TEL AVIV: Brad Lander, an ally of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani who is a Democratic candidate for the US Congress, was among 90 volunteers detained by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, according to American and Israeli rights groups.
Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli organization, said in a statement that Lander and other volunteers were accompanying Palestinian farmers harvest olives close to a village near Bethlehem before Israeli forces arrived and detained the group.
Israeli military and police forces told the volunteers that the area they were in was a closed military zone, which Rabbis for Human Rights said the group could not have known in advance.
Lander, a Jewish American and former New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate who has criticized Israel’s war in Gaza, later wrote in a post on X that he had been detained along with a group of rabbis and volunteers.
“We were simply harvesting olives in a grove near Nehalim in the West Bank. The occupation is a crime under international law. Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know,” he said.
Lander is the Democratic party’s nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district for the US House of Representatives in the November 3 midterm elections.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the chief executive of American rights organization T’ruah, who is among those detained, told Reuters the group had volunteered to leave the area but was instead put on buses by the Israeli forces and taken to a police station.
“We were obviously not doing anything violent but just the very act of picking olives together with Palestinian farmers was apparently disturbing for some,” said Jacobs, a 51 year-old conservative rabbi from Manhattan in New York City.
She said the group had been picking olives “very peacefully” with Palestinian farmers before Israeli forces arrived. Rabbis for Human Rights said Israeli forces arrived around two hours after the harvest began.
Among those detained are 33 US citizens, along with a number of British and Canadian citizens, Jacobs said.
There was no immediate comment from Israeli police, the military or the US Embassy in Jerusalem.
Jacobs said the group was placed on two buses before being taken to a police station. Some of those detained have been taken inside the police station, while others like Jacobs, were being held on a bus outside the stations, she said by phone. As far as she knew, the police had not made any formal accusations against the group and it was not clear to them why they were detained or if they would be charged, Jacob said.