David Dean Shulman (born January 13, 1949) is an Israeli Indologist, poet and peace activist, known for his work on the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Carnatic music.

Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi, and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam.

[4] In 1967, on graduating from Waterloo high school, he won a National Merit Scholarship, and emigrated to Israel, where he enrolled at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

His interest in Indian studies was inspired by a friend, the English economic historian Daniel Sperber, and later by the philologist, and expert in Semitic languages, Chaim Rabin.

[11][12] More recently he has been active as a leader of international campaigns to defend the Palestinians under threat of eviction from such villages as Susya in the South Hebron Hills,[13] and especially from Silwan, where they are at risk of losing their homes as a result of the pressure on the area to have it rezoned for Israeli archaeological digs, in particular those promoted by the Elad association.

B. Yehoshua called it: One of the most fascinating and moving accounts of Israeli-Palestinian attempts to help, indeed to save, human beings suffering under the burden of occupation and terror.

Here, in places like Chavat Maon, Itamar, Tapuach, and Hebron, they have, in effect, unfettered freedom to terrorize the local Palestinian population: to attack, shoot, injure, sometimes kill - all in the name of the alleged sanctity of the land and of the Jews' exclusive right to it.

[19][20]Shulman's book addresses here what he calls a 'moral conundrum': how Israel, 'once a home to utopian idealists and humanists, should have engendered and given free rein to a murderous, also ultimately suicidal, messianism,' and asks if the 'humane heart of the Jewish tradition' always contains the 'seeds of self-righteous terror' he observed among settlers.

He finds within himself an intersection of hope, faith and empathy, and 'the same dark forces that are active among the most predatory of the settlers', and it is this which provides him with 'a reason to act'[21] against what he regards as 'pure, rarefied, unadulterated, unreasoning, uncontainable human evil'.

He does not excuse Arabs in the book,[22] but focuses on his own side's culpability, writing: 'I feel responsible for the atrocities committed in my name, by the Israeli half of the story.

[23] Writing of efforts by the IDF and members of hard-core settlements at Susya, Ma'on, Carmel and elsewhere who, having settled on Palestinian land in the hills south of Hebron, endeavour to evict the local people in the many khirbehs of a region where several thousand pacific Palestinian herders and farmers dwell in rock caves and live a 'unique life' of biblical colour,[24] Shulman comments, according to Margalit, that:- Nothing but malice drives this campaign to uproot the few thousand cave dwellers with their babies and lambs.