YATED, Israel — Several dozen volunteers arrived Wednesday at this remote farming community — the westernmost point of Israel – to harvest the season’s tomato crop before it rotted on the vine.
A farmer teaches volunteers about picking tomatoes — which to keep, and which to discard. Yated, Israel November 15, 2023 (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
They came from every conceivable background within Israeli society — Ashkenazi and Ethiopian, secular and religious, young and old. As they worked, the sound of Israeli fighter jets was heard overhead, as well as occasional explosions from the Gaza Strip, just a few short kilometers away, where war is raging.
Fresh tomatoes on a farm near the Gaza envelope, Novermner 23, 2023. (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
The farm effort is part of the spirit of volunteerism that has swept Israel in the last several weeks. Reservists have showed up at their units without being called; ordinary citizens have gone into war zones to deliver food and necessities to those stranded there.
The farming communities of the “Gaza envelope” — the fertile region of the western Negev desert where Hamas carried out its horrific terror attack on October 7 — have been almost completely empty for more than a month, except for the Israeli soldiers who have taken up positions in and around those communities. Farm workers — many of them foreign — have gone home, and the local civilian population has been evacuated, joining the 250,000 Israelis who have been internally displaced in the war.
Ordinary Israelis have rushed to fill the gap. From high-tech executives, to filmmakers, to government officials, they flock south on a daily basis to harvest fruits and vegetables, to milk cows, and to keep agriculture in the region alive.
One of the organizations putting the farming effort together is called Brothers in Arms, a veterans’ organization that led protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms earlier in the year.
Setting politics aside — for the moment — after October 7, the group has used its extensive activist network to organize volunteer efforts and to make sure that help goes to where it is needed in the country.
As Israel’s government reeled from the shock of Oct. 7, civil society groups like Brothers in Arms found themselves filling the gap.
On this Wednesday morning, Brothers in Arms organizers greeted hundreds of volunteers at a staging point east of the Gaza envelope, in the Bedouin Israeli Arab city of Rahat. Volunteers could choose to do “hard,” “medium,” or “light” work. They were then given assignments and instructions — including how to get to their destinations where GPS signals have been scrambled.
An organizer gives volunteers in work teams instructions about how to reach their intended destinations, given that military activity has disrupted many GPS apps. Rahat, Israel, November 15, 2023 (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
The group in which Breitbart News was traveling was assigned to Yated, which is about two kilometers east of the Egyptian border and two kilometers south of the Gaza border. It is about as close as you can get to Gaza without actually entering it.
Yated was spared the worst of the October 7 carnage, according to local farmer Shai Avraham, thanks in part to a vigilant female tank commander from a nearby base who decided to fire upon a group of Hamas terrorists who were lurking near the community. She killed most of them, and while a few persisted in their attack, others fled back to Gaza and did not return. But the community was still evacuated — and there are still tomatoes to pick.
Volunteers pick tomatoes off the vine, Yated, Israel, November 15, 2023 (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
For six hours, the volunteers worked — filling crates with clusters of tomatoes, then tossing out any with obvious flaws before loading the crates on the back of a flatbed truck.
Farm workers load crates of freshly-picked tomatoes onto a flatbed, Yetad, Israel, November 15, 2023 (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
The volunteers played Israeli music and stopped occasionally to take selfies or to enjoy freshly-brewed cups of Turkish coffee, boiled on camp stoves.
The tomatoes, once loaded, are destined for the city of Rishon LeTzion, near Tel Aviv, where they will be distributed to markets across the rest of the country.
The destination of Brothers in Arms is less clear. The organization has put politics on ice. But it intends to pick up where it left off in opposing Netanyahu once the war is over — and now it is much more powerful.
Millions of Israelis have seen that, politics aside, this left-wing organization has delivered urgently needed services, and has provided its members with a sense of camaraderie and belonging.
If there is major change coming in Israeli politics, the seeds of that change may have been planted in the fields of Yated.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
