In late October, two American activists—volunteers with an NIF partner organization, Achvat Amim—were detained, deported from Israel, and handed a 10-year entry ban. They had been traveling through the West Bank to work alongside Palestinian farmers, who every year face terrible violence from Israeli settlers as they try to harvest their olives.
This year has been especially dramatic, with groups of settlers routinely burning homes and cars, chopping down olive trees, cutting holes in water lines, and physically assaulting Palestinians of all ages. In order to help stop the violence, volunteers from Israel and around the world have been arriving to accompany farmers, to document the violence they face, and sometimes to intentionally stand between the attackers and the Palestinian farmers under threat.
That’s what these two volunteers with Achvat Amim had been doing with Rabbis for Human Rights when they were picked up by Israeli security forces for accidentally entering a “closed military zone.” While the Israeli activists who had gone with them were quickly released and told not to reenter the West Bank for a short period of time, the two American women spent the night in detention before being tried at 4:30 in the morning, deported from the country, and banned from returning to Israel for 10 years.
The deportation and banning of these activists, and many others before them, is a clear attempt at intimidation and silencing. But neither our grantees, nor we at NIF will be intimidated or silenced. NIF recently approved a rapid response grant to fund a legal appeal against the ban.
We know that solidarity—a belief in justice, equality, and safety for all people—is not a crime. We won’t give up on those values, nor will we back down from supporting the activists who embody them.