Congressional candidate Brad Lander said Wednesday that the Israel Defense Forces detained him in the occupied West Bank while he was participating in an olive harvest.
Lander, who is running in New York’s 10th District, said in an interview that he was later released with a warning.
Lander, a former New York City comptroller, said he was harvesting olives for Palestinians in the West Bank along with more than 40 international volunteers, including Americans, and 28 Israelis, who were affiliated with a coalition of human rights groups. Israeli authorities told him that his actions were illegal and that the group had been “causing a disturbance of public order,” he said.
“But I assure you, all we were doing was harvesting olives,” he said. “So if by ‘disturbance of public order’ they mean the order of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, I guess maybe, but we were very peacefully harvesting olives.”
Beck Strober, a spokesperson for Protect the Harvest, one of the groups involved in the volunteer effort, told NBC News on Wednesday afternoon that all but four of those who were detained have been released. The Israeli members of the group will not be allowed to return to the West Bank for 28 days, Strober said.
Lander later said on X that everyone in the Protect the Harvest delegation has been released but that the multiweek ban for Israelis in the group “means they will be unable to participate in the olive harvest.”
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The IDF said in a statement that soldiers, border police and other officers detained people harvesting olives “due to the security risk posed by conducting an uncoordinated harvest near an Israeli community.”
“Harvesting in this area requires a request to be submitted to the relevant authorities in advance of the start of the olive harvest season,” the IDF said. “This coordination is necessary to ensure the security of the area and maintain public order.”
Lander told NBC News that he was apparently released from detention because of his “public profile,” adding that Israeli authorities kept calling him “congressman.”
“I tried to explain to them I wasn’t a member of Congress, just a primary winner,” he said, referring to the Democratic primary this year. “If they don’t want a diplomatic or international incident, they should stop state-sponsored ethnic cleansing. Releasing me is not going to change the facts of occupation.”
Lander’s 10th District primary race against Rep. Dan Goldman was dominated by the candidates’ views about Israel. Both men are Jewish, and Lander has been more critical of Israel’s government and the war in Gaza, which he has said is a “genocide.”
The olive grove in which the group was volunteering had not been harvested since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, according to Lander and the spokesperson for Protect the Harvest. Lander said Palestinian farmers “haven’t felt safe to harvest their olive trees” because of the grove’s proximity to a nearby Israeli settlement.
Last week brought high-profile Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and others, including one in which Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine was injured and another that targeted European diplomats. Israeli police said this week that they arrested 10 people suspected of participating in the violence against Palestinians and others.
More than 900 Palestinians had been injured in settler attacks since the start of the year, a United Nations report said in July. The report said 76 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were killed by Israeli forces or settlers or died from their injuries since the start of the year.
Lander and other volunteers were detained after about two hours of harvesting, when, Lander said, the group spotted what he believed to be a security car from an Israeli settlement watching them. Shortly afterward, a group of IDF soldiers and police officers arrived and asked the group for passports, he said. Eventually, the harvesters were loaded onto a bus and driven to a military station in the West Bank.
The group was not asked to leave before being detained, Lander said, adding that if Israeli authorities had asked, “we would have left.”
The CEO of T’ruah, a Jewish human rights group, and 11 other U.S. rabbis affiliated with it were among those detained, a communications firm for the organization said in a news release.
In a statement, T’ruah CEO Rabbi Jill Jacobs called the IDF’s actions “an outrageous abuse of power, and part of a systematic, state-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing aimed at driving Palestinians from their land.”
“We will not be intimidated into silence,” she said later in the statement.
Lander previously posted that he was visiting the occupied West Bank with Protect the Harvest, which he said was “bringing people together from around the world to help Palestinian farmers harvest olives in the face of state-sanctioned settler terrorism.”
“Our goals for the trip are to help protect the olive harvest — and to shed a light on the reality of the occupation,” he said Monday on X.
Last year, Lander was detained with more than 70 other people, including about a dozen elected officials, as they tried to inspect the living conditions at an immigrant detention facility in New York City. He was found not guilty this year of misdemeanor charges related to the incident.
