of ultranationalism to the center of Israeli politics. This is the history that is told here in three parts. In Part I, we describe the origins of a religious movement that established Jewish settlements in the newly won territories of Gaza and the West Bank during the 1970s. In Part II, we recount how the most extreme elements of the settler movement began targeting not only Palestinians but also Israeli leaders who tried to make peace with them. And in Part III, we show how the most established members of Israel’s ultraright, unpunished for their crimes, gained political power in Israel, even as a more radical generation of settlers vowed to eliminate the Israeli state altogether.

Many Israelis who moved to the West Bank did so for reasons other than ideology, and among the settlers, there is a large majority who aren’t involved in violence or other illegal acts against Palestinians. And many within the Israeli government fought to expand the rule of law into the territories, with some success. But they also faced harsh pushback, with sometimes grave personal consequences. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts in the 1990s, on the heels of the First Intifada, to make peace with Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, gave rise to a new generation of Jewish terrorists, and they ultimately cost him his life.

The disagreement over how to handle the occupied territories and their residents has bred a complex and sometimes opaque system of law enforcement. At its heart are two separate and unequal systems of justice: one for Jews and another for Palestinians.

The West Bank is under the command of the I.D.F., which means that Palestinians are subject to a military law that gives the I.D.F. and the Shin Bet considerable authority. They can hold suspects for extended periods without trial or access to either a lawyer or the evidence against them. They can wiretap, conduct secret surveillance, hack into databases and gather intelligence on any Arab living in the occupied territory with few restrictions. Palestinians are subject to military — not civilian — courts, which are far more punitive when it comes to accusations of terrorism and less transparent to outside scrutiny. (In a statement, the I.D.F. said, “The use of administrative detention measures is only carried out in situations where the security authorities have reliable and credible information indicating a real danger posed by the detainee to the region’s security, and in the absence of other alternatives to remove the risk.” It declined to respond to multiple specific queries, in some cases saying “the events are too old to address.”)

According to a senior Israeli defense official, since Oct. 7, some 7,000 settler reservists were called back by the I.D.F., put in uniform, armed and ordered to protect the settlements. They were given specific orders: Do not leave the settlements, do not cover your faces, do not initiate unauthorized roadblocks. But in reality many of them have left the settlements in uniform, wearing masks, setting up roadblocks and harassing Palestinians.

All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.

In this system, even the question of what behavior is being investigated as an act of terror is different for Jews and Arabs. For a Palestinian, the simple admission of identifying with Hamas counts as an act of terrorism that permits Israeli authorities to use severe interrogation methods and long detention. Moreover, most acts of violence by Arabs against Jews are categorized as a “terror” attack — giving Shin Bet and other services license to use the harshest methods at their disposal.

The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet called the Department for Counterintelligence and Prevention of Subversion in the Jewish Sector, known more commonly as the Jewish Department. It is dwarfed both in size and prestige by Shin Bet’s Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism. And in the event, most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause. This system, with its gaps and obstructions, allowed the founders of groups advocating extreme violence during the 1970s and 1980s to act without consequences, and today it has built a protective cocoon around their ideological descendants.

Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands . Just two months earlier, according to news reports at the time, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal Amir.

Now Ben-Gvir was Israel’s national security minister and Smotrich was Israel’s finance minister, charged additionally with overseeing much of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank. In December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet, including a clear statement that the nationalistic ideology of his new allies was now the government’s guiding star. “The Jewish people,” it said, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel.”

Two months after that, two Israeli settlers were murdered in an attack by Hamas gunmen near Huwara, a village in the West Bank. The widespread calls for revenge, common after Palestinian terror attacks, were now coming from within Netanyahu’s new government. Smotrich declared that “the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out.”

And, he added, “I think the State of Israel needs to do it.”

Birth of a Movement

With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the territories animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands.

Gush Emunim followers believed that the coming of the messiah would be hastened if, rather than studying holy books from morning to night, Jews settled the newly occupied territories. This was the land of “Greater Israel,” they believed, and there was a pioneer spirit among the early settlers. They saw themselves as direct descendants of the earliest Zionists, who built farms and kibbutzim near Palestinian villages during the first part of the 20th century, when the land was under British control. But while the Zionism of the earlier period was largely secular and socialist, the new settlers believed they were advancing God’s agenda.

The legality of that agenda was an open question. The Geneva Conventions, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade occupying powers to deport or transfer “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But the status of the territory was, in the view of many within and outside the Israeli government, more complex. The settlers sought to create what some of them called “facts on the ground.” This put them into conflict with both the Palestinians and, at least putatively, the Israeli authorities responsible for preventing the spread of illegal settlements.

Whether or not the government would prove flexible on these matters became clear in April 1975 at Ein Yabrud, an abandoned Jordanian military base near Ofra, in the West Bank. A group of workers had been making the short commute from Israel most days for months to work on rebuilding the base, and one evening they decided to stay. They were aiming to establish a Jewish foothold in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli designation for the territories that make up the West Bank, and they had found a back door that required only the slightest push. Their leader met that same night with Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defense minister, who told the I.D.F. to stand down. Peres would treat the nascent settlement not as a community but as a “work camp” — and the I.D.F. would do nothing to hinder their work.

Peres’s maneuver was partly a sign of the weakness of Israel’s ruling Labor party, which had dominated Israeli politics since the country’s founding. The residual trauma of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 — when Israel was caught completely by surprise by Egyptian and Syrian forces before eventually beating back the invading armies — had shaken citizens’ belief in their leaders, and movements like Gush Emunim, directly challenging the authority of the Israeli state, had gained momentum amid Labor’s decline. This, in turn, energized Israel’s political right.

By the late 1970s, the settlers, bolstered in part by growing political support, were expanding in number. Carmi Gillon, who joined Shin Bet in 1972 and rose by the mid-1990s to become its director, recalls the evolving internal debates. Whose responsibility was it to deal with settlers? Should Israel’s vaunted domestic security service enforce the law in the face of clearly illegal acts of settlement? “When we realized that Gush Emunim had the backing of so many politicians, we knew we shouldn’t touch them,” he said in his first interview for this article in 2016.

One leader of the ultraright movement would prove hard to ignore, however. Meir Kahane, an ultraright rabbi from Flatbush, Brooklyn, had founded the militant Jewish Defense League in 1968 in New York. He made no secret of his belief that violence was sometimes necessary to fulfill his dream of Greater Israel, and he even spoke of plans to buy .22 caliber rifles for Jews to defend themselves. “Our campaign motto will be, ‘Every Jew a .22,’” he declared. In 1971, he received a suspended sentence on bomb-making charges, and at the age of 39 he moved to Israel to start a new life. From a hotel on Zion Square in Jerusalem, he started a school and a political party, what would become Kach, and drew followers with his fiery rhetoric.

Kahane said he wanted to rewrite the stereotype of Jews as victims, and he argued, in often vivid terms, that Zionism and democracy are in fundamental tension. “Zionism came into being to create a Jewish state,” Kahane said in an interview with The Times in 1985, five years before he was assassinated by a gunman in New York. “Zionism declares that there is going to be a Jewish state with a majority of Jews, come what may. Democracy says, ‘No, if the Arabs are the majority then they have the right to decide their own fate.’ So Zionism and democracy are at odds. I say clearly that I stand with Zionism.”

