There was a time when I felt I could live on three foods: grapefruit, bell peppers, and brown rice. I’ve definitely branched out into other food groups since then, but today I had the opportunity to return to one of my first loves and pick my own grapefruit.

With so many people in the army and on reserve duty, and with restrictions on Palestinians coming from the territories to work, there is a labor shortage. I decided to stay beyond the time of my organized tour in order to take advantage of  the volunteer opportunities, which are available for field work, in particular. Today I went with Bili’s friend F. to a kibbutz orchard (Netzer Sereni) about an hour from Jerusalem to help them pick grapefruit. I had last done this in 1981 when I was on kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek. They quickly saw that I had very little upper body strength to do this strenuous work, and moved me to work elsewhere. Forty-plus years later and I do have more upper body strength, but it was still very hard work. I was  relieved when the rains came and we ended the day early, as I wasn’t sure I could have done much more without hurting my back and knees.

Filling my bag (slung over my shoulder–VERY heavy)

We dumped our bags into these large crates

This was an elongated grapefruit that I took a liking to.

F. climbed a tree to get some grapefruit higher up.

(And in a country where there are but one or two degrees of separation, one of the other volunteers today –and note that there are many, many places one could volunteer–was the son of an Israeli Reform rabbi in one of the communities our group had visited. He was there with an American friend and the friend’s mother who told me that they had come from the U.S. to both pay a shiva visit and to visit someone in the hospital–both of whom were casualties of this war.)

As for F., she told me that before the war she was out protesting against threat of the judicial reforms every single week. That protest movement was unprecedented in Israeli history and perhaps even on a global scale–every week from January 2023 until October 7, and indeed prevented a total coup by the Netanyahu government. She is a leftist with three sons, one of whom is on the right and lives in a settlement. They don’t speak politics. (One of the rabbis we met with last week comes from a big family with political leanings all along the spectrum. Their solution: they have one What’sApp group for loving contact with one another and another What’sApp group dedicated to their political arguments!) The brother-in-law of one F’s sons has come home from the war without two legs–the vests protect their chests but not their limbs. There are so many dead and so many wounded. F. said she cries almost every day from the news.

F. will only go to a protest gathering now if it is only in support of the release of the hostages. However, the protests are now more and more about calling for a new government, recognizing the utter failure of the Netanyahu regime. As much as she despises Netanyahu, F. said that she doesn’t want to divide the country while soldiers are in Gaza and is more discriminating about which protests she will go to. These are the kinds of nuances I can only learn about here on the ground–not from the black-and-white coverage I’m exposed to at home in the States or from my own knee-jerk reactions.

We also spoke about the hostages and the deal that is currently on the table. It is a high price to pay–to release thousands of Palestinian prisoners (many with blood on their hands as I’ve mentioned previously) in exchange for the hostages, and for a pause in the war to allow for humanitarian aid to reach Gaza–but most Israelis want the hostages to come home–hence the ubiquitous signs and posters of them and in support of them everywhere. There are those on the right, however, who want the war to continue at all cost, willing to sacrifice the hostages for what they consider the greater safety of the country. 

How do you calculate the worth of a life? How do you calculate security? It is harder than 1 + 1, that is for sure.