Nearly 80 activists engaged in a “protective presence” activity, attempting to protect Palestinian olive harvesters from settler attacks, have been detained by the Israeli military. The group comprised both American and Israeli activists and notably included a large number of American rabbis and New York Democratic House nominee Brad Lander, who is also Jewish. Most (if not all) of the detainees were released by Wednesday night. In official statements, the IDF claimed that harvests in the area required coordination with Israeli authorities, which the farmers did not obtain. Lander rejected this argument, saying “We were on private Palestinian land. We were with the farmers whose land it is. There’s no obligation to coordinate with the Israeli military.”
Two Israeli lawyers who work on similar detention cases described the mass detention as the largest directed at activists in the West Bank in at least a decade. Protective presence activities like the one the activists were engaged in take on a special significance during the increased violence of the olive harvesting season as a means to protect farmers and allow them to conduct their harvests. This arrest also occurred against a backdrop of increasingly strained relations between the United States and Israel, with the beating of American photojournalist Heidi Levine last Friday drawing a strong condemnation from the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. Ambassador Huckabee is generally regarded as hardline pro-Israel, but he denounced Friday’s attack as a “despicable act of terror”, using terrorism-related language that in the past was almost completely reserved for describing the actions of Palestinian militant groups.
A team from NPR were the only American journalists on-site to witness the mass detentions. Reporter Ruth Sherlock describes the scene, with first drones appearing over the harvesting site, then a build-up of IDF, Israeli security forces, and settlement security, before IDF troops came down and ordered the activists to leave, declaring the area a “closed military zone”. While Sherlock described this kind of eviction as “seemingly normal” during the olive harvest, what came next was unusual, a large bus arrived and took the now detained activists away to be processed.
The reasons for this action could be broad, but it appears likely that this is an attempt by the Israeli government to project power ahead of elections scheduled for October 27th. Polls in this election will close at 10 PM local time, or 3 PM EDT.
https://www.npr.org/2026/10/21/nx-s1-6010460/brad-lander-detained-west-bank-israel-palestinians