A Buried Report

In 1977, the Likud party led a coalition that, for the first time in Israeli history, secured a right-wing majority in the country’s Parliament, the Knesset. The party was headed by Menachem Begin, a veteran of the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that carried out attacks against Arabs and British authorities in Mandatory Palestine, the British colonial entity that preceded the creation of Israel. Likud — Hebrew for “the alliance” — was itself an amalgam of several political parties. Kach itself was still on the outside and would always remain so. But its radical ideas and ambitions were moving closer to the mainstream.

Likud’s victory came 10 years after the war that brought Israel vast amounts of new land, but the issue of what to do with the occupied territories had yet to be resolved. As the new prime minister, Begin knew that addressing that question would mean addressing the settlements. Could there be a legal basis for taking the land? Something that would allow the settlements to expand with the full support of the state?

It was Plia Albeck, then a largely unknown bureaucrat in the Israeli Justice Ministry, who found Begin’s answer. Searching through the regulations of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine in the years preceding the British Mandate, she lit upon the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, a major effort at land reform. Among other provisions, the law enabled the sultan to seize any land that had not been cultivated by its owners for a number of years and that was not “within shouting distance” of the last house in the village. It did little to address the provisions of the Geneva Convention, but it was, for her department, precedent enough. Soon Albeck was riding in an army helicopter, mapping the West Bank and identifying plots of land that might meet the criteria of the Ottoman law. The Israeli state had replaced the sultan, but the effect was the same. Albeck’s creative legal interpretation led to the creation of more than 100 new Jewish settlements, which she referred to as “my children.”

At the same time, Begin was quietly brokering a peace deal with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the United States at Camp David. The pact they eventually negotiated gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt and promised greater autonomy to Palestinians in the occupied territories in return for normalized relations with Israel. It would eventually win the two leaders a joint Nobel Peace Prize. But Gush Emunim and other right-wing groups saw the accords as a shocking reversal. From this well of anger sprang a new campaign of intimidation. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the leaders of Gush Emunim and the founder of the settlement in the heart of Hebron, declared the movement’s purposes on Israeli television. The Arabs, he said, “must not be allowed to raise their heads.”

Leading this effort would be a militarized offshoot of Gush Emunim called the Jewish Underground. The first taste of what was to come arrived on June 2, 1980. Car bombs exploded as part of a complex assassination plot against prominent Palestinian political figures in the West Bank. The attack blew the legs off Bassam Shaka, the mayor of Nablus; Karim Khalaf, the mayor of Ramallah, was forced to have his foot amputated. Kahane, who in the days before the attack said at a news conference that the Israeli government should form a “Jewish terrorist group” that would “throw bombs and grenades to kill Arabs,” applauded the attacks, as did Rabbi Haim Druckman, a leader of Gush Emunim then serving in the Knesset, and many others within and outside the movement. Brig. Gen. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, then the top I.D.F. commander in the West Bank, noting the injuries suffered by the Palestinian mayors under his watch, said simply, “It’s a shame they didn’t hit them a bit higher.” An investigation began, but it would be years before it achieved any results. Ben-Eliezer went on to become a leader of the Labor party and defense minister.

The threat that the unchecked attacks posed to the institutions and guardrails of Jewish democracy wasn’t lost on some members of the Israeli elite. As the violence spread, a group of professors at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem sent a letter to Yitzhak Zamir, Israel’s attorney general. They were concerned, they wrote, that illegal “private policing activity” against the Palestinians living in the occupied territories presented a “threat to the rule of law in the country.” The professors saw possible collusion between the settlers and the authorities. “There is a suspicion that similar crimes are not being handled in the same manner and some criminals are receiving preferential treatment over others,” the signatories to the letter said. “This suspicion requires fundamental examination.”

The letter shook Zamir, who knew some of the professors well. He was also well aware that evidence of selective law enforcement — one law for the Palestinians and another for the settlers — would rebut the Israeli government’s claim that the law was enforced equally and could become both a domestic scandal and an international one. Zamir asked Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties, to lead a committee looking into the issue. Karp was responsible for handling the most delicate issues facing the Justice Ministry, but this would require even greater discretion than usual.

As her team investigated, Karp says, “it very quickly became clear to me that what was described in the letter was nothing compared to the actual reality on the ground.” She and her investigative committee found case after case of trespassing, extortion, assault and murder, even as the military authorities and the police did nothing or performed notional investigations that went nowhere. “The police and the I.D.F. in both action and inaction were really cooperating with the settler vandals,” Karp says. “They operated as if they had no interest in investigating when there were complaints, and generally did everything they could to deter the Palestinians from even submitting them.”

In May 1982, Karp and her committee submitted a 33-page report, determining that dozens of offenses were investigated insufficiently. The committee also noted that, in their research, the police had provided them with information that was incomplete, contradictory and in part false. They concluded that nearly half the investigations opened against settlers were closed without the police conducting even a rudimentary investigation. In the few cases in which they did investigate, the committee found “profound flaws.” In some cases, the police witnessed the crimes and did nothing. In others, soldiers were willing to testify against the settlers, but their testimonies and other evidence were buried.

It soon became clear to Karp that the government was going to bury the report. “We were very naïve,” she now recalls. Zamir had been assured, she says, that the cabinet would discuss the grave findings and had in fact demanded total confidentiality. The minister of the interior at the time, Yosef Burg, invited Karp to his home for what she recalls him describing as “a personal conversation.” Burg, a leader of the pro-settler National Religious Party, had by then served as a government minister in one office or another for more than 30 years. Karp assumed he wanted to learn more about her work, which could in theory have important repercussions for the religious right. “But, to my astonishment,” she says, “he simply began to scold me in harsh language about what we were doing. I understood that he wanted us to drop it.”

Karp announced she was quitting the investigative committee. “The situation we discovered was one of complete helplessness,” she says. When the existence of the report (but not its contents) leaked to the public, Burg denied having ever seen such an investigation. When the full contents of the report were finally made public in 1984, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry said only that the committee had been dissolved and that the ministry was no longer monitoring the problem.

A Wave of Violence

On April 11, 1982, a uniformed I.D.F. soldier named Alan Harry Goodman shot his way into the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, one of the most sacred sites for Muslims around the world. Carrying an M16 rifle, standard issue in the Israeli Army, he killed two Arabs and wounded many more. When investigators searched Goodman’s apartment, they found fliers for Kach, but a spokesman for the group said that it did not condone the attack. Prime Minister Begin condemned the attack, but he also chastised Islamic leaders calling for a general strike in response, which he saw as an attempt to “exploit the tragedy.”

The next year, masked Jewish Underground terrorists opened fire on students at the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three people and injuring 33 more. Israeli authorities condemned the massacre but were less clear about who would be held to account. Gen. Ori Orr, commander of Israeli forces in the region, said on the radio that all avenues would be pursued. But, he added, “we don’t have any description, and we don’t know who we are looking for.”

