In a West Bank olive grove, I witnessed a Jewish identity crisis

I’m in an olive field just outside Nahalin, a Palestinian village in the West Bank. A group of liberal Jewish activists, along with a couple of Palestinian grandmothers, are testing the Israeli authorities by harvesting this particular olive grove, which I’m told hasn’t been touched in three years. 

The grove is very close to the walls of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlement, Beitar Illit. Since 7 October, this has been deemed too close for comfort.

The group is mostly composed of American rabbis and worthies, some young and bright-eyed, others old and weary with the world’s disappointments. One wears a T-shirt with the slogan “Resisting tyrants since Pharaoh”.

There are a few Brits along too, tough social justice types. Brad Lander, the incoming Democratic congressman from New York and noted Israel critic, is also along for the ride.

Days away from the Israeli election, with violence breaking out across the West Bank, this is – to put it mildly – a tense moment to be inserting ourselves into the situation. The activists, organised by Rabbis for Human Rights, are expecting the authorities to respond. In fact, in some ways this is the point.

This is the group’s third day of olive-picking, and the news is full of reports about Israeli settler violence. Days one and two of harvesting passed without incident, and some of the activists pushed for a “spicier” choice of location on day three. Having come all this way, they want to feel like their presence made a significant impact.

En route to Nahalin, we received a safety briefing and a blessing from one of the younger activists, exhorting us to hold on to our humanity in the face of what may come. Some of the older hands compared this work to the Jewish freedom riders, who rode to Martin Luther King’s assistance in the 1960s.

As the harvest gets going, I fall into conversation with Rabbi David Greenstein, who describes himself as an exile from orthodox Judaism. He is a learned and friendly man but also clearly in deep pain over Israel. At his Philadelphia shul, he has suggested that the rabbi drop the prayer to protect the state of Israel and instead offer up a prayer for protection from the state of Israel.

“What you are witnessing here is a crisis of Jewish identity,” says Anton Gutman, the trip’s British-Israeli organiser. “It’s a clash between Jewish values and the state of Israel. These people are trying to reclaim those values and their own agency.”

This clash becomes very tangible when a platoon of IDF soldiers turns up, with the police rapidly following. This is now a closed military area; we are calmly informed.  The group is herded together and led down to a police bus. They sigh and tut with outrage.

Before everyone is carted off to the station, where they are detained for several hours, I have a chat with Brad Lander. “As an American Jew, I hate what’s happening here,” he tells me.

How much have his feelings towards Israel changed in the past three years, I wonder? “I’ve long wanted Israel to change, to be the thing it dreamed itself of, and I dreamed for it,” he says. “I have long believed that the occupation is a violation of our Jewish values. But I didn’t feel complicit in genocide before the 7 October.”

Lander thinks many Jews are “trapped” by their relationship to Israel. “The Jewish amygdala is badly dysregulated. There’s this real agony over how to understand what’s happening.” He then takes a picture of himself on the bus, provoking a days-long row online.

This olive-picking incident can be viewed in a number of ways. According to the IDF, some 220,000 dunams of land have been harvested so far this autumn (a dunam is 1000 square metres). It estimates that 22,500 tonnes of olives have been raked from the trees and says the only reason it shut this particular harvest down is because it hadn’t been coordinated and approved in advance.

Rabbis from Human Rights point out that the area in which this specific harvest took place didn’t actually require prior approval and that Palestinians (or indeed American rabbis) should be entitled to harvest those olives without interference. Maps of the area shown in the Israeli media suggest this is an accurate point.

What should we make of this story? Why am I even telling it? I’m telling it because whatever you think of these activists and the farrago over West Bank olives, this crisis of Jewish identity is real and growing and should be acknowledged.  It underpins much of the debate over this Israeli election.

Clearly, Jews have never all agreed on Israel, far from it. But for 75 years after the state was created, in the shadow of Auschwitz, most of us accepted Israel’s fundamental purpose and raison d’etre. But in recent years, Israel has moved sharply rightwards. Whatever the justness of its cause, since 7 October it is now responsible for death and destruction on a previously unprecedented scale in its history.

For those Jews whose Judaism has become fused with progressive politics, this is completely incompatible with their sense of self. They simply cannot bear to perceive themselves as – or be perceived as – even implicitly supporting such a country. Picking forbidden olives is a way of disavowing this connection, seeking atonement in the eyes of Palestine and the world.

It’s easy to write this trip off as a self-aggrandising stunt. Many Israelis roll their eyes at this kind of activism and the credulous journalism that accompanies it, viewing it as yet another manifestation of the rolling human rights attack machine that focuses on Israel’s iniquities to the exclusion of almost anything else.

They have a point, but to just write it off as a stunt is too easy and misses something important. First, that radical settler violence and punitive Israeli restrictions are a troubling reality in the West Bank, even if the media focus sometimes warps the full picture. But also that the Jews I met in Nahalin were anguished and sincere. Their despair over Israel’s direction of travel was shared by many of the liberal Tel Avivians I met too last week, who view this upcoming election as their last stand against the forces of zealotry and reaction.

Perhaps these are all just weak-kneed liberals who care more about gentile perception than Jewish reality, but nonetheless this is how they feel, increasingly alienated from their own homeland.

At times it seems as though Jewish life itself is splintering over Israel, cracking under the pressure of global opprobrium. Standing in that olive grove, it occurred to me that these divisions are almost as ancient as the Judean hills themselves. The cosmopolitan Hellenists versus the unrelenting Maccabees. The collaborationist Sadducees clashing with the revolutionary Zealots. There is something almost magnificent about our stiff-necked dedication to these warring traditions; we put Jewish history in the deep freeze for 2,000 years, returned to the holy land and then immediately reanimated all the same old arguments.

Just before the IDF turned up, I went to say goodbye to David Greenstein. He was humming a haunting and familiar tune, typically heard at a badeken, when the husband walked towards his bride for the unveiling.

I found this scene almost unbearably poignant. For 2,000 years, Jews prayed to return to these lands. Now this rabbi was standing in a Palestinian olive grove, religiously adrift, seeking solace in manual labour and choral nostalgia. His tune is usually sung at a wedding, but for Jews like David, this is closer to a divorce.