Democratic US congressional candidate Brad Lander said he was released from Israeli military detention with a warning after being detained alongside dozens of volunteers helping Palestinian farmers harvest olives in the occupied West Bank.
But several dozen others, including rabbis and international volunteers, remain in detention, according to Lander, who called for their release immediately after Wednesday’s incident.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
“I was released (from the Israeli army) with a ‘warning,’ apparently because of my public profile,” Lander wrote on X. “I told them I wasn’t even a member of Congress yet, just a candidate.”
Lander, a Jewish American and former New York City comptroller, was among about 80 volunteers arrested by Israeli soldiers and police near the village of Nahalin, outside Bethlehem, according to the Israeli organization Rabbis for Human Rights.
The group included American, Israeli, Palestinian, British and Canadian volunteers.
Becca Strober, a representative of the Protect the Harvest Coalition, which helped organize the olive harvest, told Al Jazeera that the group had been picking olives at the invitation of a Palestinian family for several hours when the Israeli army arrived.
“It was a nice, peaceful day,” he said. “There was no conflict. There was no settler violence. There was no violence of any kind.”
According to Strober, after a while, soldiers began checking volunteers’ ID cards and, soon after, issued an order declaring the area a closed military zone. They then arrested the group, first on the ground, then at a police station.
“Right now, everyone is still in custody except Brad Lander,” Strober said. “They made it very clear to him that they were allowing his release because he would probably be in Congress very soon.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, accused Lander of staging a “calculated political provocation,” alleging that he deliberately entered a restricted security zone without authorization.
“This was not about harvesting olives. This was about harvesting headlines,” the ministry said in a statement on
“Brad Lander came looking for a confrontation,” the statement said. “Now he’s pretending to be the victim.”
Anton Goodman, interim director of Rabbis for Human Rights, told Reuters that volunteers who were neither Israeli nor Palestinian citizens had to be transferred to an Israeli military base.
In a video posted to X from one of the buses, Lander said Israeli forces arrested the group after apparently being called to the area by settlement security personnel.
“We were arrested by the Israeli army for harvesting olives,” he said. “And let’s be clear, occupation is a crime under international law. Olive harvesting is not a crime under any law.”
It is unclear why the area was declared a closed military zone. Rabbis for Human Rights said the olive pickers had no way of knowing the order and offered to leave voluntarily when asked.
Lander said the volunteers were taken for processing but were not told if they were under arrest.
Lander, a vocal critic of Israel’s war on Gaza, is a former New York mayoral candidate and an ally of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He is now running as the Democratic candidate for New York’s 10th Congressional District in the November 3 U.S. midterm elections.
Writing on X after his release, Lander said Palestinians faced worse consequences every day.
“These detentions by (the Israeli army) are another attempt to undermine the rights of Palestinians to harvest their olive groves, to travel on their roads and to live in their homes,” he wrote. “Yet another element of increasing ethnic cleansing, and very clearly state-sponsored. »
Neither the Israeli government nor the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem immediately responded to a request for comment.
The volunteers had traveled to the West Bank to support Palestinian farmers during the annual olive harvest, amid a surge in settler violence, including several attacks in recent days targeting Palestinians and international observers.
Strober said that Wednesday was the first time a Palestinian olive-picking family had been able to access their own land since October 7, 2023, because violence in the area had made returning too dangerous.
“The fact that Brad was there, of course, made the situation more newsworthy, but we’ve been seeing this happen in the West Bank for years,” she said.
On Friday, an American photojournalist working for the Washington Post was beaten by Israeli settlers while covering the olive harvest. The next day, European diplomats and a French mayor are attacked by settlers during another harvest. Palestinians were also attacked in both incidents.
Israeli police announced Tuesday that they had arrested 10 people in connection with the attacks.
Gn usa