The Jewish Department found itself continually behind in its efforts to address the onslaught. In April 1984, it had a major breakthrough: Its agents foiled a Jewish Underground plan to blow up five buses full of Palestinians, and they arrested around two dozen Jewish Underground members who had also played roles in the Islamic College attack and the bombings of the Palestinian mayors in 1980. But only after weeks of interrogating the suspects did Shin Bet learn that the Jewish Underground had been developing a scheme to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque. The planning involved dozens of intelligence-gathering trips to the Temple Mount and an assessment of the exact amount of explosives that would be needed and where to place them. The goal was nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the messiah.

Carmi Gillon, who was head of Shin Bet’s Jewish Department at the time, says the fact that Shin Bet hadn’t learned about a plot involving so many people and such ambitious planning earlier was an “egregious intelligence failure.” And it was not the Shin Bet, he notes, who prevented the plot from coming to fruition. It was the Jewish Underground itself. “Fortunately for all of us, they decided to forgo the plan because they felt the Jewish people were not yet ready.”

“You have to understand why all this is important now,” Ami Ayalon said, leaning in for emphasis. The sun shining into the backyard of the former Shin Bet director was gleaming off his bald scalp, illuminating a face that looked as if it were sculpted by a dull kitchen knife. “We are not discussing Jewish terrorism. We are discussing the failure of Israel.”

Ayalon was protective of his former service, insisting that Shin Bet, despite some failures, usually has the intelligence and resources to deter and prosecute right-wing terrorism in Israel. And, he said, they usually have the will. “The question is why they are not doing anything about it,” he said. “And the answer is very simple. They cannot confront our courts. And the legal community finds it almost impossible to face the political community, which is supported by the street. So everything starts with the street.”

By the early 1980s, the settler movement had begun to gain some traction within the Knesset, but it remained far from the mainstream. When Kahane himself was elected to the Knesset in 1984, the members of the other parties, including Likud, would turn and leave the room when he stood up to deliver speeches. One issue was that the continual expansion of the settlements was becoming an irritant in U.S.-Israel relations. During a 1982 trip by Begin to Washington, the prime minister had a closed-door meeting with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to discuss Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year, an effort to force out the P.L.O. that had been heavy with civilian casualties. According to The Times’s coverage of the session, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, then in his second term, had an angry exchange with Begin about the West Bank, telling him that Israel was losing support in this country because of the settlements policy.

But Israeli officials came to understand that the Americans were generally content to vent their anger about the issue without taking more forceful action — like restricting military aid to Israel, which was then, as now, central to the country’s security arrangements. After the Jewish Underground plotters of the bombings targeting the West Bank mayors and other attacks were finally brought to trial in 1984, they were found guilty and given sentences ranging from a few months to life in prison. The plotters showed little remorse, though, and a public campaign swelled to have them pardoned. Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir also made the case for pardoning them, saying they were “excellent, good people who have erred in their path and actions.” Clemency, Shamir suggested, would prevent a recurrence of Jewish terrorism.

In the end, President Chaim Herzog, against the recommendations of Shin Bet and the Justice Ministry, signed an extraordinary series of pardons and commutations for the plotters. They were released and greeted as heroes by the settler community, and some rose to prominent positions in government and the Israeli media. One of them, Uzi Sharbav, now a leader in the settlement movement, was a speaker at a recent conference promoting the return of settlers to Gaza.

In fact, nearly all the Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial reductions in prison time. Gillon, the head of the Jewish Department when some of these people were arrested, recalls the “profound sense of injustice” that he felt when they were released. But even more important, he says, was “the question of what message the pardons convey to the public and to anyone who ever thinks about carrying out acts of terror against Arabs.”

Operational Failures

In 1987, a series of conflicts in Gaza led to a sustained Palestinian uprising throughout the occupied territories and Israel. The First Intifada, as it became known, was driven by anger over the occupation, which was then entering its third decade. It would simmer for the next six years, as Palestinians attacked Israelis with stones and Molotov cocktails and launched a series of strikes and boycotts. Israel deployed thousands of soldiers to quell the uprising.

In the occupied territories, reprisal attacks between settlers and Palestinians were an increasing problem. The Gush Emunim movement had spread and fractured into different groups, making it difficult for Shin Bet to embed enough informants with the settlers. But the service had one key informant — a man given the code name Shaul. He was a trusted figure among the settlers and rose to become a close assistant to Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the Gush Emunim leader who founded the settlement in Hebron.

Levinger had been questioned many times under suspicion of having a role in multiple violent attacks, but Shaul told Shin Bet operatives that they were seeing only a fraction of the whole picture. He told them about raids past and planned; about the settlers tearing through Arab villages, vandalizing homes, burning dozens of cars. The operatives ordered him to participate in these raids to strengthen his cover. One newspaper photographer in Hebron in 1985 captured Shaul smashing the wall of an Arab marketplace with a sledgehammer. As was standard policy, Shin Bet had ordered him to participate in any activity that didn’t involve harm to human life, but figuring out which of the activities wouldn’t cross that line became increasingly difficult. “The majority of the activists were lunatics, riffraff, and it was very difficult to be sure they wouldn’t hurt people and would harm only property,” Shaul said. (Shaul, whose true identity remains secret, provided these quotes in a 2015 interview with Bergman for the Israeli Hebrew-language paper Yedioth Ahronoth. Some of his account is published here for the first time.)

In September 1988, Rabbi Levinger, Shaul’s patron, was driving through Hebron when, he later said in court, Palestinians began throwing stones at his car and surrounding him. Levinger flashed a pistol and began firing wildly at nearby shops. Investigators said he killed a 42-year-old shopkeeper, Khayed Salah, who had been closing the steel shutter of his shoe store, and injured a second man. Levinger claimed self-defense, but he was hardly remorseful. “I know that I am innocent,” he said at the trial, “and that I didn’t have the honor of killing the Arab.”

Prosecutors cut a deal with Levinger. He was convicted of criminally negligent homicide, sentenced to five months in prison and released after only three.

Shin Bet faced the classic intelligence agency’s dilemma: how and when to let its informants participate in the very violent acts the service was supposed to be stopping. There was some logic in Shin Bet’s approach with Shaul, but it certainly didn’t help deter acts of terror in the West Bank, especially with little police presence in the occupied territories and a powerful interest group ensuring that whoever was charged for the violence was released with a light sentence.

Over his many years as a Shin Bet mole, Shaul said, he saw numerous intelligence and operational failures by the agency. One of the worst, he said, was the December 1993 murder of three Palestinians in an act of vengeance after the murder of a settler leader and his son. Driving home from a day of work in Israel, the three Palestinians, who had no connection to the deaths of the settlers, were pulled from their car and killed near the West Bank town Tarqumiyah.

Shaul recalled how one settler activist proudly told him that he and two friends committed the murders. He contacted his Shin Bet handlers to tell them what he had heard. “And suddenly I saw they were losing interest,” Shaul said. It was only later that he learned why: Two of the shooters were Shin Bet informants. The service didn’t want to blow their cover, or worse, to suffer the scandal that two of its operatives were involved in a murder and a cover-up.

