Our first activity of the day was helping a farmer who produces lettuce. On the bus farm, our guide explain more about what is happening in Israel today.

Recent survey has Bennett most popular. He recently served as Prime Minister, but lasted only a year. He is national religious right but more rational. At one point said he wanted to annex area C which is the Israeli controlled part of West Bank. Surveys like these show that Israel has moved significantly to the right because of what happened on October 7. However, Netanyahu is extremely unpopular. 

Not all serve in the army. Only a little over 50%. Reserve army is about 400,000. Israel called up 330,000. Standing army is 300,000. LGBTQ serve since there is no regulation or concern about this. However, the Government is not able to supply required number of soldiers. Ultra Orthodox do not serve in spite of the courts ruling that they need to. Netanyahu’s government is trying to pass a law exempting them from service. This is not right. Not only are they exempt from the service but a lot of money right now is being diverted to ultra Orthodox causes . Just recently there was a little bit of a crisis in the government because Netanyahu withdrew a bill to allow the orthodox Rabbinate to pay more rabbis. This did not sit well with his religious partners. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be a big enough crisis to bring them the government. 

There is not enough affordable housing in Israel. 90% of land is state land where you can’t build without state approval. It is a state problem. Supply and demand issue. Israelis earn 60% of US. Cars and gas twice US. Now because of the war, the periphery of the country is unlivable. Israel has the highest birthrate in developed world.

Now back to the farmer who lives near Bet Shemesh and has over 25,000 lettuce plants. The plants are grown in forms that are floated in water. So picking them was not very difficult because you didn’t have to bend down to the ground. I also helped place lettuce starts in the forms. The farmer and his wife work at the farm on their own since they are unable to get any help at this time. There are some neighbors that also come over to help. I really enjoyed this activity as it was extremely educational. I never knew lettuce could be grown this way. It makes a lot of sense.

We then went to visit a Zak’a, a group of 3500 volunteers mostly men who rescue bodies. They will go anywhere in world to help with the recovery of bodies due to earthquakes, avalanches, etc. They were called into action on October 7 and needed to go as quickly as possible to prevent Hamas from taking bodies as hostage. Hamas has done it in the past. The woman volunteer that talk to us was very outspoken. She was particularly concerned about Israel being accused of genocide. If Israel wanted to commit genocide, she said, they could kill all Gazans in a matter of days. The Hamas Charter calls for destruction of Israel. That is genocide. Hamas dressed the dead in Hamas clothing so Israel would have difficulty identifying dead. One dead girl was surrounded with hand grenades and then a cabinet was put over her body so that rescuers would be blown up. Dak’a is trained to look for these kinds of things. They also discovered many booby trapped doors to houses.

After this activity, we were taken back to the hotel to check out since this is the last day of the solidarity tour. I moved my stuff to the Airbnb where I am going to stay until Thursday. I then met up with the group at the Jaffa gate in the old city.

From the Jaffa gate, we went up to Hebrew University on Mount Scopus overlooking the Old City. We discussed this week’s Torah portion where Moses sends out spies to scout out the promised land. We discussed that we can think of ourselves as these spies who have come to Israel, and now must report back to our families and friends at home. The question is how do you talk to people that have a different viewpoint than you? That is not an easy question. We discussed three techniques. One is to judge generously. The other two is to reject thought police and finally to ask good questions. We then discussed our feelings about our experience. It was obvious everybody has been deeply moved. We have lots of questions and obviously it is going to take time for us to absorb everything that we have seen and heard in these past five days. We finished the evening with a delightful dinner off of Jaffa Road. After dinner, I left the group and took the light rail to my Airbnb.