By Alexander Cornwell
TEL AVIV, Oct 21 (Reuters) – Brad Lander, a US Democratic party candidate for Congress, was detained in the occupied-West Bank by Israeli forces on Wednesday, along with dozens of activists who were picking olives alongside Palestinian farmers, rights groups said.
Israeli organisation Rabbis for Human Rights said around 80 volunteers, including Lander, were detained by Israeli military and police on village farmland near Bethlehem where for about two hours they had been accompanying the Palestinian farmers.
Israeli forces informed the group they were in a closed military zone and detained them before taking them to a police station, Rabbis for Human Rights said in a statement.
Lander, a Jewish American and former New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, wrote on X that he had been detained by the military along with rabbis and volunteers.
“We were simply harvesting olives in a grove near Nehalim in the West Bank. The occupation is a crime under international law. Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know.”
Lander, who is an ally of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and has been critical of Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza, included in his post a photo of himself on a bus that showed what appeared to be a police officer and a masked soldier.
He is the Democratic party’s nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district for the US House of Representatives in the November 3 midterm elections.
Rabbis for Human Rights Acting Director Anton Goodman told Reuters that Lander had been released but that everyone else was being held at a police station in an Israeli settlement. He said that those who weren’t Israeli or Palestinian citizens were expected to be later taken to an Israeli military base.
According to T’ruah, a Jewish North American rights group, volunteers, which included US and Israeli citizens, were accompanying local Palestinian farmers who face the threat of violence from Israeli settlers, as an act of solidarity.
Israelis and Palestinians have also been detained, it said.
Olives are the backbone of Palestinian agriculture, a sector that accounts for around 8% of GDP and more than 60,000 jobs, according to the Palestinian Authority’s agriculture ministry.
ISRAELI SETTLER ATTACKS ON PALESTINIANS SURGING
It was not immediately clear why the area had been declared a closed military zone. Rabbis for Human Rights said the group could not have known before arriving and volunteered to leave.
An Israeli military spokesperson had no immediate comment when contacted by Reuters. Israel Police and the US Embassy in Jerusalem did not immediately respond to emailed questions.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the chief executive of T’ruah, who is among those detained, said the group, which includes 33 US citizens, along with UK and Canadian citizen, was “very peacefully” picking olives before Israeli forces arrived.
“We were obviously not doing anything violent but just the very act of picking olives together with Palestinian farmers was apparently disturbing for some,” Jacobs, a 51 year-old conservative rabbi from Manhattan, told Reuters by phone.
The group was taken the police station on two separate buses, and some had since been taken inside, while others, like Jacobs, were being held on a bus outside the station, she said.
As far as she knew, the police had not made any formal accusations against the group and it was not clear to them why they were detained or if they would be charged, Jacobs said.
Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians and other civilians in the West Bank are surging, prompting calls over the weekend by US Secretary Marco Rubio for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to crack down on the violence.
An American photojournalist for the Washington Post covering a Palestinian olive harvest on Friday was beaten by settlers, while European diplomats and a French mayor were attacked at another Palestinian olive harvest by settlers on Saturday.
Palestinians were attacked by settlers in both incidents.
Israeli police on Tuesday announced on Tuesday it had made ten arrests in connection with the weekend violence.
(Reporting by Alexander Cornwell; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Nick Zieminski)
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