In a statement, Shin Bet said that Shaul’s version of events is “rife with incorrect details” but refused to specify which details were incorrect. Neither the state prosecutor nor the attorney general responded to requests for comment, which included Shaul’s full version of events and additional evidence gathered over the years.

Shaul said he also gave numerous reports to his handlers about the activities of yet another Brooklyn-born follower of Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League: Dr. Baruch Goldstein. He earned his medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and in 1983 immigrated to Israel, where he worked first as a physician in the I.D.F., then as an emergency doctor at Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron.

In the years that passed, he gained the attention of Shin Bet with his eliminationist views, calling Arabs “latter-day Nazis” and making a point to visit the Jewish terrorist Ami Popper in prison, where he was serving a sentence for the 1990 murder of seven Palestinians in the Tel Aviv suburb Rishon LeZion. Shaul said he regarded Goldstein at the time as a “charismatic and highly dangerous figure” and repeatedly urged the Shin Bet to monitor him. “They told me it was none of my business,” he said.

‘Clean Hands’

On Feb. 24, 1994, Goldstein abruptly fired his personal driver. According to Shaul, Goldstein told the driver that he knew he was a Shin Bet informer. Terrified at having been found out, the driver fled the West Bank immediately. Now Goldstein was moving unobserved.

That evening marked the beginning of Purim, the festive commemoration of the victory of the Jews over Haman the Agagite, a court official in the Persian Empire and the nemesis of the Jews in the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. Right-wing Israelis have often drawn parallels between Haman and Arabs — enemies who seek the annihilation of Jews. Goldstein woke early the next day and put on his I.D.F. uniform, and at 5:20 a.m. he entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, an ancient complex in Hebron that serves as a place of worship for both Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried with him his I.D.F.-issued Galil rifle. It was also the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and on that morning hundreds of Muslims crowded the hall in prayer. Goldstein faced the worshipers and began shooting , firing 108 rounds before he was dragged down and beaten to death. The massacre killed 29 Muslim worshipers and injured more than 100.

The killings shocked Israel, and the government responded with a crackdown on extremism. Kach and Kahane Chai, the two political organizations most closely affiliated with the Kahanist movement, were outlawed and labeled terrorist groups, as was any other party that called for “the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land.” Rabin, in an address to the Knesset, spoke directly to the followers of Goldstein and Kahane, who he said were the product of a malicious foreign influence on Israel. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” he said. “You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”

Following the massacre, a state commission of inquiry was appointed, headed by Judge Meir Shamgar, the president of the Supreme Court. The commission’s report, made public in June 1994, strongly criticized the security arrangements at the Cave of the Patriarchs and examined law-enforcement practices regarding settlers and the extreme right in general. A secret appendix to the report, containing material deemed too sensitive for public consumption, included a December 1992 letter from the Israeli commissioner of police, essentially admitting that the police could not enforce the law. “The situation in the districts is extremely bleak,” he wrote, using the administrative nomenclature for the occupied territories. “The ability of the police to function is far from the required minimum. This is as a result of the lack of essential resources.”

In its conclusions, the commission, tracing the lines of the previous decade’s Karp report, confirmed claims that human rights organizations had made for years but that had been ignored by the Israeli establishment. The commission found that Israeli law enforcement was “ineffective in handling complaints,” that it delayed the filing of indictments and that restraining orders against “chronic” criminals among the “hard core” of the settlers were rarely issued.

The I.D.F. refused to allow Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel with “clean hands and a pure heart.”

A Curse of Death

One ultranationalist settler who went regularly to Goldstein’s grave was a teenage radical named Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would sometimes gather other followers there on Purim to celebrate the slain killer. Purim revelers often dress in costume, and on one such occasion, caught on video, Ben-Gvir even wore a Goldstein costume, complete with a fake beard and a stethoscope. By then, Ben-Gvir had already come to the attention of the Jewish Department, and investigators interrogated him several times. The military declined to enlist him into the service expected of most Israeli citizens.

After the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a new generation of Kahanists directed their anger squarely at Rabin for his signing of the Oslo agreement and for depriving them, in their view, of their birthright. “From my standpoint, Goldstein’s action was a wake-up call,” says Hezi Kalo, a longtime senior Shin Bet official who oversaw the division that included the Jewish Department at that time. “I realized that this was going to be a very big story, that the diplomatic moves by the Rabin government would simply not pass by without the shedding of blood.”

The government of Israel was finally paying attention to the threat, and parts of the government acted to deal with it. Shin Bet increased the size of the Jewish Department, and it began to issue a new kind of warning: Jewish terrorists no longer threatened only Arabs. They threatened Jews.

The warnings noted that rabbis in West Bank settlements, along with some politicians on the right, were now openly advocating violence against Israeli public officials, especially Rabin. Extremist rabbis issued rulings of Jewish law against Rabin — imposing a curse of death, a Pulsa Dinura , and providing justification for killing him, a din rodef .

Carmi Gillon by then had moved on from running the Jewish Department and now had the top job at Shin Bet. “Discussing and acknowledging such halakhic laws was tantamount to a license to kill,” he says now, looking back. He was particularly concerned about Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, who were stoking the fury of the right-wing rabbis and settler leaders in their battles with Rabin.

Shin Bet wanted to prosecute rabbis who approved the religiously motivated death sentences against Rabin, but the state attorney’s office refused. “They didn’t give enough importance back then to the link between incitement and legitimacy for terrorism,” says one former prosecutor who worked in the state attorney’s office in the mid-1990s.

Shin Bet issued warning after warning in 1995. “This was no longer a matter of mere incitement, but rather concrete information on the intention to kill top political figures, including Rabin,” Kalo now recalls. In October of that year, Ben-Gvir spoke to Israeli television cameras holding up a Cadillac hood ornament, which he boasted he had broken off the prime minister’s official car during chaotic anti-Oslo demonstrations in front of the Knesset. “We got to his car,” he said, “and we’ll get to him, too.” The following month, Rabin was dead.

Conspiracies

Yigal Amir, the man who shot and killed Rabin in Tel Aviv after a rally in support of the Oslo Accords on Nov. 4, 1995, was not unknown to the Jewish Department. A 25-year-old studying law, computer science and the Torah at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, he had been radicalized by Rabin’s efforts to make peace with Palestinian leaders and had connections to Avishai Raviv, the leader of Eyal, a new far-right group loosely affiliated with the Kach movement. In fact, Raviv was a Shin Bet informant, code-named Champagne. He had heard Amir talking about the justice of the din rodef judgments, but he did not identify him to his handlers as an immediate danger. “No one took Yigal seriously,” he said later in a court proceeding. “It’s common in our circles to talk about attacking public figures.”

Lior Akerman was the first Shin Bet investigator to interrogate Amir at the detention center where he was being held after the assassination. There was of course no question about his guilt. But there was the broader question of conspiracy. Did Amir have accomplices? Did they have further plans? Akerman now recalls asking Amir how he could reconcile his belief in God with his decision to murder the prime minister of Israel. Amir, he says, told him that rabbis had justified harming the prime minister in order to protect Israel.

