Read more - HaShomer HaChadash

Yediot Acharonot, Magazine Section, October 14, 2011
Not On My Watch
By Karen Peles
A journey in the North, in the footsteps of the movement
HaShomer HaChadash, and a meeting with a fearless cowgirl and a
young man who admires Berl Katznelson.
Summer 2007. Moshav Tzipori. Yoel Zilberman, a 22 year old soldier, sits down to a typical Sabbath eve
dinner with his family. After the Kiddush, his father suddenly announces his intention to abandon his
pasture after repeated harassment by outlaws in the area. Instead of nodding sadly or complaining,
Yoel declares, “Over my dead body” and a couple of hours later he shows up in the field with a friend.
The outlaws saw two guards patrolling the field and ever since then they haven’t caused any more
trouble.
That, in essence, is the story of HaShomer HaChadash, a movement started four years ago by Yoel
Zilberman and On Rifman, a different breed of young men, and which today has over 2,000 volunteers,
students and trainees in leadership development programs. And how am I connected to all this?
Completely by chance. Meaningless wandering on YouTube led me to a speech given by Zilberman at
the Jerusalem Conference. I watched and I trembled. Turns out, I wasn’t alone. That same, rather lowquality YouTube video has been viewed more than 139,000 times.
So I asked Zilberman to meet with me for a brief conversation, and as he sat across from me with a glass
of orange juice in his hand, I felt that I was sitting with a real leader. With his green eyes and his golden
head he is armed with uncommon ammunition for an emissary. He doesn’t resemble any of the other
secular young men his age that I’ve met. He reminds me more of the pioneers, those same nearmythological figures from history lessons, the ones who have streets in Tel Aviv named after them.
“I grew up on Moshav Tzipori,” he says. “My father has a herd of cattle, 5,000
dunams of pasture land that he leases from the state, and he is obligated by
that lease to protect it. The pasture land is surrounded by long wire fences.
My father paid about 25,000 NIS per kilometer for that fence but a few
Bedouins from the village nearby decided to embitter his life. About eight
kilometers of my father’s fence were cut one year; they burned the pasture,
stole calves and slaughtered them as a threat. My father was on the brink of
bankruptcy. At one of his lowest moments, they even beat him up. My father
said he’d rather open a shoe store at the mall. He was a broken man.”
Yoel Zilberman
And at that point you, his son, came into the picture.
“Exactly. I took a few books – Berl Katznelson, the Rambam, Chaver Tov, and everything started from
there.”
Weren’t you also serving in the army at that time? How did you manage everything?
“My friends from my [army] team helped me. We bought an old Reno Express and started making
patrols. I even got permission from my commander to leave the base one day a week. Within three
months we were a group of 40 guys from the area, and we set up watches. They told me, ‘While you’re
with the army, we’ll be here.’”
Just like a family.
“Not like. A family. During and between watches, we studied and broadened our horizons. It was very
important to us that we not just pass the time while staying in neutral. On Fridays we would bring
crates of fruit to a hill we had taken over, sit in a circle and listen to lectures that we had arranged for
the guys. We gradually built a
strong group that truly believes
that it is possible to affect change
here. I called the place Mitzpe
Sando after my grandfather, our
family’s legendary farmer.”
And that’s how the movement
HaShomer HaChadash came into
being?
“Rumors travel fast. Within four
to five months we started getting requests for help from all over the area. A farmer from Har Turan told
us that he’d had 17 kilometers of fence cut, and his barn set on fire. A guy came from Yavniel and told
me, ‘Either my wife and I are getting divorced, or I abandon my fields.’ Later a kibbutznik from the area
came by – all of his sons are elite combat soldiers – but the guy was just broken. We started doing
watches on the kibbutzim and what we saw there was shocking. It turned out that after several years of
wars, the kibbutzim simply gave up. They’re putting up an electric fence around the kibbutz and living
there like my grandmother lived 60 years ago. Do you understand that from a different perspective, it
seems like a joke?”
So you’re claiming that what we’re talking about here is basically two sides caught in a conflict?
“There’s no political interest here. We’ve got Bedouins volunteering for us alongside religious guys,
secular guys, right-wingers, peace activists – everyone who feels it’s important to protect our country
from outlaws who take the law into their own hands. Does it seem logical to you that we surround
ourselves with fences? You’ve never heard of any Arab village surrounding itself with an electric fence
or a locked gate, and rightly so. You gradually come to realize that there’s a master of the house and it’s
not you.”
Master of the house is every citizen of the country, Arabs and Jews, right?
