A team of Dr. Bronner’s staff and I just returned from the Holy Land, our first visit since 2018, to support friends, family, and partners there. Since 2007, Dr. Bronner’s has sourced our olive oil from the region—90% from Palestinian farmers in the West Bank, via Canaan Fair Trade, and the rest from an Israeli Jewish family farm and an Israeli-Palestinian project called Sindyanna. Bringing together oil from Muslim, Jewish, and Christian farmers powerfully resonates with my grandfather’s vision, born from the Holocaust and murder of his parents, of a world united across ethnic and religious divides. We support local organizations working for peace, healing and justice in Palestine and Israel, such as The Parents Circle Bereaved Families Forum, Combatants for Peace, The Foundation for Middle East Peace, +972 Magazine, The Center for Jewish Nonviolence, J Street, B’tselem, Army of Healers, MAPS Israel, Ripples, Mission Within, Standing Together, and others.
On this trip, we partnered with Mejdi Tours, an incredible social venture that uses dual-narrative travel in conflict zones to give people a deeper, more nuanced understanding of what’s happening. Today, roughly 7 million Jewish Israelis and 7 million Palestinians live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Mejdi co-founder Aziz Abu Sarah and peace activist Maoz Inon have alchemized their personal grief over losing family to the conflict on either side into a passionate cause for peace in the region, with a forthcoming book outlining their vision, The Future is Peace.
We spent time with our partners at Canaan Fair Trade near Jenin, staying overnight with farmers there. Canaan has helped thousands of farmers boost yields and incomes with fair and regenerative organic practices. Traveling through the West Bank, we saw firsthand how Israel is grinding away at the core Palestinian wound of dispossession and disenfranchisement. Land is being annexed at an accelerating rate under military apartheid rule, through a mix of settler violence, harassment by police and soldiers, and so-called “archaeological” land grabs. Settlers steal sheep, cut down olive trees, and seize control of grazing lands and water sources to make life impossible, forcing Palestinians to leave their homes and land. I personally witnessed how farmers who have supplied us with olive oil for over a decade had more than 4,000 productive trees decimated by the IDF in the last couple months, with no compensation or explanation. We were not able to visit Gaza to witness the devastation from what Palestinians call the Second Nakba, but we saw signs in the West Bank calling out the Third Nakba of intensifying ethnic cleansing happening there right now.
On the Israeli side, we visited the Nova Festival memorial and Kibbutz Nir Oz, where we met with two former hostages who shared their stories of survival and struggle to rebuild their lives and destroyed communities We felt and will never forget the raw devastation and horror of October 7th, and understood by visiting how deeply that day triggered the core wound in the Israeli psyche—spasms of antisemitic violence that has haunted the Jewish people for millennia.
Six months before October 7th, I published a blog post decrying the Netanyahu government’s push to colonize and annex the West Bank. It was, and is, the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. Much like the Bush administration took advantage of American trauma from 9/11 to invade not just Afghanistan but Iraq, the Israeli government has weaponized the national trauma from the Hamas massacre to accelerate its project of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
On our visit there, we saw how settlers, emboldened and deputized by the state, harass and threaten Palestinian communities until they’re forced to flee to urban centers. This isn’t the work of a few rogue elements; the entire state apparatus is complicit. Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli Minister of Finance and the de facto viceroy of the West Bank, openly promotes a 2030 plan for the “Gazafication” of the West Bank—herding Palestinians into disconnected urban ghettos while Israel maintains full control from the river to the sea, “encouraging” Palestinians to emigrate. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli Minister of National Security, has created his own “national guard” to further terrorize the Palestinian population, and recently toured prisons, celebrating the Abu Ghraib-like torture of Palestinian detainees. Also while we were there, the government changed a land registration rule that will transfer huge amounts of Palestinian land to Israeli control. It’s a legalistic rigmarole that I found chillingly similar to the Aryanization campaigns used in Germany in the 1930s to systematically strip Jews, including my own family, of their property and rights.
This campaign of ethnic cleansing is, in part, based on the argument that Palestinians are just “Arabs” who can live in other Arab countries, which is as absurd and wrong as saying Italians are “Europeans” who should just go live somewhere else in Europe.
After decades behind the separation wall, the Second Intifada, and now October 7th, many Israelis have been conditioned to regard Palestinians only as potential terrorists and Islam as inherently violent. Hearts have hardened on both sides. But we also met people who are alchemizing their grief into peace-building. Groups like The Parents Circle and Combatants for Peace are doing the painful work of humanizing the “enemy,” though their efforts are often dismissed on both sides as “normalization.”
The truth is, majorities on both sides want peace, security, and equality, but they are trapped in traumatized, triggered states, unable to see the other’s humanity or right to be on the land.
There are dueling visions for 2030. One is a future of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. If Smotrich’s 2030 plan succeeds, Israel will inevitably face a global boycott like the one against South Africa, especially as younger generations of American Jews turn away in disgust. The other vision is one of real, durable peace. But that can only happen if Israel’s Messianic right wing’s lust for Palestinian land is reined in and a genuine effort is made to enable and empower Palestinian self-determination. For years, Netanyahu played a sinister game, propping up Hamas as an “asset” to keep Palestinians divided and prevent a credible partner for a two-state solution from emerging. This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s widely understood both in Israel and the United States.
A safe homeland for Jewish people cannot be built by constantly antagonizing and dispossessing Palestinians. To get there, both Palestinians and Israelis need to have their core traumas recognized. Israelis need the world to understand the Holocaust and their need for a safe ancestral home. Palestinians need recognition of the Nakba, the catastrophe that displaced hundreds of thousands from their homes and forced them to live as refugees in their own land, unable to return. The choice is stark. One path leads to more walls, more division, and endless violence. The other leads to a future where everyone from the river to the sea can live in peace, equality, and prosperity.