We arrived at the envelope at sunrise, making sure to drive according to the instructions recorded for us by Hovav Ofer from Sde Nitzan, because Route 232 is closed to traffic and Waze has its own roads, extending the journey by at least an hour. He said he would wait for us after the Tze'elim Bridge, and from there he would take us by shortcut. Every now and then some white Toyota pickup truck crosses the road, like a Regards from hell. Etiel, the photographer, says these should be outlawed.
From Kibbutz Borders emerges a motorcyclist dressed in black, also sending some chills of panic through his body. "That's how it is now," Orna Ofer tells me as we sit in the garden of the house in Sde Nitzan, a moshav where most of the members have evacuated to hotels. She says that a few days ago she was driving and some Miloamnik with a rifle followed her on the road, and even though she knew he was a Miloamnik she could not be afraid when he entered.
They met in London. Both worked at El Al at the time. An amateur immediately told her that his dream was to be a farmer, but she didn't take it seriously. When he enrolled in agricultural studies, the furthest she could imagine was a farm in Rashpon. In '88, they arrived at Sde Nitzan, the moshav established by Anglo-Saxons in the early 70s, which became famous in those years for the glass greenhouses built there by Eddie Peretz, a New Zealander who came with an orderly doctrine on growing tomatoes for export.
Female officers' course cadets, armed with rifles, peer out of well-kept gardens who know how to tell about the beneficial soil of the western Negev. Cars patrol endlessly. A security bustle that breeds some stress, along with a sense of security.
Like every year, last Friday Asaf Farhi held the mango celebrations for his team from Sayeret Matkal. One family stayed with the Ofarim in the room of Roi, the eldest of their three children, who was on his way back from Nepal and now serves in Gaza. On Saturday morning, when the shooting began, they called for guests to come and stand with them in the hallway. A remnant of the agency house built of cast concrete, which the Home Front Command said was enough to do the job. In the meantime, and considering the fact that no fall was experienced, it can be determined that the experiment was successful.
"What would help to see black?" Hovav and Orna Ofer, Photo: Etiel Zion
Sde Nitzan is the meat of the Cluster Council, but is located 200 meters outside the seven kilometers that define the envelope. 200 meters were enough for Israeli governments to leave them without eligibility for protection. 200 meters, because of which Mayor Gadi Yarkoni finds himself knocking on every table, so that funding will be found for hotels housing the evacuees from the moshav.
An amateur says he realized something was wrong. That something about the all-too-familiar melody of war sounded strange to him. After that, the sound of small arms fire began and it was clear to him that it wasn't one of ours, "because the IDF doesn't fire automatically, and the sound wasn't like that of the M-16. There was something more opaque about him," he analyzes with a kind of precision that will be repeated during the day when, in honor of the 2023 harvest, we went to visit the olive people of the region.
The frenzy of gunfire did not stop, the two girls who no longer live in the moshav did not stop calling, to find out what was happening, son Roy announced that his plane that took off from Dubai on the way to Israel had been returned and Orna felt like Ari in a bracket. She, who follows a routine of training, knocked a run down the street to the Farhi family home and found all the children gathered in the living room and the men, veterans of Sayeret Matkal, patrolling around with pitchforks and axes.
In the afternoon they decided to leave through the fields towards Sde Boker. She could hardly convince Hovav to come with them. Ross, the dog who never leaves the house, didn't understand what they wanted from him. Two days passed before an amateur announced that this was it, he was coming home. Since then, Orna has been on the line between Be'er Sheva, where their little Shira lives and studies, and the home in the moshav. She spends entire days in Soroka's NICU, while an amateur scrambles workers into the territories. Save as much as possible out of the ground.
A man who smiles this life even where it hurts most. The more stressed the world around him, the more he spreads some calm and feels like walking by his side all the time, everywhere. "Don't you panic? Not afraid?" I try to pry, maybe after all. "It's not something I can recognize inside me. I went through several events in the Peace of the Galilee, go know what it did, what it left. I have to say the sentence of my father before he passed away, a Lehi man who fought all his life, 'Actually, pass the time. That's life.'"
Nir Bitan: "We won't get through this if we're not optimistic. We owe it to our children. Now I just miss a simple routine, the kids who go, come back and complain about the fact that the food doesn't taste good. To go without looking back."
A few minutes with the fawns are enough to know that an amateur is not here to flip through life. A curious, knowledge-hungry man who signed inventions and developments related to the world of agriculture. From sulfur evaporation to kits that allow significant shortcuts in greenhouse construction.
