All the activists detained by the Israeli military Wednesday morning while peacefully accompanying Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest in the occupied West Bank, including Democratic nominee for Congress (NY-10) Brad Lander and a delegation of American rabbis with T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, have now been released without charge. Israeli participants in the harvest have been issued bans preventing them from entering the West Bank for periods of two to four weeks.
The activists had been harvesting at the invitation of Palestinian communities, and were harvesting alongside a family that had been unable to access its land since October 7, 2023.
Becca Strober, spokesperson for the Protect the Harvest coalition and Executive Director of Achvat Amim, and Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah, issued the following joint statement:
“Today’s releases demonstrate the power of mass international solidarity. Israeli authorities have repeatedly arrested and deported international activists engaged in protective presence in the West Bank. We believe the authorities were reluctant to do so today precisely because of who was standing in those olive groves: American Jews, rabbis, prominent community leaders, and dozens of international volunteers acting together. Their identities, privilege, and the size of the group afforded them protections that Palestinians are routinely denied.
“We cannot allow the relative safety of international activists to obscure the profound vulnerability of the Palestinians we came to support. We must use every advantage and every avenue available to us to stop ethnic cleansing before it is too late.
“That privilege comes with a responsibility to act. Today showed what becomes possible when people from abroad use their relative protection, privilege, visibility, and their numbers to stand alongside Palestinians facing dispossession and expulsion. While we welcome the release of our participants, the Palestinian farmers whose livelihoods and land are under threat still face the same systematic violence and ethnic cleansing. We are also cognizant of the growing restrictions and pressure facing our Israeli partners in this work.
“The lesson from today is that we need many more people willing to provide a protective presence to Palestinian families and communities during the olive harvest and more broadly. And we need the international community to intervene against the escalating, state-backed ethnic cleansing in the West Bank through sustained public pressure and meaningful action abroad.
“Our work continues.”
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Protect the Harvest is a nonviolent, ideologically diverse coalition of Palestinian, American, Israeli, and Jewish organizations bringing international volunteers to the West Bank to support the Palestinian olive harvest this fall.
T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights brings the Torah’s ideals of human dignity, equality, and justice to life by empowering our network of over 2,300 rabbis and cantors to be moral voices and to lead Jewish communities in advancing democracy and human rights for all people in the United States, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories.