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Urban Israelis are flocking to the Gaza border to tend farms left suddenly without workers
TEL AVIV (JTA) — By now, the dramatic rescue of Amir Tibon’s family from Kibbutz Nahal Oz by his 62-year old father, retired IDF General Noam Tibon, has become one of the most widely shared stories of Oct. 7.
Lesser known but also heroic is the tale of another of Tibon’s family members, Dudik Laniyado, who put on his army uniform and sped into the line of fire to tend to the cows that were abandoned that day.
Laniyado, who is Noam Tibon’s brother-in-law, is a dairy farmer at Kibbutz Kalya near the Dead Sea. Amid the news of the massacre, he heard from Tibon’s rescue mission that the cows of Nahal Oz and other farms near the Gaza border were at risk.
“Dairy cows can live without being milked for one or two days,” said Laniyado, but then they begin to dry out, a process that cannot be reversed. Going longer without being milked can cause injury and death.
When he arrived at the closed military area on Oct. 9, he found that Hamas terrorists had destroyed the milking area and the equipment used to feed the cows. Under fire from nearby gun battles, he opened all the gates on the farm and let the baby calves out of their cages, letting them move around for the first time in days and eat food that he gathered from a local agricultural center.
“We got to a place that is a war zone,” he said. “There is enormous destruction to all the farms near the border area.”
Laniyado was an early arrival to what has become a new passion for Israelis, one they say is nearly as vital to southern Israel’s future as the country’s war on Hamas in Gaza: tending the farms, animals and fields that have been left fallow by the massive disruption of Oct. 7 and its aftermath.
האיש הזה הוא גיבור. דודיק לניאדו. נשוי לדודה שלי, יעל תיבון. דודיק הוא רפתן וגר בקיבוץ קלי”ה בים המלח. הוא שמע שהפרות בעוטף נשארו בלי מי שיאכיל אותן. עלה על מדים ונסע להאכיל את הפרות בנחל עוז ומקומות נוספים. הציל אותן ואת העתיד של הקיבוצים. מעשה אדיר של אומץ, חסד ואהבה תחת אש. pic.twitter.com/yPLqeOJMDv
— Amir Tibon (@amirtibon) October 9, 2023
Thousands of Israelis have signed up to work the fields and pens, joining regional Whatsapp groups that place local farmers and volunteers where they are most needed. Slots fill within minutes as volunteers trek from their urban homes to pick crops whose regular workers are dead, departed or unable to enter the country.
Popup farmers markets in city centers are packed with customers seeking to spend their money to help growers whose work they know has been upended. Help is even coming from overseas: Birthright Israel has even called upon its 850,000 alumni around the world to fly to Israel for volunteer opportunities that include picking fruit and vegetables.
Like the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have joined the military reserves, the volunteers are stepping in for a depleted workforce — and hoping that the region has a future after the guns stop blazing.
“What happened on [Oct. 7] was a kind of local Holocaust. Its effect could be a holocaust on the economy here,” said Dudi Alon, who is the deputy head of the Gaza border’s Eshkol Regional Council. He is among the few farmers and security staff remaining at his home of Moshav Yated, just east of the Kerem Shalom border crossing into Gaza.
“There are people who think we are all soldiers now and anyone who comes to help here is like a fighter,” he added. “On the other hand, there are those who think it is a moral problem if you risk the lives of volunteers and farmers to work fields under fire.”
Israeli volunteers hold mangoes during the harvest at a farm in Moshav Sde Nitzan, in southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip, Oct. 25, 2023. (Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images)
Surveying his region, Alon believes Hamas aimed to destroy southern Israel’s agriculture along with its population. Gaza-area farms, he said, produce 70% of Israel’s tomatoes and 30% of its potatoes in addition to other vegetables and dairy products, and rely on a legion of foreign workers.
Before Oct. 7, he said, the Eshkol Regional Council had 4,000 workers from Thailand who were experienced at farm work. Dozens of Thai workers were murdered on Oct. 7, and dozens more are hostages in Gaza. Most of the rest flew home to their country, leaving fewer than 1,000 now, a loss Alon calls “a death knell to agriculture here.” (Guest workers from Gaza also contributed to the workforce.) Farms’ planting cycles can last up to eight months, making it harder for them to restart production if they’ve been abandoned.
“Hamas intentionally kidnapped and murdered foreign workers in order to frighten the foreign workers to ruin the economy here and they succeeded,” said Alon. “Many incredible volunteers are coming to help and support us, [but] at the end of the day there is work that is physically difficult and requires special skills that cannot rely on volunteers.”
Many of the area’s residents have been evacuated by the government to safer regions of the country, but a few have remained. Evie Atiya, who lives in Moshav Pri Gan and is still there, recounted that “10 terrorists entered on bikes and started to shoot at houses” on Oct. 7, killing four residents and trapping the entire village in their shelters for 48 hours before they were evacuated by the army.
Shortly after leaving his shelter “terrified,” Ataya learned that the Thai embassy had evacuated more than half of all the farm workers in the area and that only seven of his farm’s 24 workers remained.
A worker milking cows at a cowshed in the Golan Heights in Israel’s north, Oct. 26, 2023. (Michael Giladi/Flash90)
“Everything has collapsed,” he said. And while the government has long provided financial assistance to the area’s farmers, the perceived insufficient response from the finance and agriculture ministries — matching the long hours residents waited in shelters before the army’s arrival — is symbolic of many Israelis’ widespread disillusionment with the country’s leadership following Oct. 7.
“It seems like they weren’t ready for this,” he said, adding that it feels like “they are trying to help but that they are lost.”
Eitan Aharon, secretary of Moshav Mivtahim in the Eshkol Regional council, recently told the Israeli publication Zman Israel, “I am afraid farmers will commit suicide” before help arrives.
On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended his government’s record on financial assistance to impacted communities. At a cabinet meeting, he announced that the government had budgeted nearly $3.4 billion in supplementary funds to help evacuees and local governments in the south and north in November and December.
“I want to sharpen the point on the financial sum we are going to bring for the benefit of Israel’s citizens,” he said. “We have already spent many billions to help the evacuees, to help the families of the kidnapped and missing, to help the authorities in the north and south, the reservists, businesses. But we are going to bring much more.”
Some government efforts are already being felt: On Thursday, the Ministry of Agriculture plans to convert Jerusalem’s Cinema City mall into a market for farmers from the south and north.
Maaya Arfi works at HaShomer HaChadash, an Israeli organization helping connect Israelis to the land through agriculture. It was one of the first groups to raise the alarm about the labor need and continues to organize efforts to assist Israeli farmers.
A local farmer stands in a field in southern Israel. (Eliyahu Freedman)
“In the next two weeks we can already be at 4,000 volunteers a day,” Arfi said of her organization’s initiative, which matches Israelis with farmers in need via a hotline and phone application.
While the precise number of volunteers is unknown, a new poll of Israelis by Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev found that more than 40% of respondents had volunteered in some form in the third week of the war.
Some volunteers have come from other Israeli farming communities. Sara Goldsmith, a 57-year old tour guide from Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, said volunteering to help farmers in the south was keeping her mind off her canceled business.
“October, November and December are peak season for tourism in Israel, and overnight I lost all my groups that I was supposed to be having,” she said. “It’s a very difficult time for all the tour guides across Israel and many are doing what I’m doing: helping out wherever we can. We don’t know when our income is coming in but we have hands and the will to volunteer.”
On Monday, she traveled with a group of approximately 20 members of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu — ranging in age from 15 to 80 — to help at Kibbutz Saad, which Sde Eliyahu had “adopted” following the outbreak of the war. Saad, which like Sde Eliyahu is a religious kibbutz, was fortunate to have its gate closed on Oct. 7 for Shabbat and was largely spared the worst of Hamas’ attack. It instead endured its own kind of trauma, becoming a makeshift morgue, refuge and clinic for the victims of the massacre, especially those who escaped from the Nova music festival at the nearby community of Re’im.
At the kibbutz, Goldsmith helped pick cucumbers grown for their seeds, rather than for eating. Goldsmith’s children have also enlisted in the war effort: Her daughter is serving in the military reserves and her son flew back from his home overseas to work full-time on a farm on the Gaza border.
“We are in a helpless situation,” she said. “So when you do something you feel a little less helpless.”
Another volunteer named Yael, who declined to share her last name out of privacy concerns, traveled from Tel Aviv to Moshav Yesha near Gaza last Saturday with a few friends and work colleagues from a Tel Aviv hospital to harvest tomatoes, passing military checkpoints and torched cars along the way. Working in the fields, she said, was particularly unnerving where there is “no safety gear and there are no shelters in the farms” to protect them from barrages of Hamas rockets, which largely target the south.
Her fear wasn’t misplaced. During her shift, Yael heard “really big booms quite close” coming from Israeli airstrikes on Gaza. And at one point, she recalled, she looked around and “I just suddenly see people on the ground, and stood there frozen waiting for it to end.”
When her shift ended a few hours later, the farm owner showed her a crater from a rocket launched by Hamas that had just struck another part of the greenhouse, causing damage only to the tomato plants.
Those dangers have led some people to flee the south. But Atiya says that no matter what happens, he is determined to stay and work the land.
“Somebody needs to be here and make food from this land and this is what I do. It’s not a choice if I am going back there,” he said. “This is my land, this is my house, everything that I know.”
Laniyado agrees that the government is flailing but said that conversations with the young soldiers in the area left him optimistic. According to some accounts, soldiers have tended greenhouses that were abandoned on Oct. 7.
“I joked with them and talked with them,” Laniyado said. “I believe with complete faith that we will win the war, that we will re-establish the villages, the agriculture will return to what it was and we will learn a lesson and unite around the fact that we are all Jews and that we have no choice. We are dependent on each other.”
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Entire Families Killed in Syria’s Military Crackdown, UN Says
A man inspects a damaged car in Latakia, after hundreds were reportedly killed in some of the deadliest violence in 13 years of civil war, pitting loyalists of deposed President Bashar al-Assad against the country’s new Islamist rulers, Syria, March 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Haidar Mustafa
Entire families including women and children were killed in Syria’s coastal region as part of a series of sectarian killings by the army against an insurgency by Bashar al-Assad loyalists, the UN human rights office said on Tuesday.
Pressure has been growing on Syria’s Islamist-led government to investigate after reports by a war monitor of the killing of hundreds of civilians in villages where the majority of the population were members of Assad’s minority Alawite sect.
“In a number of extremely disturbing instances, entire families – including women, children, and individuals hors de combat – were killed, with predominantly Alawite cities and villages targeted in particular,” UN human rights office spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan said, using a French term for those incapable of fighting.
So far, the UN human rights office has documented the killing of 111 civilians and expects the real toll to be significantly higher, Al-Kheetan told a Geneva press briefing. Of those, 90 were men; 18 were women; and three were children, he added.
“Many of the cases documented were of summary executions. They appear to have been carried out on a sectarian basis,” Al-Kheetan told reporters. In some cases, men were shot dead in front of their families, he said, citing testimonies from survivors.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk welcomed an announcement by Syria’s Islamist-led government to create an accountability committee and called for those investigations to be prompt, thorough, independent, and impartial, the spokesperson added.
The post Entire Families Killed in Syria’s Military Crackdown, UN Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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The Western World Refuses to See the Truth About Syria, the Palestinians, and the Middle East
Rebel fighters holds weapons at the Citadel of Aleppo, after Syrian rebels announced that they have ousted Bashar al-Assad, in Aleppo, Syria, Dec. 9, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Karam al-Masri
Anyone who believed that Syria’s new leader — trading his military uniform for a tailored suit — represented a fresh hope for the Middle East has recently come to a sobering realization: the sea remains the same, the mountains remain unchanged, and the Middle East does not transform overnight.
The harrowing images emerging from Syria lay bare a grim reality. The forces of Abu Mohammad al-Julani, ideological heirs of ISIS, are humiliating, beating, and slaughtering members of the Alawite minority, which until recently ruled the country. As expected, the world — including the United Nations — maintains its usual silence, as long as Israel is not directly involved.
The harsh reality is that Syria has never truly been a sovereign nation. It has always been an open battlefield where global powers, terrorist organizations, and sectarian factions compete to establish facts on the ground. Russia, Iran, and Turkey all vie for influence, while the Alawites find themselves mercilessly hunted, after inflicting mass violence for the decades that they ruled the country.
Like Iraq, Lebanon, and many other Middle Eastern states, Syria was never a unified nation but rather a patchwork of sects, religions, and ethnic groups forcibly bound together by oppressive regimes. The notion of a “Palestinian people” was similarly born out of political circumstances rather than historical continuity or a cohesive identity. As history has demonstrated, those identified as “Palestinians” in the modern era originated from various other regions — Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and beyond. The struggle over Palestinian identity arose from an anti-Zionist political necessity rather than a deep-rooted historical reality.
Today, if someone were to quote former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s 1970s assertion that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”, they would be labeled as delusional, ultra-right-wing, or even messianic — or all of the above. Yet this famous statement, attributed to a leader of Israel’s leftist establishment, aligns directly with the contemporary reality in Syria. There are tribes, sects, economic and religious interests — but no “nation” in the Western sense of the term.
The shifting realities in Syria and the broader political developments in the region compel us to reconsider the terms we use — “nations”, “states”, “peoples” — which do not always apply to the Middle East in the same way they do in Europe or the United States. The events in Syria are yet another testament to the deep ethnic and religious rifts that prevent the emergence of a united nation — just as we have seen before in Lebanon, Iraq, and other artificially constructed states.
This illusion continues to shatter in fire, blood, and destruction – -yet many still refuse to see the truth. Those who ignore it will inevitably find themselves staring at new ruins, as history continues to dictate the rules of the Middle Eastern game.
