*Erez Avrahami’s Facebook Post:*
"For about 40 years I was in agriculture. From the day I was born, I grew up in a farming family.
"From the moment I was born, I grew up in agriculture that lives in fear of Arabs — fear of thefts, fear of vandalism and destruction of property and equipment.
"One of my childhood memories is going down with Dad to close the shutters on the chicken coops. He would skillfully hold a small cocked rifle in one hand while lowering the shutters.
Another memory: One day he came up from the young olive grove he had planted and told us that the Arabs had chopped down the trees. They came at night with axes and cut down tree after tree. They made sure to cut them below the graft, so that even if the trees regenerated, they wouldn’t bear fruit. That orchard still exists around the greenhouse to this day — and it doesn’t produce any fruit.
"Another time, I remember them destroying a plot of Godetia flowers that was intended for export. They came at night and cut the support nets that held up the branches. Everything collapsed and the whole plot was ruined.
"They stole everything — crops, chickens, irrigation equipment, plastic sheets, nets, clothes, and tools. In the year we closed the farm, they stole 2 tractors, 2 small tractors, and 2 cars.
If I add up all the thefts and damages, it comes to well over a million shekels.
"When they couldn’t steal, they would cause damage: pour out fertilizer from containers, cut plastic sheets and nets, break faucets, and smash water meters.
"This went on for years and years.
When the tractors were stolen and taken to the [Arab] villages, I followed the tracks all the way to the security fence. Of course, the army and the state refused to intervene. They refused to enter the villages and retrieve the stolen equipment. They refused to act to stop the phenomenon.
"They called it agricultural terror.
"Once we even found the slogan “Itbah al Yahud” (Slaughter the Jews) written on the plastic in the greenhouse.
"And all of this happened here in Moshav Neve Michael, inside the Green Line — not in a settlement, just a regular border community.
"At night we didn’t sleep out of fear of thefts. We would wander around the fields for hours, guarding until we were exhausted. We played cat and mouse with the Arab thieves.
"This went on for years and years. If I was in agriculture for 40 years, my father was in it for 80 years — and he doesn’t remember any other reality.
"So today, when I see the settlers in the outposts retrieving stolen herds from the villages, I am proud of them.
"When I see them taking the law into their own hands, I am proud of them.
*"Where the state and the law fail, private initiative rises to solve the problem.*
"Anyone who looks at “Jewish terror” in Judea and Samaria without understanding where it came from is blind and immoral.
"The settlers understood what the State of Israel refuses to understand: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
"This is the language the Arabs understand here. The strong survive.
"The settlers got tired of living in fear, in ghettos inside their settlements. They went out to the fields, to state lands that were bought with a lot of money and left abandoned for years because the Arabs imposed terror on them.
"When we abandoned lands in the West Bank, they started stealing in the Elah Valley. When we abandoned the Elah Valley, they started stealing and causing damage in communities even deeper inside — in the Lachish area and Beit Shemesh.
"This is their method. This is how Arab terror works.
"I remember when Bat Ayin went up to the land for the first time. The moment a flock was stolen from them, they entered the village of Surif and brought it back — with interest.
"This is how a people that is sovereign in its land behaves. It does not allow a gang of thieves, murderers, and rapists to plunder it.
They are simply doing what the state has fallen asleep on and cannot do.
"I am proud of them. I look at the agricultural farms in Judea and Samaria and I am proud of them.
"They are succeeding where we failed.
"I wish we would all agree to break out of the fences and stop being afraid — to truly be “a free people in our land.”
"Old memories: the hole in the security fence that was cut open with the stolen tractor. The tracks were still fresh in the mud. If only back then he had had a group of brave young men armed with clubs to go in and bring it back."
Source: Elisha Yered
*HILLTOP MACCABEES*
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