It should have been his mango year. The first time he will pick from the fruit, but then comes "Black Friday" - that's what he calls Hamsin, who struck the fruit a month before the war and left huge kisses on 20 percent of the fruit in black.
"What good would it do to see black?" he smiles as we walk among the olive trees, where some of the olives are already dying to come down from the tree. But only now is he done with the pineapple and is organizing for workers to finish with the mangoes, and only then will he turn to olives, which in some vineyards suffered from durera, a fungal disease that usually occurs in places where potatoes are grown.
The olive harvest near Gaza, photo: Etiel Zion
The "oil of the gospel" is called its oil, which has a complexity that says its own with great delicacy. Oil he has been stopping since the day he started at Nir Bitan, the one whose parents opened an olive press 20 years ago in Moshav Yoshivaya, just a stone's throw from Netivot.
Nir, who went outside that Saturday to find out the meaning of this strange shooting - and then saw in the street two girls and a boy in strange makeup, who seemed lost to him. He called them in, because it was dangerous outside, and they told him something that sounded like a half-hallucination about a party they had fled from. They said they had no one to call because their parents were religious, and asked him to help them return home to Kiryat Arba.
Tells of friends who don't go the day without half a bottle of whiskey and then, in a cracked voice, he adds: "We won't get through this if we're not optimistic. We owe it to our children. Now I just miss a simple routine, the kids who go, come back and complain about the fact that the food doesn't taste good. To go without looking back."
Nir Bitan says that he is a man of peace who sobered up because he understood that this was a religious war, and then adds: "When Negev, my eldest, was small and I was sick, she would tell me, 'Dad, if you smile you'll get well faster.' We'll stay here, stop oil and grow, and we'll smile again."
"I'll open and taste"
In 2016, when Shlomi Ozan of Ein HaBasor started producing olive oil, all the people around him pressured him that it was a problematic livelihood. So he decided to call his business "Hallelujah." He thought that if he needed export, it would be a name that would appeal to evangelicals in America, who were pouring a sea of money into Jewish businesses in the Holy Land.
But "Hallelujah" worked out within the borders of the country. 40 dunams of Pishulin, Barnea, Suri and Picual he grows on his own land in the moshav. He buys the rest from other growers in the area. Makes beauty of oil. "Lucky," I say, adds something about the fact that all the flames of the past few days align with the evangelical end-times vision of the War of Gog and Magog, after which the surviving Jews will take on faith in Jesus. "Totally," he laughs.
In two weeks, he is supposed to start the helicopter. Like many other towers in the south, it relies on Bedouin contractors. The horror, which did not differentiate between the peoples living in the Negev, seemed to scrub with blood the tension that had developed in the region between farmers and members of the diaspora in the days before the war.
Ozan, 41 years old and a third-generation farmer, came to Ein HaBesor in the late 80s. He grew up not far away, in Moshav Gilat near Ofakim. His grandfather, Aharon Ouzan, an immigrant from Tunisia who was one of the founders of the moshav, served as a minister in the Golda and Rabin governments until he left the party in 1981 and founded Tami with Abuhatzira. "I am his political failure," the grandson tells me. "My inclination has always been to the right. From the beginning, I thought there was a war of civilizations here, that we would forever live by the sword."
"We're still in the chaos." Shlomi Ouzan, Photo: Naama Caspi
His attentiveness to his senses regarding the olive proved itself on the morning of October 7. His ex-wife was in Greece and the children slept with him. "I have a 9-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old boy, and for several years I've been anxious that they'll be taken to Gaza," he says. "Like everyone else, I woke up from the sound of crazy shelling. 20 minutes, half an hour, something you realize is not ordinary. I put the children in the safe room and then, in some WhatsApp group, someone wrote that there was a rumor about terrorists.
"I immediately understood they were coming. I took the children out of the safe room, put them in the car, and they didn't understand why I was suddenly taking them out like that with sirens. We flew to Moshav Gilat, to my parents' house. I wanted to go back and get clothes, but by then it was clear that the road was out of the question. It was a crazy, delusional action. I've never, in my entire life, been scared away by the color red."
Shlomi Uzan: "I immediately understood that they were coming. I took the children out of the safe room, they didn't understand why I was taking them out in the middle of the sirens, and we flew to Moshav Gilat, to my parents' house. It was a crazy, delusional action. I've never, in my whole life, been scared away by the color red."
