Volunteers help out on Israeli farms near Gaza border to save crops threatened by war

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Barak Halpern was planting zucchinis in southern Israel when a projectile exploded a few hundred metres away. He ducked, then returned to the soil.

“Dude,” he said, “they are also shooting at Tel Aviv. So what’s the difference?”

Besides, if he didn’t do the work, it’s not clear who would. The farmer who owned the field was dead, killed in the fighting with Palestinian militants who invaded Israel on Oct. 7. Most of the foreign workers whose labour underpinned the region’s agricultural industry fled after the attacks, which killed at least 33 Thais (another 22 have been taken hostage in the Gaza Strip).

So Mr. Halpern came to help, joining hundreds of people from across Israel who have mobilized into volunteer farming brigades made up of insurance agents, teachers, lawyer, tour guides and students like Mr. Halpern, who is doing a PhD in environmental engineering. He worked in the zucchini patch last week. On Tuesday, he worked alongside roughly a dozen other students at a pineapple farm, tearing apart the prickly saplings that will grow into the next fruit crop.

He considers it a way to help, but also to combat the helplessness of being a bystander to war.

“If I know that I can save some of the crop here, I would be happy,” Mr. Halpern said.

The mobilization of Israel’s farming dilettantes – many of them too old for military service – is part of an outpouring of civic participation accompanying Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks, with volunteers gathering to track hostages, raise money, secure equipment for soldiers and co-ordinate accommodations for evacuees.

It’s also a stark illustration of the limits of such generosity against the destructive upheaval Israel has endured, both from the initial attacks and the deadly war the country has waged in the weeks since.

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In the Eshkol Region, where the pineapple farm is located, farmers once employed almost 4,000 foreign workers, out of a total of 30,000 across Israel’s agricultural sector.

Less than a thousand remain in Eshkol, which is reeling after 185 of its residents were killed and 120 reported missing or taken hostage on Oct. 7. The region produces a third of Israel’s potatoes and 70 per cent of its tomatoes, some of which have rotted since the war began.

Even if there are hundreds of volunteers, “it’s not a substitute for the professional workers,” said David Alon, the deputy mayor of Eshkol.

No one can accurately estimate the impact of the war on agriculture in Israel, which produces roughly half of the food it consumes. But in Eshkol, “if you have 20 per cent of the employees, you can only produce 20 per cent of the area,” Mr. Alon said.

“It’s a huge problem. It’s not a small problem.”

Agricultural experts say Israel can use imports to make up for any declines in domestic production, although they worry that an expanded war with heavily armed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon could threaten ports.

Any long-term solution, Mr. Alon said, will require a national effort: negotiating with other countries to bring in new workers and providing enough compensation to farmers that the war does not further winnow their ranks. It may even require reviving the farming draft, like the one that obligated Ayal Kimhi to pick oranges 50 years ago, when he was a young man during the Yom Kippur War.

For now, though, none of those options appears imminent.

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“There’s a kind of chaos,” said Mr. Kimhi, now a scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and vice-president of the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research.

“Government is slow to respond,” he said. “Civil society is really driving everything right now.”

That includes people like Nancy Katz, a lawyer at a non-profit that specializes in fundraising. Since the beginning of the war, money has poured in to buy ballistic vests for soldiers, pay for children’s activities and fund the rebuilding that will be needed after the war.

On Tuesday, though, Ms. Katz was inside a greenhouse, filling containers with bright orange tomatoes.

“I thought these guys needed help. And I can pick tomatoes. I can’t do a whole lot else – but I can pick tomatoes,” she said.

She has taken two days off work in each of the past two weeks to come here, joined by her husband, her sister and her brother-in-law. Since the war began, groups organizing volunteers have proliferated on social media.

“I don’t like the desert that much, and I’m not crazy about heat,” Ms. Katz said. Her nail polish is wrecked, too. But “there’s a feeling of accomplishment you get when you work with your hands – and when you work with things that grow.”

She said picking tomatoes has engaged her competitive instincts, as she has sought to match the speed of the Thai workers who fled after the war began.

Guy Arnolds, whose family owns the tomato farm, says he understands why they left. Everyone was “in shock the first week,” he said.

The Gaza Strip lies only a few kilometres from his tomato greenhouse; one piece of debris, possibly from an intercepted rocket, fell on a field a half-kilometre away. The thud of explosions has grown commonplace. The quiet moments are worse. The 500 children who once lived in this moshav – or agricultural co-operative – have now been relocated elsewhere.

“I hear a lot of people who say they don’t want to come back,” Mr. Arnolds said.

The volunteers have brought new energy but have struggled to match those whose absence they are trying to fill. It takes two volunteers to do the work of one Thai person, Mr. Arnolds said.

Some work does not lend itself to amateur hands. Mr. Arnolds hasn’t been able to finish some planting because the nursery can’t find people to do the delicate work of handling seedlings.

He has discovered, meanwhile, that it’s best to give his volunteers tasks that are simple but rewarding, such as harvesting.

“It’s psychological,” he said. “They are working and can feel they are doing something.”

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Manual labour can still come as a shock. “It’s hard work,” said Dana Bromberg, a preschool teacher. “We prefer to have soft hands.” Nonetheless, she called in sick Tuesday to pick tomatoes. “After something like this has happened, we come together,” she said.

Some have more personal reasons for being here. One of the students working at the pineapple farm is from China, with parents from Xinjiang, the northeastern region of that country where Chinese authorities have responded with an iron fist to terrorist attacks. “What the Israeli people are facing, we had the same problem in Xinjiang,” said the student, whom The Globe and Mail is not identifying because of the risk of reprisal for speaking out.

At Tel Aviv University, volunteer farming has been a hot ticket, with sign-up sheets filling quickly.

Ari Spielman, a master’s student from New York, secured a slot Tuesday, boarding a bus that left at 7 a.m. Hours later, he was pulling pineapple saplings.

As an American citizen, “I wasn’t going to go fight,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow as he sipped from a water bottle. “But things needed to get done. This needed to get done.”