“But the country of these citizens, Jews and Arabs, is completely flaccid. Here, we brought the Minister
of Internal Security for a tour, so he could meet farmers, cowboys, the salt of the earth, and they poured
their hearts out to him. One of them told him a very difficult story. He has Parkinson’s disease and the
only thing that gives him strength is taking his herd out to the field every day, but the Bedouins have
stolen his sheep ten times already, broken his legs with sticks.”
So the HaShomer HaChadash movement is actually filling in the gaps for the police?
“It is a lot deeper than that. Are you familiar with Arik Krep’s story? A man was walking on the beach in
Tel Aviv with his family, suddenly a group of people walk up to him and beat him to death. The man
screamed for help and nobody helped. Dozens of people, like you and me, were around and they just
let it happen. There is no collective responsibility. Everybody is just looking out for themselves. I give
five to seven lectures a week – at pilot training courses, battalion commanders’ courses, schools,
universities, new recruits, high tech companies – and I meet a lot of young people, and they all lack
identity. When you ask them: ‘tell me the name of a book Ben- Gurion wrote or a sentence Jabotinsky
said’ they tell you Ben- Gurion is a pub in Tel Aviv and Jabotinsky is the longest street in Ramat Gan. Ask
the kids who Harry Potters’ great- grandmother was, and all the students in the class will raise their
hands, but they’ve never heard of Berl Katznelson. I want to see what is important to them, and no
offense, I see their world revolves around “Big Brother” and “Survivor”.
What’s so bad about “Survivor”?
“The norm there is gossiping, trashing each other and stabbing each other in the back. The public
language today is hypocrisy. That’s what the youth sees and their social codes are formed according to
that. What sort of responsibility will the kids feel when they turn off the TV? At the end of the day, they
go out into the street, see a woman flipping over in her kayak and the start filming on their iPhones
instead of helping her. And the stabbing in the clubs? The people who suddenly get out of their cars, in
the middle of the road, to beat up a guy who cut in front of them? My partner and I took upon
ourselves the goal of building a social movement that will bring back the term ‘mutual involvement’”.
And today, after four years has something really come back?
“I just came back from a visit with Ayelet Gordon, a cowgirl from Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan. When I came
to her area, about a year ago, she took me aside and burst out in tears. She told me: ‘I have never cried,
Yoel. Not in front of someone else.’ Now she has nothing to cry about anymore. Our guys started doing
patrols on her property, and the break-ins stopped. You must meet her, she’s this tough woman; she
rears 200 cows near Shfaram and Hawlad.”
There is no choice. When Yoel Zilberman says you have to go meet Ayelet, you go to meet Ayelet. The
next morning I found myself climbing up a steep hill, near Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan, where the only
cowgirl in Israel was waiting for me. She had green nail polish on her nails and was wearing leather
boots. We sat down and drank in front of a table full of chopped vegetables and cheese that Ayelet had
made herself. There was a wonderful breeze blowing.
“My name is Ayelet, I’m divorced, open to offers, and have three children,” she began. “For as long as I
can remember, I have been working with cattle. In my point of view it is an ideology – preserving the
green spaces of the country. The meaning of being a cowgirl is ‘if you’ve got animals, you have no life’.
What I mean is that every day you wake up to a day full of battles. Forget about the holidays or
Shabbat. There is always something to take care of, whether it’s the cattle themselves, or the damage
done over night.”
What kind of damages do you discover?
“They cut my fences, steal my calves - just that adds up to damages of hundreds of thousands of shekels
a year. There is also something called invasion of pasture. The thorns you see here are the cows’ food;
when the neighbors let their animals onto my property at night; it comes at the expense of my herds. It
is already difficult being a farmer and living on the edge; with all the other trouble it is no wonder that
this kind of life is dying out.”
It sounds very difficult to handle, even more when you are a woman. How did you hold on?
“When the outlaws were young, I would catch them by the belt, pick them up and throw them on the
other side, like cats. Now they have grown and have gotten heavy. The threats became part of my
routine. They hate my guts, but I am the one who rules in this area.”
When did your romance with HaShomer HaChadash start?
