Rabbi Doug Alpert, the leader of Congregation Kol Ami in Kansas City, Missouri, was among around 80 people detained by the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank on Wednesday. He was released after about seven hours in custody.
Alpert is in the West Bank with an organization called T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights on a mission to help Palestinians with their olive harvests.
“(Palestinian farmers) have been not able to get to their olive groves because of egregious Israeli policies, barriers to them getting there, even arrests,” he told KCUR via a zoom call from the West Bank on Thursday. “And that's been going on for a long, long time. But now, in addition to that, you had settler violence against Palestinian families, and they have been really, I mean, unable to get to their olive groves, and olives is really the main economy for Palestinians in the West Bank.”
After two days harvesting olives without any issues at all, the Israeli military arrived and told everyone that it was a closed military zone.
“(We) immediately left, which is what we were told we would need to do if they showed up and said it's a closed military zone. So, we left, and we walked back down through the olive groves, back down the road to the bottom of a hill where our busses had been left, fully expecting we were going to get on our busses and go back to our respective guesthouses.”
But upon arriving back to the area by their busses, he said there was a “massive presence” of Israel Defense Forces soldiers and Israeli police waiting there for them.
“We were learning that they were going to put us on a police bus, detain us, and haul us over to the police station.”
He then said that a human rights attorney, who was assigned to their case in Israel, informed him and the other non-Israelis who were detained that they would likely be deported.
“(We were told) that would involve an interrogation through immigration by the airport, that we would be forced to stay there until we would get on a plane that they would put us on, and then somebody else had to go get all our belongings out of our guest house and take them to the airport separately, which of course worried a lot of us,” Alpert said. “And we had this understanding for a number of hours. And then like, magically, they said, ‘Guess what? You're released.’”
After being released, Rabbi Alpert continued helping with the harvest at another olive grove the next day.
“Everyone, including me, is convinced that the real purpose of what they did to us on the prior day was to deter us and others from going back out to harvest olives. So, the message we wanted to give is you're not going to deter us. It's not going to happen.”
- Rabbi Doug Alpert, leader of Congregation Kol Ami
