Holy Land: Rabbis build fences to protect Palestinian farms from illegal settlers

Adam Rabia, head of field operations, delivering fencing and flashlights to Abu Hamdan in Burqa.

Source: Rabbis for Human Rights

Rabbis for Human Rights write:

Abu Ramsey and Abu Hamdan will not leave their land; they will reinforce their protection from intruders. We will stand by them as they do.

Abu Ramsey called us from Jenata. He explained his situation: settlers from the nearby outpost Kochav Yehuda have become increasingly hostile to him and his family, incessantly intimidating them, breaking windows, and intruding on the olive groves his family has stewarded for generations. We know who he's talking about. These are the same violent settlers that intimidated and attacked our volunteers twice in the past month. And Abu Ramsey has to deal with them every day.

With the olive harvest only a month away, he's worried they will do whatever it takes to stop him from reaping the harvest he's sown. So he asked us to help build a fence around the olive trees surrounding his home. We happily obliged. We partnered with Standing Together and Bnei Avraham and succeeded in securing the groves. He invited us back to help pick olives in a month, insisting he would be honoured to welcome us as guests.

Further north, in the village of Burqa, Abu Hamdan reached out after a pogrom left his wife with a head injury and his daughter unable to sleep for fear that the perpetrators might return in the middle of the night. Two days later, our head of field operations, Adam Rabia, came back with a truck filled with fencing, metal beams, and flashlights. All so that a young Palestinian girl can have a normal night's sleep. It is the moral failure of the Israeli government and the criminal offensive waged by settler militias that demands our attention and reckoning when we ask ourselves this Yom Kippur, "Who are we? What is our life worth?"

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Rabbis for Human Rights: www.rhr.org.il/en/