Itamar Tzur is the author of The Invention of the Palestinian Narrative and an Israeli scholar specializing in Middle Eastern history. He holds a Bachelor’s degree with honors in Jewish History and a Master’s degree with honors in Middle Eastern studies. As a senior member of the “Forum Kedem for Middle Eastern Studies and Public Diplomacy,” he leverages his academic expertise to deepen understanding of regional dynamics and historical contexts.
The post The Western World Refuses to See the Truth About Syria, the Palestinians, and the Middle East first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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In Order to Fight the Anti-Zionist Narrative on Campus, We Must Engage — Not Blackball
More than 200 Brown University students gathered outside University Hall where roughly 40 students sat inside demanding the school divest from weapons manufacturers amid the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Amy Russo / USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
Last month, I attended the “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions” conference hosted by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University.
The conference consisted of five panels and two roundtable discussions across two days. While I did not experience the full program, the combined four hours I spent at the conference provided me with an eye-opening window into the world of anti-Zionist academia and the danger of echo chambers.
I remain convinced that to pursue truth and not ideology, anti-Zionist and Zionist academics must seriously engage with counter-narratives.
Before the conference, I naively believed that the event would simply examine the fascinating stories of non-Zionist Jews through history. What I instead saw was an extreme portrayal of Israel as the pinnacle of evil in the world. Though I’ve encountered this position amongst my peers at protests, I have never heard it so explicitly stated by faculty members.
During the final panel titled “Roundtable: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Stakes of the Debate,” one professor of Palestinian studies at Brown remarked that “Global Israel” has become the north star of the rise of fascism. The room responded to this proclamation with head nods and snaps.
Someone else asserted “that in order to pursue a liberatory imagination of what it means to be a Jew, the first move is to become an Anti-Zionist,” a questionable characterization from someone who is not themselves Jewish.
I am wary of mischaracterizing this gathering as monolithic, given that the conference was open to everyone — apparently, some attendees identified as liberal Zionists. However, the anti-Zionist perspective monopolized the discussions that I attended. The characterization of Zionism as inherently racist and genocidal went unchallenged, creating a hostile environment for anyone inclined to “own up” to their Zionism, even if it included fierce criticism of contemporary Israeli policy. This hostility became clear to me during a question I posed about antisemitism.
During the same panel, the speakers discussed how the pro-Israel lobby suppresses anti-Zionist speech, especially at universities. While I agree that some Zionist groups mischaracterize any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, I also know that antisemitism is often part and parcel of anti-Zionist activity. In response to the panelists’ points about free speech, I asked: How should administrators engage with the real concerns on behalf of Jewish students that anti-Zionist protests are often entangled with antisemitism? When I finished my question, many in the room laughed, and one of the panelists audibly scoffed.
This conference highlights the ever-deepening polarization surrounding conversations about Zionism and Israel. Professors did not merely criticize the Jewish State, they attacked the founders of Zionism and their adherents as genocidal, Jewish supremacists.
The issue with this conference was not that academics spoke vehemently against Zionism, but rather that no voices offered opposing perspectives. Brown is not lacking in Zionist professors, particularly in our outstanding Judaic Studies department, yet none of them were present at the event. Whether their absence is attributable to themselves or that of the conference organizers, I cannot know. But it was an absence that I felt poignantly.
The Cogut Institute received more than 1,500 emails in protest of the conference. Although many Zionist students and alumni pressured the administration to cancel the event, this would have been a mistake. Counteracting extreme distortions of Zionism does not require shutting down conferences. After all, suppressing false and skewed narratives does not eliminate the beliefs underlying them, and restricting the free exchange of ideas contradicts the University’s epistemic mission. An honest pursuit of truth demands that we allow for the expression of ideas that might be perceived by some as uncomfortable or even dangerous.
When I attended the “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions” conference, I stepped into an echo chamber. Though I do not expect Zionist professors to sway their fellow academics, their mere presence at a conference like this would signify that anti-Zionism is not a mandate within the academy. If our mission is to examine Zionism, non-Zionism and anti-Zionism in a rigorous, academic manner, it is imperative to include professors who do not consider Zionism a fundamentally fascist, genocidal, and Jewish supremacist movement, and who are willing to speak to this effect.
I am thankful that those who sought to cancel the conference failed; I am also hopeful that next time around, such gatherings will resemble more of a scholarly dialectic than a party convention.
Maya Rackoff is a senior at Brown University majoring in History. She plans to move to Israel in September for a master’s degree in Security and Diplomacy at Tel Aviv University
The post In Order to Fight the Anti-Zionist Narrative on Campus, We Must Engage — Not Blackball first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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