Amir was smug, Akerman recalls, and he did not respond directly to the question of accomplices. “‘Listen,” he said, according to Akerman, “I succeeded . I was able to do something that many people wanted but no one dared to do. I fired a gun that many Jews held, but I squeezed the trigger because no one else had the courage to do it.”

The Shin Bet investigators demanded to know the identities of the rabbis. Amir was coy at first, but eventually the interrogators drew enough out of him to identify at least two of them. Kalo, the head of the division that oversaw the Jewish Department, went to the attorney general to argue that the rabbis should be detained immediately and prosecuted for incitement to murder. But the attorney general disagreed, saying the rabbis’ encouragement was protected speech and couldn’t be directly linked to the murder. No rabbis were arrested.

Days later, however, the police brought Raviv — the Shin Bet operative known as Champagne — into custody in a Tel Aviv Magistrate Court, on charges that he had conspired to kill Rabin, but he was released shortly after. Raviv’s role as an informant later came to light, and in 1999, he was arrested for his failure to act on previous knowledge of the assassination. He was acquitted on all charges, but he has since become a fixture of extremist conspiracy theories that pose his failure to ring the alarm as evidence that the murder of the prime minister was due not to the violent rhetoric of the settler right, or the death sentences from the rabbis, or the incitement by the leaders of the opposition, but to the all-too-successful efforts of a Shin Bet agent provocateur. A more complicated and insidious conspiracy theory, but no less false, was that it was Shin Bet itself that assassinated Rabin or allowed the assassination to happen.

Gillon, the head of the service at the time, resigned, and ongoing inquiries, charges and countercharges would continue for years. Until Oct. 7, 2023, the killing of the prime minister was considered the greatest failure in the history of Shin Bet. Kalo tried to sum up what went wrong with Israeli security. “The only answer my friends and I could give for the failure was complacency,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir. “They simply couldn’t believe that such a thing could happen, definitely not at the hands of another Jew.”

The Sasson Report

In 2001, as the Second Intifada unleashed a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, Ariel Sharon took office as prime minister. The struggling peace process had come to a complete halt amid the violence, and Sharon’s rise at first appeared to mark another victory for the settlers. But in 2003, in one of the more surprising reversals in Israeli political history, Sharon announced what he called Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza, with a plan to remove settlers — forcibly if necessary — over the next two years.

The motivations were complex and the subject of considerable debate. For Sharon, at least, it appeared to be a tactical move. “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” his senior adviser Dov Weisglass told Haaretz at the time. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” But Sharon was also facing considerable pressure from President George W. Bush to do something about the ever-expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank, which were a growing impediment to any regional security deals. In July 2004, he asked Talia Sasson, who had recently retired as the head of the special tasks division in the state attorney’s office, to draw up a legal opinion on the subject of “unauthorized outposts” in the West Bank. His instructions were clear: Investigate which Israeli government agencies and authorities were secretly involved in building the outposts. “Sharon never interfered in my work, and neither was he surprised by the conclusions,” Sasson said in an interview two decades later. “After all, he knew better than anyone what the situation was on the ground, and he was expecting only grave conclusions.”

It was a simple enough question: Just how had it happened that hundreds of outposts had been built in the decade since Yitzhak Rabin ordered a halt in most new settlements? But Sasson’s effort to find an answer was met with delays, avoidance and outright lies. Her final report used careful but pointed language: “Not everyone I turned to agreed to talk with me. One claimed he was too busy to meet, while another came to the meeting but refused to meaningfully engage with most of my questions.”

Sasson found that between January 2000 and June 2003, a division of Israel’s Construction and Housing Ministry issued 77 contracts for the establishment of 33 sites in the West Bank, all of which were illegal. In some cases, the ministry even paid for the paving of roads and the construction of buildings at settlements for which the Defense Ministry had issued demolition orders.

Several government ministries concealed the fact that funds were being diverted to the West Bank, reporting them under budgetary clauses such as “miscellaneous general development.” Just as in the case of the Karp Report two decades earlier, Sasson and her Justice Ministry colleagues discovered that the West Bank was being administered under completely separate laws, and those laws, she says, “appeared to me utterly insane.”

Sasson’s report took special note of Avi Maoz, who ran the Construction and Housing Ministry during most of this period. A political activist who early in his career spoke openly of pushing all Arabs out of the West Bank, Maoz helped found a settlement south of Jerusalem during the 1990s and began building a professional alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and would soon go on to his first term as prime minister. Years later, Maoz would be instrumental in ensuring Netanyahu’s political survival.

“The picture that emerges in the eye of the beholder is severe,” Sasson wrote in her report. “Instead of the government of Israel deciding on the establishment of settlements in the territories of Judea and Samaria, its place has been taken, from the mid-1990s and onward, by others.” The settlers, she wrote, were “the moving force,” but they could not have succeeded without the assistance of “various ministers of construction and housing in the relevant periods, some of them with a blind eye, and some of them with support and encouragement.”

This clandestine network was operating, Sasson wrote, “with massive funding from the State of Israel, without appropriate public transparency, without obligatory criteria. The erection of the unauthorized outposts is being done with violation of the proper procedures and general administrative rules, and in particular, flagrant and ongoing violation of the law.” These violations, Sasson warned, were coming from the government: “It was state and public agencies that broke the law, the rules, the procedures that the state itself had determined.” It was a conflict, she argued, that effectively neutered Israel’s internal checks and balances and posed a grave threat to the nation’s integrity. “The law-enforcement agencies are unable to act against government departments that are themselves breaking the law.”

But, in an echo of Judith Karp’s secret report decades earlier, the Sasson Report, made publicly available in March 2005, had almost no impact. Because she had a mandate directly from the prime minister, Sasson could have believed that her investigation might lead to the dismantling of the illegal outposts that had metastasized throughout the Palestinian territories. But even Sharon, with his high office, found himself powerless against the machine now in place to protect and expand the settlements in the West Bank — the very machine he had helped to build.

All of this was against the backdrop of the Gaza pullout. Sharon, who began overseeing the removal of settlements from Gaza in August 2005, was the third Israeli prime minister to threaten the settler dream of a Greater Israel, and the effort drew bitter opposition not only from the settlers but also from a growing part of the political establishment. Netanyahu, who had served his first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, and who previously voted in favor of a pullout, resigned his position as finance minister in Sharon’s cabinet in protest — and in anticipation of another run for the top job.

The settlers themselves took more active measures. In 2005, the Jewish Department of Shin Bet received intelligence about a plot to slow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by using 700 liters of gasoline to blow up vehicles on a major highway. Acting on the tip, officers arrested six men in central Israel. One of them was Bezalel Smotrich, the future minister overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank.

Smotrich, then 25, was detained and questioned for weeks. Yitzhak Ilan, one of the Shin Bet officers present at the interrogation, says he remained “silent as a fish” throughout — “like an experienced criminal.” He was released without charges, Ilan says, in part because Shin Bet knew putting him on trial might expose the service’s agents inside Jewish extremist groups, and in part because they believed Smotrich was likely to receive little punishment in any case. Shin Bet was very comfortable with the courts when we fought Palestinian terrorism and we got the heavy punishments we wanted, he says. With the Jewish terrorists it was exactly the opposite.

