Why would Israel bring state muscle to bear on Palestinian farmers who are not engaged in anything remotely resembling military activity? All farmers have felt, to varying degrees, the effect of Israeli policies on their ability to farm their land and take their produce to market, but the Nassar family has been cast in a nightmarish situation since 1991, the threat of confiscation looming over their heads. They ask for international intervention to resolve their dilemma, and we have a moral obligation to offer it.  

Daoud Nassar’s farm is located six miles southwest of Bethlehem, in what is referred to as Area C. It has been a family farm for more than 100 years. The peace project Tent of Nations is located on the 100-acre farm; it is a center where internationals visit and local empowerment programs for women and girls are run. The family registered the property during the Ottoman period and again during the British Mandate; they updated their land documents in a Bethlehem court in 1987 and 2000.

In light of the family’s obvious care to ensure that their documentation is up-to-date, it is hard to believe that since 1991, the farm has been at risk of confiscation and demolition. The Israeli government demands that the family re-register the property, and the family has tried to do so since 2006, but the process gets stalled and they are told they must start all over again. And they do.

In 2019, the family was finally told that the application was complete, and so they waited for a response. Two years later, they are still waiting. In the meantime, the farm has been attacked; arson destroyed around 1,000 fruit trees in May 2021, and the Israeli military has brought bulldozers to the farm and destroyed trees in the process.

The harassment of the Nassar family by the Israeli military and nearby settlers seems designed to encourage the family to give up and leave the area; the farmland would then be taken over by a nearby settlement, used to create roads and checkpoints, or put to some other purpose benefiting Israel’s Jewish citizens. The state was not counting on the tenacity of the Nassar family, which has no intention of being stripped of its patrimony.