American Evangelical Cowboys Volunteering for Israel's War
Effort Headed for West Bank Settlements
The four American men, seen on video dressed in Western gear and promising to help Israel during its crisis, were brought by a West Bank-based evangelical Christian organization to help settlement farmers
A group of Americans clad in cowboy gear heading to volunteer on Israeli farms in wartime excited and charmed Hebrew and English Israeli social media Tuesday after they were spotted in New York’s JFK airport before taking off and at Ben-Gurion Airport after landing.
The group, however, was not headed to the country’s embattled Gaza border, but to the West Bank.
The arrival of the men, non-Jews from Arkansas and Montana who had come to “help out on the farms in Israel” was announced by The Israel Guys by HaYovel, an organization located in the West Bank settlement of Har Bracha.
In a video posted Wednesday on the Israel Guys account on X, formerly Twitter, one of the as-yet unidentified cowboys says, “We heard Israel was in trouble and we came to help.” The others agree: “Yessiree.”
Josiah HIlton of The Israel Guys confirmed to Haaretz that the group was headed to the West Bank and not to Israel's Gaza vicinity communities. “Many Israelis are in the reserves and so farms are being neglected," Josiah Hilton of The Israel Guys told Haaretz. "They will tend sheep or harvest fruit or do whatever needs to be done all over Judea and Samaria.”
Hilton added that they were exploring the possibility of bringing in more Christian volunteers. "There are a lot of other Christian men who would like to come and do something if they could."
The arrival of non-Jewish volunteers in Israel to tend the land of the West Bank is not a wartime phenomenon. HaYovel, the organization that sponsored the trip, is a veteran group founded and run by U.S. evangelicals and strongly aligned with the Israeli settler movement. For more than a decade it has brought more than 1,700 Christian “faith-based” volunteers to the West Bank to work in agriculture, to “experience Israeli culture, deepen faith, and fulfill Biblical prophecy,” according to its website.
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In August 2022, Haaretz reported that in addition to its farming volunteers, HaYovel was expanding its mission to include planting 20,000 trees across the West Bank, beginning with an area south of the Har Bracha settlement where the organization is based. The plot on which they were planting the trees, according to one of Israel’s foremost experts on West Bank land, belongs to Palestinian farmers from the village of Burin, situated just east of the forest.
On Tuesday evening, excited posts across the Israeli media praised the American “farmhands” for coming to Israel’s aid during its conflict with Hamas, which has caused a crisis in Israeli agriculture as the foreign workers the country depends on for manpower have left for their home countries.
One Hebrew language account drew more than 11,000 likes when it gushed over the handsome eligible newcomers as romantic “Nashville” and “Brokeback Mountain” prospects who “have the advantages of country music and an American passport.”
Israelis from all walks of life have spent their days volunteering to harvest everything from lettuce to avocados as numerous civil society organizations work to fill the void, and some major companies have even offered scholarships to university students who will devote themselves full-time to agriculture until the academic year begins. The scarcity is particularly severe in southern Israel, where many volunteers fear to work due to continued rocket fire from Gaza. Dozens of Thai workers were killed or kidnapped by Hamas during the October 7 attack.
Open gallery view
Israelis volunteer on a tomato farm in an area in southern Israel hit by the Hamas attack.Credit: Eliyahu Hershkovitz
One hashtag that appears on the HaYovel cowboy posts, #OperationIttai, is war-related. The Operation Ittai website calls on “Christians around the world to stand with Israel and provide support during this crisis” by “equipping and defending the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria. Just like Ittai, a foreigner who stood with King David in the Bible.”
The mission of the operation “is to equip and defend 200 communities throughout Judea and Samaria with the critical equipment that they need, ensuring that Israel’s biblical heartland will not only be protected during this time of crisis, but will remain a safe haven for the 500,000 Jewish people who live there.”
In an appeal for funds, the organization noted that in the wartime crisis, Israeli farms are operating “with inefficient manpower and less than adequate equipment.”
Based in Patterson, Missouri, HaYovel has brought thousands of evangelical volunteers – mainly from the United States – to West Bank settlements over the last 15 years. The organization has a campus on Har Bracha where volunteers are accommodated and where its founder, Tommy Waller and his family, also live.