When Netanyahu made his triumphant return as prime minister in 2009, he set out to undermine Talia Sasson’s report, which he and his allies saw as an obstacle to accelerating the settlement campaign. He appointed his own investigative committee, led by Judge Edmond Levy of the Supreme Court, who was known to support the settler cause. But the Levy report, completed in 2012, did not undermine the findings in the Sasson Report — in some ways, it reinforced them. Senior Israeli officials, the committee found, were fully aware of what was happening in the territories, and they were simply denying it for the sake of political expediency. The behavior, they wrote, was not befitting of “a country that has proclaimed the rule of law as a goal.” Netanyahu moved on.

A NEW GENERATION

The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.

Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth “genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for Israel’s future.”

A former member of Hilltop Youth, who has asked to remain anonymous because she fears speaking out could endanger her, recalls how she and her friends used an illegal outpost on a hilltop in the West Bank as a base to lob stones at Palestinian cars. “The Palestinians would call the police, and we would know that we have at least 30 minutes before they arrive, if they arrive. And if they do arrive, they won’t arrest anyone. We did this tens of times.” The West Bank police, she says, couldn’t have been less interested in investigating the violence. “When I was young, I thought that I was outsmarting the police because I was clever. Later, I found out that they are either not trying or very stupid.”

The former Hilltop Youth member says she began pulling away from the group as their tactics became more extreme and once Ettinger began speaking openly about murdering Palestinians. She offered to become a police informant, and during a meeting with police intelligence officers in 2015, she described the group’s plans to commit murder — and to harm any Jews that stood in their way. By her account, she told the police about efforts to scout the homes of Palestinians before settling on a target. The police could have begun an investigation, she says, but they weren’t even curious enough to ask her the names of the people plotting the attack.

In 2013, Ettinger and other members of Hilltop Youth formed a secret cell calling itself the Revolt, designed to instigate an insurrection against a government that “prevents us from building the temple, which blocks our way to true and complete redemption.”

During a search of one of the group’s safe houses, Shin Bet investigators discovered the Revolt’s founding documents. “The State of Israel has no right to exist, and therefore we are not bound by the rules of the game,” one declared. The documents called for an end to the State of Israel and made it clear that in the new state that would rise in its place, there would be absolutely no room for non-Jews and for Arabs in particular: “If those non-Jews don’t leave, it will be permissible to kill them, without distinguishing between women, men and children.”

This wasn’t just idle talk. Ettinger and his comrades organized a plan that included timetables and steps to be taken at each stage. One member even composed a training manual with instructions on how to form terror cells and burn down houses. “In order to prevent the residents from escaping,” the manual advised, “you can leave burning tires in the entrance to the house.”

The Revolt carried out an early attack in February 2014, firebombing an uninhabited home in a small Arab village in the West Bank called Silwad, and followed with more arson attacks, the uprooting of olive groves and the destruction of Palestinian granaries. Members of the group torched mosques, monasteries and churches, including the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. A police officer spotted Ettinger himself attacking a herd of sheep belonging to an Arab shepherd. He stoned a sheep and then slaughtered it in front of the shepherd, the officer later testified. “It was shocking,” he said. “There was a sort of insanity in it.”

Shin Bet defined the Revolt as an organization that aimed “to undermine the stability of the State of Israel through terror and violence, including bodily harm and bloodshed,” according to an internal Shin Bet memo, and sought to place several of its members, including Ettinger, under administrative detention — a measure applied frequently against Arabs.

The state attorney, however, did not approve the request. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented 323 incidents of violence by settlers against Palestinians in 2014; Palestinians were injured in 107 of these incidents. By the following year, the Revolt escalated the violence by openly advocating the murder of Arabs.

The Shin Bet and the police identified one of the prominent members of the Revolt, Amiram Ben-Uliel, making him a target of surveillance. But the service failed to prevent the wave of violence that he unleashed. On the night of July 31, 2015, Ben-Uliel set out on a killing spree in a central West Bank village called Duma. Ben-Uliel prepared a bag with two bottles of incendiary liquid, rags, a lighter, a box of matches, gloves and black spray paint. According to the indictment against him, Ben-Uliel sought a home with clear signs of life to ensure that the house he torched was not abandoned. He eventually found the home of Reham and Sa’ad Dawabsheh, a young mother and father. He opened a window and threw a Molotov cocktail into the home. He fled, and in the blaze that followed, the parents suffered injuries that eventually killed them. Their older son, Ahmad, survived the attack, but their 18-month-old toddler, Ali, was burned to death.

It was always clear, says Akerman, the former Shin Bet official, “that those wild groups would move from bullying Arabs to damaging property and trees and eventually would murder people.” He is still furious about how the service has handled Jewish terrorism. “Shin Bet knows how to deal with such groups, using emergency orders, administrative detention and special methods in interrogation until they break,” he says. But although it was perfectly willing to apply those methods to investigating Arab terrorism, the service was more restrained when it came to Jews. “It allowed them to incite, and then they moved on to the next stage and began to torch mosques and churches. Still undeterred, they entered Duma and burned a family.”

Shin Bet at first claimed to have difficulty locating the killers, even though they were all supposed to be under constant surveillance. When Ben-Uliel and other perpetrators were finally arrested, right-wing politicians gave fiery speeches against Shin Bet and met with the families of the perpetrators to show their support. Ben-Uliel was sentenced to life in prison, and Ettinger was finally put in administrative detention, but a fracture was spreading. In December 2015, Hilltop Youth members circulated a video clip showing members of the Revolt ecstatically dancing with rifles and pistols, belting out songs of hatred for Arabs, with one of them stabbing and burning a photograph of the murdered toddler, Ali Dawabsheh. Netanyahu, for his part, denounced the video, which, he said, exposed “the real face of a group that poses danger to Israeli society and security.”

American Friends

The expansion of the settlements had long been an irritant in Israel’s relationship with the United States, with American officials spending years dutifully warning Netanyahu both in public and in private meetings about his support for the enterprise. But the election of Donald Trump in 2016 ended all that. His new administration’s Israel policy was led mostly by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had a long personal relationship with Netanyahu, a friend of his father’s who had stayed at their family home in New Jersey. Trump, in a broader regional agenda that lined up perfectly with Netanyahu’s own plans, also hoped to scuttle the nuclear deal with Iran that Barack Obama had negotiated and broker diplomatic pacts between Israel and Arab nations that left the matter of a Palestinian state unresolved and off the table.

If there were any questions about the new administration’s position on settlements, they were answered once Trump picked his ambassador to Israel. His choice, David Friedman, was a bankruptcy lawyer who for years had helped run an American nonprofit that raised millions of dollars for Beit El, one of the early Gush Emunim settlements in the West Bank and the place where Bezalel Smotrich was raised and educated. The organization, which was also supported by the Trump family, had helped fund schools and other institutions inside Beit El. On the heels of the Trump transition, Friedman referred to Israel’s “alleged occupation” of Palestinian territories and broke with longstanding U.S. policy by saying “the settlements are part of Israel.”

