attacking settlers<\/a>; in practice, they apply overwhelmingly to the Palestinian landowners the settlers are attacking.<\/p>\nThe pattern extends far beyond Burin. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded 1,418 settler attacks this year resulting in casualties or property damage across the West Bank through July, a rate that is on pace to eclipse 2025\u2019s record high of 1,836 such attacks. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other human rights organisations have accused Israeli authorities of enabling settler attacks and described their cumulative effect on Palestinian communities as contributing to forced displacement.<\/p>\n
It is in this context that Najjar and the cooperative\u2019s members have developed what they call the \u201cTom and Jerry Programme\u201d after the cartoon.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe go to the land early every morning,\u201d he explained. \u201cWhen the army comes, we run away. And when the army goes, we come back again.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if we don\u2019t have planting or harvesting to do on the land, we [go to] drink coffee \u2013 to tell the settlers and the army that this is our land and we\u2019re not going to leave it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Building towards \u2018food sovereignty\u2019<\/p>\n
Najjar founded the Land and Farming Cooperative in March 2020, weeks before COVID-19 lockdowns reached the West Bank. It started with five members and now counts about 25, 17 of them women, who farm roughly 25,000sq metres (6 acres) around Burin together.<\/p>\n
The idea, he said, was never simply agricultural. \u201cWe\u2019re not just a cooperative that plants vegetables and sells them,\u201d Najjar said. \u201cFor us, the cooperative straddles the economic and the political because everything is connected.\u201d<\/p>\n
He described the cooperative as fighting on three fronts at once: the Israeli occupation, what he calls the \u201cbureaucracy\u201d of the Palestinian Authority and the \u201cumbrella\u201d of capitalism and the NGO funding structures that come, in his telling, with strings attached.<\/p>\n
Fifteen percent of everything the cooperative sells goes back into the village, funding children\u2019s and women\u2019s programming. Twenty families it considers most in need once received free vegetables outright. The cooperative has since shifted towards helping those families cultivate small plots of their own under what members call their \u201cdon\u2019t give me fish; teach me to fish\u201d programme.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the real food sovereignty,\u201d Najjar said. \u201cPeople who don\u2019t eat from what they\u2019ve grown will never have real freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before joining, new members undergo six months of training covering both the political economy of the occupation and the practicalities of agroecology, including how to treat soil and pest problems without resorting to chemicals. Every two weeks, the cooperative meets to plan their work. At the end of each month, members evaluate what succeeded.<\/p>\n
Much of the vision for the cooperative, Najjar said, was drafted while he attended what he calls \u201cthe Palestinian school of revolution\u201d: Israeli prison. Two months after the cooperative was founded, Najjar was placed under administrative detention, under which Israeli authorities hold Palestinians without charge or trial and detention orders may be renewable indefinitely. Najjar spent roughly a year in prison, four months of it in isolation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn isolation, I thought a lot about the cooperative because, to be honest, it gives you the time to think,\u201d he said. \u201cI wrote all the procedures and the goals for the cooperative \u2013 exactly what we needed.\u201d By the time he was released, cooperative members had built two additional greenhouses and brought three more plots of land under cultivation in his absence.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe cooperative is not for us,\u201d he said. \u201cIf Ghassan gets arrested, if Ghassan dies, if Ghassan is travelling, the cooperative doesn\u2019t close. It\u2019s for the farmers, for Burin, for whoever believes in freedom and food sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Ghassan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Ghassan-Najjar-1788196487.jpeg\")
Ghassan Najjar, a member of the Burin Land and Farming Cooperative [Al Jazeera]\u2018We prefer to die on our land\u2019<\/p>\n
By Najjar\u2019s count, the July attack was the seventh time the cooperative has had its greenhouses vandalised or destroyed. Asked what drives members to keep rebuilding structures that may simply be torn down again, he returns, over and over, to dignity.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the work between the evil and the right. You have to decide which side you\u2019re going to be on,\u201d he said. \u201cWe decided to be at the front of the struggle because this is our land. We connect our dignity to the land, and I don\u2019t think anyone in this world can live without dignity.\u201d<\/p>\n
As closed military zones have become the norm, Burin \u2013 sandwiched between the notoriously violent settlements of Yitzhar and Har Brakha and the Givat Ronen outpost \u2013 has seen 13 outposts established or expanded in recent months, by Najjar\u2019s count. But as people in the village have shifted from regarding his politics with bemusement to respect, Najjar sees the cooperative\u2019s persistence as proof of a more fundamental victory.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe real occupation is not when they create the checkpoint and invade the village,\u201d he said. \u201cThe real occupation is if they occupy your mind. When you are waking up in the morning and working your land \u2013 this is the real freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n
For now, that resolve manifests in early morning \u201cTom and Jerry\u201d trips to their lands and in replacing what was destroyed alongside building a fence organisers hope will at least slow the next attack.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe prefer to die on our land rather than accept another Nakba,\u201d Najjar said. \u201cWe work as a family, we work as comrades and we work for freedom.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not working just for economic reasons or for \u2018peace\u2019,\u201d he added. \u201cF*** \u2018peace\u2019. I care about freedom. And when you work the land, you feel you have freedom, even if you are under attack by the settler.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Burin, occupied West Bank \u2013 Ghassan Najjar\u2019s phone starts ringing the moment the Israeli army rolls into Burin.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":601870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2664,85,46,44,47,43,48],"class_list":["post-601869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-features","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-israel-palestine-conflict","tag-middle-east","tag-news","tag-palestine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/601870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}