The watchman

Yoel Zilberman, this year’s recipient of the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism, pioneered a movement to reconnect youth with the Land of Israel and protect the country’s farmers.

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Hashomer Hahadash at work on the land. (photo credit: Courtesy)
Hashomer Hahadash at work on the land.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
In 2007, Yoel Zilberman was serving in the elite naval commando unit, Shayetet 13. He was busy with an officers’ course and other strenuous responsibilities.
Then he heard his father was in trouble. “My father had lost all the profits for the year. It wasn’t because he was a bad farmer but because a Beduin family was [illegally] taking over my father’s fields.”
Zilberman’s family were ranchers and their cattle grazed on open range. Bit by bit their business was under assault. Thieves cut fences, cows were killed, fields were burned. “My dad turned to the police. At the station in Nazareth he was told that he could either pay protection money or give away his land. He was broken up about it. He said it was the end of the business,” recalls Zilberman.
For many men at the age of 22, with numerous other responsibilities, and in the army, that might be the end of the story. Sell the farm. Give up the land. Move to the city and retire, who wants the headache of trying to raise cattle in the face of such harassment? But Zilberman, who was born on Moshav Tzipori in the Lower Galilee and wanted to defend his parents’ land and livelihood, decided he would do what it takes to make things right.
“I took a flag from an officer on base and took an old car and I rode around my father’s field and built a small tent.” Every time he had leave from the army he would spend his time watching the land. He brought more than 40 books to read, he says.
“For two years I was still in the army and every weekend I would sleep in the field.”
Then something happened. Men began to join him.
First 30 and then 40 friends came. “They said they would volunteer and help my father and make sure he was not alone… after several months I heard from 40 more farmers [who wanted help].” Over the next year Zilberman’s initiative seemed to touch a nerve, as if the country was waiting for something like this to come along. A man living near Tiberias was spending all his free time in the fields trying to protect his land. His wife had told him “it’s your cows or men, we cannot live like this.” So he went to Zilberman. A man in the Negev who had made aliya a few years before was attacked and tied to a tree by thieves who stole his sheep and goats while he watched.
Eventually what came out of Zilberman’s efforts was the need to build a nonprofit organization, a movement dedicated to social activism, education and loving and defending the land: Hashomer Hahadash, the New Israeli Guardians.
ZILBERMAN IN some ways is the archetype of the individual that would lead a movement like this. His grandparents had come to Israel from Austria-Hungary and Romania in the wake of the Holocaust. As a teen he had studied at the iconically sunflower-shaped Moshav Nahalal in the Jezreel Valley. Before his army service he did a preparatory program at Ein Prat in the West Bank. As an officer in Shayetet 13 he lost six friends in the Second Lebanon War.
But he’s also a sort of enigma. A passionate reader of Rav Soloveitchik, the boyish and outwardly secular appearing Zilberman seems to want to rebuild an original Zionist ethos in the modern hi-tech state. He is an admirer of A.D. Gordon, who came to Ottoman Palestine in 1904. It was Gordon who wrote, “The Jewish people has been completely cut off from nature and imprisoned within city walls for two thousand years.”
Gordon prophesied that Jews must work the land to renew themselves as a nation. And yet although Gordon was a Labor Zionist, he remained ensconced in the religious world.
Hashomer Hahadash takes its name and its logo of a horseman from the original Hashomer, founded by Alexander Zaid in 1909. Zaid’s watchmen defended and guarded Jewish agricultural communities in the Galilee from 1909 to 1920. Zaid was killed in an attack by Arabs in 1938. But for the new watchmen, Zilberman is quick to point out this is not an anti-Arab movement and in fact tries to work with the Arab minority community to build relations and mutual respect. “It is not about the other side. It is about how we feel about the land. It is easy to say that it is against an enemy, but the biggest enemy is our weak connection to our identity. Like everywhere else in the world, when someone says it doesn’t belong to them then it will belong to someone else; we [ Jews] dreamed for 2,000 years to get back, but now we will make sure that the next generation will keep and create the fruits of the land.”