This didn’t make Friedman a particularly friendly recipient of the warnings regularly delivered by Lt. Gen. Mark Schwartz, the three-star general who in 2019 arrived at the embassy in Jerusalem to coordinate security between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. A career Green Beret who had combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and served as deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, the military task force with authority over U.S. counterterrorism special missions units, Schwartz wasn’t short on Middle East experience.

But he was immediately shocked by the landscape of the West Bank: settlers acting with impunity, a police force that was essentially nonexistent outside the settlements and the Israeli Army fanning the tensions with its own operations. Schwartz recalls how angry he was about what he called the army’s “collective punishment” tactics, including the razing of Palestinian homes, which he viewed as gratuitous and counterproductive. “I said, ‘Guys, this isn’t how professional militaries act.’” As Schwartz saw it, the West Bank was in some ways the American South of the 1960s. But at any moment the situation could become even more volatile, resulting in the next intifada.

Schwartz is diplomatic when recalling his interactions with Friedman, his former boss. He was a “good listener,” Schwartz says, but when he raised concerns about the settlements, Friedman would often deflect by noting “the lack of appreciation by the Palestinian people about what the Americans are doing for them.” Schwartz also discussed his concerns about settler violence directly with Shin Bet and I.D.F. officials, he says, but as far as he could tell, Friedman didn’t follow up with the political leadership. “I never got the sense he went to Netanyahu to discuss it.”

Friedman sees things differently. “I think I had a far broader perspective on acts of violence in Judea and Samaria” than Schwartz, he says now. “And it was clear that the violence coming from Palestinians against Israelis overwhelmingly was more prevalent.” He says he “wasn’t concerned about ‘appreciation’ from the Palestinians; I was concerned by their leadership’s embrace of terror and unwillingness to control violence.” He declined to discuss any conversations he had with Israeli officials.

Weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Israel for a trip that delivered a number of gifts to Netanyahu and the settler cause. He announced new guidelines requiring that goods imported to the United States from parts of the West Bank be labeled “Made in Israel.” And he flew by helicopter to Psagot, a winery in the West Bank, making him the first American secretary of state to visit a settlement. One of the winery’s large shareholders, the Florida-based Falic family, have donated millions to various projects in the settlements.

During his lunchtime visit, Pompeo paused to write a note in the winery’s guest book. “May I not be the last secretary of state to visit this beautiful land,” he wrote.

A Settler Coalition

Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to become prime minister for an unprecedented sixth term came with a price: an alliance with a movement that he once shunned, but that had been brought into the political mainstream by Israel’s steady drift to the right. Netanyahu, who is now on trial for bribery and other corruption charges, repeatedly failed in his attempts to form a coalition after most of the parties announced that they were no longer willing to join him. He personally involved himself in negotiations to ally Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party, making them kingmakers for anyone trying to form a coalition government. In November 2022, the bet paid off: With the now-critical support of the extreme right, Netanyahu returned to office.

The two men ushered into power by this arrangement were some of the most extreme figures ever to hold such high positions in an Israeli cabinet. Shin Bet had monitored Ben-Gvir in the years after Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, and he was arrested on multiple charges including inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He won acquittals or dismissals in some of the cases, but he was also convicted several times and served time in prison. During the Second Intifada, he led protests calling for extreme measures against Arabs and harassed Israeli politicians he believed were insufficiently hawkish.

Then Ben-Gvir made a radical change: He went to law school. He also took a job as an aide to Michael Ben-Ari, a Knesset member from the National Union party, which had picked up many followers of the Kach movement. In 2011, after considerable legal wrangling around his criminal record, he was admitted to the bar. He changed his hairstyle and clothing to appear more mainstream and began working from the inside, once saying he represented the “soldiers and civilians who find themselves in legal entanglements due to the security situation in Israel.” Netanyahu made him minister of national security, with authority over the police.

Smotrich also moved into public life after his 2005 arrest by Shin Bet for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He made Shin Bet’s Jewish Department a frequent target of criticism, complaining that it was wasting time and money investigating crimes carried out by Jews, when the real terrorists were Palestinians. His ultraright allies sometimes referred to the Jewish Department as Hamakhlaka Hayehudit — the Hebrew phrase for the Gestapo unit that executed Hitler’s Final Solution.

In 2015, while campaigning for a seat in the Knesset, Smotrich said that “every shekel invested in this department is one less shekel invested in real terrorism and saving lives.” Seven years later, Netanyahu made him both minister of finance and a minister in the Ministry of Defense, in charge of overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank, and he has steadily pushed to seize authority over the territory from the military. As part of the coalition deal with Netanyahu, Smotrich now has the authority to appoint one of the senior administrative figures in the West Bank, who helps oversee the building of roads and the enforcement of construction laws. The 2022 election also brought Avi Maoz to the Knesset — the former housing-ministry official whom Talia Sasson once marked as a hidden hand of Israeli government support for illegal settlements. Since then, Maoz had joined the far-right Noam party, using it as a platform to advance racist and homophobic policies. And he never forgot, or forgave, Sasson. On “International Anti-Corruption Day” in 2022, Maoz took to the lectern of the Knesset and denounced Sasson’s report of nearly two decades earlier, saying it was written “with a hatred of the settlements and a desire to harm them.” This, he said, was “public corruption of the highest order, for which people like Talia Sasson should be prosecuted.”

Days after assuming his own new position, Ben-Gvir ordered the police to remove Palestinian flags from public spaces in Israel, saying they “incite and encourage terrorism.” Smotrich, for his part, ordered drastic cuts in payments to the Palestinian Authority — a move that led the Shin Bet and the I.D.F. intelligence division to raise concerns that the cuts would interfere with the Palestinian Authority’s own efforts to police and prevent Palestinian terrorism.

Weeks after the new cabinet was sworn in, the Judea and Samaria division of the I.D.F. distributed an instructional video to the soldiers of a ground unit about to be deployed in the West Bank. Titled “Operational Challenge: The Farms,” the video depicts settlers as peaceful farmers living pastoral lives, feeding goats and herding sheep and cows, in dangerous circumstances. The illegal outposts multiplying around the West Bank are “small and isolated places of settlement, each with a handful of residents, a few of them — or none at all — bearing arms, the means of defense meager or nonexistent.”

It is the settlers, according to the video, who are under constant threat of attack, whether it be “penetration of the farm by a terrorist, an attack against a shepherd in the pastures, arson” or “destruction of property” — threats from which the soldiers of the I.D.F. must protect them. The commander of each army company guarding each farm must, the video says, “link up with the person in charge of security and to maintain communications”; soldiers and officers are encouraged to cultivate a close and intimate relationship with the settlers. “The informal,” viewers are told, “is much more important than the formal.”