He was not in the moshav for two weeks, where the alert squad prevented the terrorists from entering. Most of the time he is on the line between Eilat, where the evacuees from Ein HaBasor were housed, and Gilat, where the children are with his ex-wife, who lost her cousin in Kibbutz Nir Oz.
"Now I'm sitting on the porch of the house, and all that goes through my mind is the massacre my friends went through here," he says. "In Eilat I had some optimism. We will have to get used to the area again, but now everything is so fresh. We are still in the chaos, and everything depends on what happens to Gaza after this operation. If there really is confidence that people will be able to send children to school and let them play outside. I'll stay here, that's clear to me. I'll open and plant. That's the only answer."
"As one piece"
We are on our way to Lapidot Camp, to Zohar Belinsky's olive grove, a few minutes from Sderot. For years, the Heletz oil field operated there, from which oil was pumped until the ground was emptied.
Etiel's press card opens part of Route 232 to us. The one that so many times, in days of quiet and in days of war, we drove on it. On summer and winter days, when it is the red anemones that sets the earth on fire. Now traveling on it involves permits. Checkpoints are scattered along the inferno. Passengers and passengers and it goes on, perforated cars, tears of clothes, cans of drink. Fragments of life are scattered along the roadside. How long the grip of terror they knew there. Never-ending.
Here and there the green insists on its own in the world. Green for the bushes and green on the sign at the entrance to Kibbutz Be'eri, which remains standing in this black. In the app Color Red, the whole area is a shooting range, but inside the moving car it is like non-existent. In the seconds of reaction in this area, there's really nothing we can do. In the end, it's us and luck.
Here and there the green insists on his. Agricultural crops near the Gaza Strip, this week, photo: Etiel Zion
The Sword Symphony never stops playing in the sky as we pass by Sderot. "How lucky that there were no classes that day," Etiel says, lighting another cigarette. For four years he studied at Sapir College, lived on the levels, then in Ruhama, which now the imagination wishes to rest for a moment in the slips of its badness. To take a quiet moment amidst the drumming of war.
"We'll drive in my van," declares Zohar Belinsky, holding a cabbage cutting knife that looks like an old-world deaf craft. When I called to schedule with him, he asked me to arrive early, because he has a funeral in the rabbis and a transport of hot food to Barry. 65 years old, from Kochav Michael, a moshav that has been operating for two weeks in a kitchen based entirely on donations.
On the right is the Gvaram Forest, on the left forces are deployed under camouflage nets, and it takes the eye a moment to understand exactly what it sees. The phone rings, Dad Belinsky is on the line. Sounds annoyed. At the age of 93, it is not missiles and sirens that worry him, he just wants to know exactly where to bring the big chant.
The road curves when opposite, on a hill, an olive grove is revealed. Like a landscape painting that takes all the time for itself. For years he focused on growing orchards, until 15 years ago he was captivated by the magic of the olive, which does not always make life easy. Certainly not this year. "Now it's me, my son Amit and five Thais I share with the neighbors." The harvest is carried out by hand and with sticks striking the fruit, some of which has already reached its conclusion a few days ago. "You get by with what's there," he says. "Regardless of the war, it's been a drake year in terms of the amount of fruit, but because of the crisis in Europe at least we could make money on oil properly."
Among the trees walks heavily Dam, a large black dog. Zohar says that in the sirens there is no one more miserable than him, "an anxious dog." For years Zohar has lived in this area. His phone has Gazan numbers on it. "They are all Fatah members, but I dare not call. They are poor too. There, if someone talks uninterested, he gets shot in the knee. There were years when they tried to import all kinds of things from here, and Hamas put such taxes on them that it wasn't worth it."
"Now it's me, my son Amit and five Thais." Zohar Belinsky and the dog Dam, photo: Etiel Zion
When I ask if he feels compassion for the sights coming from there, he replies, "If I make the distinction between them and Hamas then of course I do, but now I have to see them all as one piece."
"No passwords"
I taste picual from the tree, a variety that brings some sweetness, not as firm as all olives, when Belinsky says he would love to try working with volunteers. That he is beginning to hear good things in the industry, and that it is hard not to be impressed by the speed of reaction of Adi Na'ali, the manager of the olive branch, who two months after returning to the position he had previously held, was caught up by the war.