“Last year, when more than 30 calves were stolen from me, I hit rock bottom. I crashed; I sat by myself
in my field and didn’t know what to do. Suddenly Yoel came along. He asked me if I was interested in
starting an outpost of the movement in Ramat Yohanan, and in a short period of time ten strong men
filled with motivation were standing in front of me, saying: ‘Come, I’ll help you; come, I’ll lift that up for
you; come, I’ll run instead of you.’ It’s amazing. I had a hard time keeping up with them. They sleep in
sleeping bags, fight mosquitoes, drink black coffee, eat halva and corn, then more black coffee, and the
movement takes care of everything. In the afternoons they have lessons on Zionism, hand- to- hand
combat training, topography and Arabic studies. Ever since they’ve been here – I have some peace and
quiet. I can’t evaluate that in money. Last winter new volunteers arrived; they slept in the field on their
first night and didn’t even know they prevented a burglary. In the morning I showed them – look, here
they cut the fence; here they almost stole my calves.”
Like a small army.
“Because who else will protect the farmers? The police can’t get up here, they don’t have 4X4 vehicles
and they don’t know the area.”
However, you still believe that one day you and the burglar can live here peacefully?
“Look, I have a Bedouin employee that I am willing to put my life in his hands. Just now I dropped off a
hitchhiker down there. We are good neighbors. Coexistence is my true aspiration; really. I don’t think it
is possible otherwise, because there is nothing to do about it, they live here with us.”
I returned to Tel Aviv, overwhelmed and confused at the same time. I set up another meeting with Yoel
at the same café near Rothschild Boulevard, to try and understand from him how he sees the future.
“So, I see that you met the cowgirl already. Amazing, isn’t she?”
She really is something else.
“She has three children she is raising. I want to bring something real for the children here, to make a
difference. Maybe five or six years from now they won’t only dress up as someone from “Survivor” for
Purim, they will dress up as someone from HaShomer HaChadash.”
Again with “Survivor”? You know my spouse participated in that show?
“Look at the macro, not the micro. A young Israeli, who just finished high school, has to know the
meaning of Tisha B’Av before he knows who the last person to be kicked off “Big Brother” was. You
know, the Druze in my platoon in Bahad 1 would laugh at me? One of them said to me: ‘We know who
the grandmother of the Prophet Moses’ aunt was, and you don’t know anything. You have no past and
no future.’ That’s what we look like.”
Maybe we need to start guarding the mosques, after the mosque in Tuba Zangeria was set on fire?
“There are individual people in the Arab villages and the settlements who are violent bullies, who allow
themselves to take the law into their own hands, but for every person like that there are at least
another 100 decent people. They are the ones who pay the price, here and there. At the end of the
day, the Arabs are Israeli citizens and when the country neglects them, they aren’t acting like the
landlords. That’s not heroic, it’s a weakness.”
What about the demonstrations that were held this summer? When I was standing on the stage in
Afula and singing to the protesters, I felt very proud to be an Israeli.
“That was a struggle that really lifted my spirit. It was amazing, real and true. After walking around for
hours down Rothschild Boulevard I found out that what people are really looking for is a personal
example – not Ehud Barak, who lives in Akirov, or Bibi, who lives in Caesarea. At the end of the day the
change will come from the lower level. Now we are at the starting point. These kinds of processes don’t
happen in a year or two, and I will be happy if the fruit of our labor will be picked by others twenty years
from now. I didn’t just leave everything and quit a very interesting officer course and move to Mitzpe
Sando. That’s also where I got married.”
I didn’t know you were married. Do you have any kids yet?
“How will I find time to raise kids now?”
Do you find the time for fun?
“My personal life is filled with contentment. Once a week I study the Middle East at the Open
University, twice a week I meet with heads of preparatory programs, guard regularly wherever they
need me, and once in a while I treat myself and work the herd with my father. That’s what keeps me
focused. Myself on a horse, the simplest worker without any nonsense.”
I’m talking about going to the movies, a vacation in Thailand, young peoples’ stuff. You’re only six
years younger than I am.
“I have Saturday. That’s the only time I have to invest in my wife. When I’m with her I am completely
with her, and if I am with myself then I am completely with myself. I used to be everywhere at once and
I wasn’t really there.”
And when Saturday is over, you get back to the race?
“You sure do. There is much more satisfaction in being there for someone else, than staying involved in
yourself. ‘Don’t stand idly by’ that’s what it is all about. I think, every person should ask themselves one
very simple question: Who am I, am I my brother’s keeper, or am I selfish?”
The Israeli Police statement was: “ the Israeli Police puts a lot of effort in human resources and
measures in order to protect the citizens, especially the village and farmer sector. The evidence speaks
for itself; there have been many successes in capturing gangs and cattle thieves and preventing damages
to infrastructure. Heavy punishments have been inflicted on the felons in this field. The police will
continue to invest efforts and resources to arrest the suspects and filing law suits against them, as we
have been doing for the last few months.”