The video addresses many matters of security, but it never addresses the question of law. When we asked the commander of the division that produced the video, Brig. Gen. Avi Bluth, why the I.D.F. was promoting the military support of settlements that are illegal under Israeli law, he directly asserted that the farms were indeed legal and offered to arrange for us to tour some of them. Later, a spokesman for the army apologized for the general’s remarks, acknowledged that the farms were illegal and announced that the I.D.F. would no longer be promoting the video. This May, Bluth was nonetheless subsequently promoted to head Israel’s Central Command, responsible for all Israeli troops in central Israel and the West Bank.

In August, Bluth will replace Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, who during his final months in charge of the West Bank has seen a near-total breakdown of law enforcement in his area of command. In late October, Fox wrote a letter to his boss, the chief of Israel’s military staff, saying that the surge of Jewish terrorism carried out in revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks “could set the West Bank on fire.” The I.D.F. is the highest security authority in the West Bank, but the military’s top commander put the blame squarely on the police — who ultimately answer to Ben-Gvir. Fox said he had established a special task force to deal with Jewish terrorism, but investigating and arresting the perpetrators is “entirely in the hands of the Israeli police.”

And, he wrote, they aren’t doing their jobs.

‘Only One Way Forward’

When the day came early this January for the Supreme Court to hear the case brought by the people of Khirbet Zanuta, the displaced villagers arrived an hour late. They had received entry permits from the District Coordination Office to attend the hearing but were delayed by security forces before reaching the checkpoint separating Israel from the West Bank. Their lawyer, Quamar Mishirqi-Assad, noting that their struggle to attend their own hearing spoke to the essence of their petition, insisted that the hearing couldn’t proceed without them. The judges agreed to wait.

The villagers finally were led into the courtroom, and Mishirqi-Assad began presenting the case. The proceedings were in Hebrew, so most of the villagers were unable to follow the arguments that described the daily terrors inflicted by settlers and the glaring absence of any law-enforcement efforts to stop them.

The lawyers representing the military and the police denied the claims of abuse and failure to enforce the law. When a judge asked what operational steps would be in place if villagers wanted to return, one of the lawyers for the state said they could already — there was no order preventing them from doing so.

The next to speak was Col. Roi Zweig-Lavi, the Central Command’s Operations Directorate officer. He said that many of these incidents involved false claims. In fact, he said, some of the villagers had probably destroyed their own homes, because of an “internal issue.” Now they were blaming the settlers to escape the consequences of their own actions.

Colonel Zweig-Lavi’s own views about the settlements, and his role in protecting them, were well known. In a 2022 speech, he told a group of yeshiva students in the West Bank that “the army and the settlements are one and the same.”

In early May, the court ordered the state to explain why the police failed to stop the attacks and declared that the villagers have a right to return to their homes. The court also ordered the state to provide details for how they would ensure the safe return of the villagers. It is now the state’s turn to decide how it will comply. Or if it will comply.

By the time the Supreme Court issued its rulings, the United States had finally taken action to directly pressure the Netanyahu government about the violent settlers. On Feb. 1, the White House issued an executive order imposing sanctions on four settlers for “engaging in terrorist activity,” among other things, in the West Bank. One of the four was Yinon Levi, the owner of Meitarim Farm near Hebron and the man American and Israeli officials believe orchestrated the campaign of violence and intimidation against the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. The British government issued its own sanctions shortly after, saying in a statement that Israel’s government had created “an environment of near-total impunity for settler extremists in the West Bank.”

The White House’s move against individual settlers, a first by an American administration, was met with a combination of anger and ridicule by ministers in Netanyahu’s government. Smotrich called the Biden administration’s allegations against Levi and others “utterly specious” and said he would work with Israeli banks to resist complying with the sanctions. One message that circulated in an open Hilltop Youth WhatsApp channel said that Levi and his family would not be abandoned. “The people of Israel are mobilizing for them,” it said.

American officials bristle when confronted with the question of whether the government’s actions are just token measures taken by an embattled American president hemorrhaging support at home for his Israel policy. They won’t end the violence, they say, but they are a signal to the Netanyahu government about the position of the United States: that the West Bank could boil over, and it could soon be the latest front of an expanding regional Middle East war since Oct. 7.

But war might just be the goal. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said he believes that many members of the ultraright in Israel “want war.” They “want intifada,” he says, “because it is the ultimate proof that there is no way of making peace with the Palestinians and there is only one way forward — to destroy them.”

Additional reporting by Natan Odenheimer.

Top photograph: A member of a group known as Hilltop Youth, which seeks to tear down Israel’s institutions and establish ‘‘Jewish rule.’’ Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times.

Read by Jonathan Davis

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Engineered by David Mason

Peter van Agtmael is a Magnum photographer who has been covering Israel and Palestinian territories since 2012. He is a mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Program.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

Israel said that it would send more troops to Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza and the current focal point in the war between Israel and Hamas. Fighting in the city has closed off a vital border crossing, forced hundreds of thousands to flee and cut off humanitarian aid.

President Biden is pushing for a broad deal that would get Israel to approve a Palestinian nation in return for Saudi recognition of Israel. But officials need to overcome Israeli opposition.

The Arab League called for a United Nations peacekeeping force to be deployed in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank until a two-state solution can be negotiated , in a statement that also called for the U.N. Security Council to set a time limit for that process.

FIFA Delays a Vote: Soccer’s global governing body postponed a decision to temporarily suspend Israel over its actions in Gaza, saying it needed to solicit legal advice before taking up a motion submitted by the Palestinian Football Association.

PEN America’s Literary Gala: The free-expression group has been engulfed by debate over its response to the Gaza war that forced the cancellation of its literary awards and annual festival. But its literary gala went on as planned .

Jerusalem Quartet Will Perform: The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, one of the world’s most prestigious concert halls, said that it would allow the Jerusalem Quartet to perform , two days after it had canceled the ensemble’s concerts amid security concerns.

A Key Weapon: When President Biden threatened to pause some weapons shipments to Israel if it invaded Rafah, the devastating effects of the 2,000-pound Mark 84 bomb were of particular concern to him.

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Festivals bring joy and prosperity and create a sense of oneness. The Kumbh Mela is one of the largest festivals in the world, which takes place at four pilgrimage sites in India; Ujjain, Prayagraj, Haridwar and Nashik. On this occasion, devotees take a ritual dip in the holy rivers of Shipra in Ujjain, Ganga-Yamuna-Sarasvati in Prayagraj, the ...
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Pakistan is the land of diverse people and ethnicity. The cultural and religious values are deep-rooted in its society. God has blessed this country with many cultural values and festivals. In addition to religious, cultural festivals, the country also takes pride in several cultural festivals and customs as well. Being the land of festivals, Pakistanis | Pakistan is the land of diverse people ...
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If visiting China, Spring Festival is a great cultural experience, full of delicious food, thrilling performances and splendid company. The San Fermin Festival in Pamplona is home to the famed Running of the Bulls. Starting on July 6th, the festival lasts until midnight on July 14th. On the 7th, San Fermin's statue is carried through Pamplona ...
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The essay strays further from form with its use of word-for-word dialogue. One or two quotes or memorable exchanges sprinkled in an experience-based essay can really make a section sing or resonate with a reader, but multiple exact quotes almost inevitably begs the question: how did the author remember whole conversations verbatim?
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