The Split Screen of U.S.-Israel Relations: An American Congressman Detained While Trump and Netanyahu Plot Escalation

The most jarring moment of the episode came when Brad Lander — a New York City Council member who just won election to Congress — called into the show from a detention facility in the West Bank. Lander had been harvesting olives alongside 60 other volunteers, including roughly 30 Americans and a delegation of rabbis, when the IDF and Israeli police arrived, ordered them out of the grove, and loaded them onto buses. Lander was released after receiving a warning for "creating a public disturbance" and for being in "Judea and Samaria" on a tourist visa, but the rest of the group remained detained as of his call. The field they were harvesting, Lander explained, sits between a Palestinian village and a large Israeli settlement and had not been harvested in three years because the Palestinian farmers did not feel safe. "The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is illegal under international law," Lander said, "but harvesting olives is not illegal under any law I am aware of."

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