Zohar Belinsky: "I have numbers of Gazans, all Fatah members, but I don't dare call. They are poor too. There, if someone talks uninterested, he gets a bullet in the knee. There were years when they tried to import from here and Hamas put such taxes on them that it wasn't worth it."
It took him two days to get out of the shock and start building a volunteer network. After that, the brothers joined the war room, through them to other bodies whose logistics is the language they speak, and together they created a mechanism that cross-references the needs of the growers with the volunteers. He knows very well that goodwill will not always align with the physical difficulty involved in the work of the harvest. With the deployment of nets that weigh quite a bit, collecting olives from the ground, standing for long periods with manual fortification in the air, not to mention punching rods. What began with great doubts is gaining momentum, attracting more growers, more private initiatives in the olive industry and in the agriculture industry as a whole.
"It's starting to look like something that could save us," Belinsky says, and when I tell him about the Brothers in Arms volunteers who did an excellent job in the lettuce fields of the envelope, he says it's hard for him now to see shirts from the protest. He is fully aware that many of the protest operations rooms enabled the civil organization that has been moving the country for two weeks, but he "doesn't like labels. Come as people, without slogans."
And you are not angry with the government?
"I have anger at the government, anger at the army and intelligence, and anger at anyone who transferred money endlessly into the hands of Hamas. For whoever is satisfied will not make war, because he will have something to lose. But what will it help me now?! We'll end the war and give everyone who needs a kick home."
It's 11:00 when the world stops. Thais sit down to eat. A picnic among the trees from which the smells of the distant homeland rise. Between broken Hebrew and English, I try to have a conversation, to ask about the fear, but they want to take the questions to them. To know if I have ever been to Isan, if the food there was not for me too spicy.
Zohar Belinsky: "I have anger at the government, the army and intelligence. Anger at anyone who transferred money endlessly into the hands of Hamas, because whoever swears will not make war. But what will it help me now?! We'll end the war and give anyone who needs a kick home."
"Photograph them working," Zohar urges me, "so that other Thais see that there is nothing to fear." But he, too, knows that he has no chance in the face of the sounds of gunfire they heard on the bloody Saturday, against the images that come from the massacre in which Thais were also murdered and kidnapped. That in the face of the king's call, in front of the phone calls from his parents and wife that Lila no longer sleeps, it will be difficult to convince them to stay, no matter how much he tries to embrace with money, sympathy or attention.
And I think that perhaps, from this shocking moment, which takes place between harvesting and sowing, a moment when the territories are under siege and the Thais are abandoning, from the spirit of volunteerism that grips the people and fills the territories with working hands, the Hebrew farmer, the one who worked his land himself, will be reborn.
A worker in a field near Gaza, photo: Etiel Zion
"No other choice"
Like the olives from the Belinsky vineyard, we continue to Kibbutz Bror Hayil, to the Shaar Hanegev olive press opened five years ago by Zuri Shtevi and Arik Soroker. Both of them from fence settlements met completely by chance at farmers' markets where they would come to sell their wares. Zuri sold olive oil and Arik cheeses, which he then produced from organic goat's milk.
Most of the towers in the area have not yet organized workers, so in the meantime they are opening there on demand. The threshold from customers is to bring good quality olives and present a certificate that there is no fear of foreskin. 3.5 tons of oil per hour is the maximum output in the place, but Arik and Zuri want to make it clear that for them it is quality that counts, not quantity, even though it is clear to everyone present that at the moment nothing is going to challenge these numbers.
"We have customers from the Gaza Strip," says Zuri, "but I'm afraid to call. If someone is gone, I don't want to know. I won't stand for it. You can't imagine what stories you're hearing here."
I think about the ancient world where that's what wars looked like. Raped, slaughtered, burned, looted. But then no one recorded or reported remotely in real time. A few days ago I heard Yuval Noah Harari say that Hamas made sure to document all the atrocities in great detail in order to murder any chance for peace.
When I asked Hovav Ofer if it worked for him, he told me that in the end there was no other choice. That now everyone is talking with blood in their mouths, that he doesn't live under the illusion that the potato fields will reach the sea of Gaza, but that "in the end we have an amazing people, that's what saves us."
Nir Bitan says that he is a man of peace who sobered up because he understood that this was a religious war, and then adds: "When Negev, my eldest, was small and I was sick, she would tell me, 'Dad, if you smile you'll get well faster.' We'll stay here, stop oil and grow, and we'll smile again."
To volunteer to help Olive Branch growers click here
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