Palestinian farmers rebuild what Israeli settlers destroy in West Bank

Burin, occupied West Bank – Ghassan Najjar’s phone starts ringing the moment the Israeli army rolls into Burin. It happens most days now – the whirring convoy of armoured personnel carriers working its way through the village’s narrow streets as soldiers fan out to shutter shops one by one.

Along with roughly two dozen other farmers, Najjar is a member of Burin’s Land and Farming Cooperative. They know that they don’t have the capability to fight back against Israel’s military might with arms so instead focus on the land and keeping their connection to it.

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But in addition to the military raids, they also face settler attacks, part of a pogrom against Palestinians that has reached fever pitch across the West Bank. Those settlers live in outposts and settlements built on occupied Palestinian land, which makes them illegal under international law.

On July 13, a settler tried to graze his flock inside one of the cooperative’s five greenhouses. Cooperative members struggled to keep the livestock away until Israeli border police arrived. Najjar recalled challenging the officers over why a settler had been permitted onto land the army itself had designated a closed military zone, from which Israeli citizens are, on paper, also barred.

The settler left angry. In Arabic, he told Najjar: “You’ll see.”

The next night, roughly 10 settlers arrived, gutting all five of the cooperative’s greenhouses, cutting away their plastic sheeting and destroying their irrigation networks.

The damage, by the cooperative’s estimate, ran to roughly 30,000 shekels (about $10,000) in plastic sheeting alone. About 9,000 tomato seedlings worth 8,000 shekels ($2,670) had been bought that same morning for planting. They died within hours because there was nowhere else to put them.

For a cooperative that pools land, labour and produce among about 25 families, the loss reverberated beyond the five greenhouses themselves. “We’re talking about 25 families working inside the cooperative,” Najjar said. “This year is the most difficult year for the cooperative. We’re facing many attacks by the settlers and the army.”

Just weeks later, Burin lost more than 1,500 olive and other trees, according to Najjar. Some were burned by settlers. Others were cut down or uprooted by military bulldozers along a local route accessible to Israelis but not Palestinians.

The wheat harvest fared little better: Of the 10,000sq metres (2.5 acres) the cooperative planted, 7,000sq metres (1.7 acres) were burned before farmers could harvest the crop this summer. These days, most of Burin’s farmland sits in closed military zones – renewed, Najjar said, every month or two. On paper, such orders are issued on security grounds to keep out attacking settlers; in practice, they apply overwhelmingly to the Palestinian landowners the settlers are attacking.

The pattern extends far beyond Burin. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded 1,418 settler attacks this year resulting in casualties or property damage across the West Bank through July, a rate that is on pace to eclipse 2025’s record high of 1,836 such attacks. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other human rights organisations have accused Israeli authorities of enabling settler attacks and described their cumulative effect on Palestinian communities as contributing to forced displacement.

It is in this context that Najjar and the cooperative’s members have developed what they call the “Tom and Jerry Programme” after the cartoon.

“We go to the land early every morning,” he explained. “When the army comes, we run away. And when the army goes, we come back again.”

“Even if we don’t have planting or harvesting to do on the land, we [go to] drink coffee – to tell the settlers and the army that this is our land and we’re not going to leave it,” he said.

Building towards ‘food sovereignty’

Najjar founded the Land and Farming Cooperative in March 2020, weeks before COVID-19 lockdowns reached the West Bank. It started with five members and now counts about 25, 17 of them women, who farm roughly 25,000sq metres (6 acres) around Burin together.

The idea, he said, was never simply agricultural. “We’re not just a cooperative that plants vegetables and sells them,” Najjar said. “For us, the cooperative straddles the economic and the political because everything is connected.”

He described the cooperative as fighting on three fronts at once: the Israeli occupation, what he calls the “bureaucracy” of the Palestinian Authority and the “umbrella” of capitalism and the NGO funding structures that come, in his telling, with strings attached.

Fifteen percent of everything the cooperative sells goes back into the village, funding children’s and women’s programming. Twenty families it considers most in need once received free vegetables outright. The cooperative has since shifted towards helping those families cultivate small plots of their own under what members call their “don’t give me fish; teach me to fish” programme.

“This is the real food sovereignty,” Najjar said. “People who don’t eat from what they’ve grown will never have real freedom.”

Before joining, new members undergo six months of training covering both the political economy of the occupation and the practicalities of agroecology, including how to treat soil and pest problems without resorting to chemicals. Every two weeks, the cooperative meets to plan their work. At the end of each month, members evaluate what succeeded.

Much of the vision for the cooperative, Najjar said, was drafted while he attended what he calls “the Palestinian school of revolution”: Israeli prison. Two months after the cooperative was founded, Najjar was placed under administrative detention, under which Israeli authorities hold Palestinians without charge or trial and detention orders may be renewable indefinitely. Najjar spent roughly a year in prison, four months of it in isolation.

“In isolation, I thought a lot about the cooperative because, to be honest, it gives you the time to think,” he said. “I wrote all the procedures and the goals for the cooperative – exactly what we needed.” By the time he was released, cooperative members had built two additional greenhouses and brought three more plots of land under cultivation in his absence.

“The cooperative is not for us,” he said. “If Ghassan gets arrested, if Ghassan dies, if Ghassan is travelling, the cooperative doesn’t close. It’s for the farmers, for Burin, for whoever believes in freedom and food sovereignty.”

Ghassan Najjar, a member of the Burin Land and Farming Cooperative [Al Jazeera]

‘We prefer to die on our land’

By Najjar’s count, the July attack was the seventh time the cooperative has had its greenhouses vandalised or destroyed. Asked what drives members to keep rebuilding structures that may simply be torn down again, he returns, over and over, to dignity.

“This is the work between the evil and the right. You have to decide which side you’re going to be on,” he said. “We decided to be at the front of the struggle because this is our land. We connect our dignity to the land, and I don’t think anyone in this world can live without dignity.”

As closed military zones have become the norm, Burin – sandwiched between the notoriously violent settlements of Yitzhar and Har Brakha and the Givat Ronen outpost – has seen 13 outposts established or expanded in recent months, by Najjar’s count. But as people in the village have shifted from regarding his politics with bemusement to respect, Najjar sees the cooperative’s persistence as proof of a more fundamental victory.

“The real occupation is not when they create the checkpoint and invade the village,” he said. “The real occupation is if they occupy your mind. When you are waking up in the morning and working your land – this is the real freedom.”

For now, that resolve manifests in early morning “Tom and Jerry” trips to their lands and in replacing what was destroyed alongside building a fence organisers hope will at least slow the next attack.

“We prefer to die on our land rather than accept another Nakba,” Najjar said. “We work as a family, we work as comrades and we work for freedom.

“We’re not working just for economic reasons or for ‘peace’,” he added. “F*** ‘peace’. I care about freedom. And when you work the land, you feel you have freedom, even if you are under attack by the settler.”