Since founding the organization in 2008 they have grown to take on more tasks than just patrolling and guarding fields at night. “We met hundreds of youth and spoke about this story, and we understood the population in Israel doesn’t hear anything about it.
We realized the youth, they never touch the land of Israel, they didn’t have experience working the Land of Israel and didn’t ask why we need the land.”
Zilberman fiddles with a pen as he speaks. He’s a modest man, secure in his vision, but almost reluctant to boast about it. He fits the cliché, “man of action, not words.” He tells the story of trying to discuss with youth about the early Zionist pioneers. “For them Gordon is the name of a pub, Katznelson is just a street,” referring to Berl Katznelson, a founder of Labor Zionism. He thinks a lot of young people know more about playing the game Farmville on a computer than actual farming.
Hashomer Hahadash set out a three-pronged program.
One side of the triangle would be the centrality of the Land of Israel. Second would come social activism, such as guarding fields and volunteering on farms. Third would be education, learning and reading. “Whether Maimonides or Ben-Gurion, from Moses Hess to Shlomo Artzi.” One almost wants to interject the line from The Big Lebowski, “3,000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax.” But this is Israel, not America; no one has heard of baseball player Sandy Koufax. And that matters to Zilberman also. “A young kid who is coming [to Israel from abroad] and having an experience, one thing that we deal with is that they might see Masada and the Western Wall, but in the end of the day they don’t feel it belongs to us. When they work the land, then they come and say that they worked hard and they felt that this tree that we worked on for hours or the terrace that someone helped build… that is the first time they say they can become part of this land, and they can build it with their own two hands.”
FOR THE past eight years, the organization has only grown. Around 10,000 volunteers came last year to work in agriculture in 50 locations around the country.
About 1,200 volunteered to do night patrols. There are 110 participants in a year-long service program for young leaders before their army service. Another 100 are involved in a post-army program called “Tent and Tower.” The name references the old Tower and Stockade settlements built between 1936 and 1939 that helped secure Jewish holdings in 57 locations, aiding the Zionist movement in its negotiations before the 1948 War of Independence.
International volunteers are coming as well. He estimates around 10 percent are from abroad. The volunteers are also a diverse group, with some 20% religious but most secular. “They come from places like Rehovot or Ra’anana, some of them are teachers or medical workers or work in hi-tech, many different types of people.
But at the end of the day they feel that this family farm in the Negev, which has 1,500 acres, that [the farmer] is keeping the land for them,” explains Zilberman.
Overall the organization claims to guard around 150,000 acres, 10 times the size of Tel Aviv, with 80 paid employees and a budget of NIS 23 million. It has assembled a board of directors with leaders from Israeli industry, former air-force members and even the son of legendary soldier and farmer Meir Har-Zion. Zilberman is quick to point out “we are not a vigilante organization” and his movement is apolitical.
But Zilberman has larger goals. “The vision is to keep the Land of Israel through social activism and education.”
He lays out six goals, including the desire to have 50,000 volunteers a year, 1,000 participants in educational programs and a youth movement, and to build awareness among two and a half million people. They will begin a new program in September called Adam Ve’adama (Man and Nature), whose name is borrowed from an A.D. Gordon book, where high school students in the Arava will work in the morning and study in the afternoon. Hashomer also seeks to have a practical impact as well, encouraging laws that provide harsher punishment for those who rustle cattle.
In a sense, what he is articulating is a desire to renew the connection with the land through the kind of program that influenced people who volunteered on kibbutzim in the 1960s and 1970s. There is a lot of that nostalgia for the past. After all, Israel already has a Labor Zionist youth movement called Hanoar Ha’oved Vehalomed, and it reminds one of the old Nahal military units, the “pioneering and fighting youth” that built so many communities in the 1950s.
But over the years these organizations either ceased to exist or exist in name only without the spirit of youthful energy that these new watchmen are trying to inculcate. Zionist founder Theodor Herzl’s aphorism “if you will it, it is no dream” seems to have found a welcome embodiment in this group of dedicated volunteers. At the moment, an hour into an interview with Zilberman, more prosaic problems present themselves.
He excuses himself to go pick up his children.
He may be only 30 years old, but he is a married man and has duties back home.