It was the detention of Democratic congressional nominee Brad Lander by the Israeli military that made international headlines yesterday during an olive harvest in the central West Bank. But within the Jewish world, it was the American rabbis being taken into custody that made waves, drawing joint condemnation from the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements. 

Some details of the incident remain in dispute. However, what is known is that a group of roughly 80 Israeli and Diaspora figures, led by Rabbis for Human Rights, attended an olive harvest in Nahalin, a village south of Bethlehem, in the central West Bank. Such trips have been taking place throughout the West Bank in recent weeks during the annual olive harvest — always a sensitive period — with participants either gathering olives or simply standing by to deter Israeli extremists from disrupting the harvest, which often represents a significant financial event for the villages.

During the harvest yesterday, Israeli security personnel arrived and declared the area a closed military zone, detaining those present on the grounds that it had not been coordinated with the military in advance. The roughly two busloads of activists were taken to a nearby military base, with nearly all of them eventually released without charge a few hours later. Four of them were kept overnight and were given legal orders barring them from entering the West Bank for 15 days. 

The military does indeed require advanced coordination for harvests in certain areas in the West Bank to ensure that they are held without violence or disruption. However, the grove outside Nahalin does not appear on the military’s own maps for areas that require advanced coordination. The IDF later said that the area was not labeled because it had never been harvested before, but it has not explained why the Palestinian owners should have realized this or why gathering in the area was an offense warranting detention.

“The land owner has been informed that he must coordinate the harvest on the plot, and he was provided with contact information for coordinating the harvest in the future,” the military said. 

There certainly appears to be an element of political theater at play, particularly in the aftermath, which was full of selfies, social media posts and press releases. (It was not for nothing that Israel’s Foreign Ministry accused Lander of “harvesting headlines,” not olives.)

And yet the fact that those involved did not appear to be intentionally violating any laws — despite Israeli claims to the contrary, which do not hold up under scrutiny — makes it harder to write this off as a mere political stunt, particularly as recent violent attacks by Israeli extremists have demonstrated the need for such assistance. 

“That farmers need to have others serve as a protective presence from violent settlers is itself a betrayal of Jewish values. Yet recent settler attacks on Palestinian harvesters and those working alongside them — and authorities’ failure or refusal to stop such attacks — have made that protective presence necessary,” the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements wrote in their joint statement.

These movements have, over the years, not infrequently criticized Israeli lawmakers, but this kind of pointed rhetoric toward law enforcement and security personnel is rare, but liable to become more common. 

These kinds of so-called “protective presence” activities were once almost exclusively the domain of die-hard activists well outside the Jewish mainstream — members of groups that accused Israel of apartheid or called for Israel to cease to be a Jewish state and become a binational one instead.

That is no longer the case, and it will make it much more difficult for the Jewish communal world to grapple with such incidents in the future unless realities on the ground change. 

When these kinds of encounters were the purview of extremists — by the Jewish community’s standards — they could be ignored; this is harder to do when those taking part are — from Israel — ex-IDF generals and former Israeli deputy attorneys general and — from the Diaspora — mainstream rabbis with Zionist bona fides. An Israel Democracy Institute survey from last month found that 58.5% of its Jewish respondents want the next Israeli government to take action against settler attacks in the West Bank.

Diaspora Jewish groups have long maintained that people can be critical of Israel while still being Zionists. As this issue persists, pitting activists against the military (and not politicians), that distinction may be put to the test.