Shots in Zion

In Israel’s southern Negev Desert—Naqab to Arabic speakers—more than eighty sandy acres have been planted with long rows of blue agave, their spears reaching into the sun. When mature, the hearts of these plants—the piñas—will be harvested, their juices extracted, fermented, and distilled into what Israel imagines as something of a growth industry: tequila.

Blue agave, of course, is not indigenous to Israel. In 2020, cell tissues from the high-desert succulents were exported from the plant’s native Mexico, where 90 percent of the world’s crop is grown. After a year of greenhouse propagation, farmers transplanted the seedlings into tilled fields near Kibbutz Alumim. As one Israeli publication proclaimed earlier this year, these acres of agave are part of an expanding “alcohol empire” in the Naqab: in addition to the sweet potatoes, radishes, and cherry tomatoes already grown in a region that cultivates a great deal of Israel’s produce, entrepreneurs have also planted barley for whisky and grapes for wine. As Avi Leitner, the American entrepreneur behind the venture brags, “This is the first time anyone is trying to make sexy alcohol like this.”

So far, the Blue Agave Israel Group has planted eighty-six acres, with plans to add an additional one hundred acres of the monocrop every year. This sort of agricultural expansionism costs money: $2 million has been plowed into the project to date. Another $3 million will be needed to convert the raw materials into liquor. As of this writing, the company has not yet produced a drop of the finished product. Agave takes a minimum of five to seven years to reach peak ripeness, so until its first harvest, the plants will sit on the land, tying it up like a speculative real estate investment.

Nearby, the Israeli government enacts designs of baser order: the systematic starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, many of whom are denied access to potable water, let alone the crops growing in abundance on just the other side of the border fence. For Gazans, the possibility of planting their own seeds has vanished, with restrictive aid blockades and the decimation of essentially all arable farmland. Late last month, a global group of experts officially declared that a famine is underway in Gaza City and in the surrounding areas. Israel, meanwhile, has an agricultural economy so rich, and food so abundant, that it has entered into luxury alcohol markets. While Israelis eat and drink from stolen land, Palestinian children starve to death. This asymmetry is part and parcel of the Zionist project—and has been since before Israel’s founding.

Leitner’s group is not the only agave venture operating out of Israel. Negave Estates has staked out another slice of the Naqab for the cultivation of this Mexican crop. Their farm—which David Niewood, the company’s CEO, tells me currently covers just thirty-eight acres—is not as close to the Gaza border as Leitner’s fields, although it is part of the same regional “alcohol empire.” But while a genocidal campaign continues nearby, Niewood is quick to draw attention elsewhere: he cuts in before I can even finish asking my first question to insist that his organization “is committed to creating a greater God-spirit and is very much non-political and wants to remain non-political.”

Established in 2023, Negave Estates is focused on developing their brand within the region’s agritourism industry. A recent Instagram post shows visitors to the farm wearing winery chic, stepping gingerly through fields while sampling the “agave spirits” (true “tequila” can only be produced in Mexico). Although their first crop was planted less than a year ago, the company is already selling a line of drinks—the spirits are distilled in Mexico and then shipped to Israel to be aged and bottled with the brand’s logo. In a very roundabout sense, then, Niewood has edged Leitner out in the race to create a “sexy” regional alcohol.

Farms like this—and the agriculture industry more broadly—are primary drivers of Israel’s colonialist project. Earlier this year, Israel’s Defense and Security Forum (IDSF), a configuration of over thirty-five thousand reserve officers and operatives, asked in a blog post: “What makes farms a particularly effective way to occupy land?” Zionists are nothing if not bald-faced. For the IDSF, a “farm’s ongoing activities thwart attempts by hostile elements to take over the land . . .  The constant presence on site strengthens the rule of law and the state’s sovereignty in the frontier areas.” In this way, agriculture is as much a program of development as it is an explicit tool for excluding Palestinians from Israeli territory.

The policing and segregation of Palestinians in public spaces requires resources. The World Bank recently determined that almost 30 percent of Israel’s landmass is in agricultural production—a percentage that has grown substantially over the decades. In the blog’s most terrifying passage, the authors write: “Another advantage lies in the fact that the farm requires almost no built-up area, and therefore it blends in well, and does not jeopardize military firing ranges or green spaces whose continuity is important from an ecological perspective.” In this worldview, open farmland provides two benefits: easier kill shots, and land conservation.

In August I spoke with Khalil Alamour—a Bedouin community leader from the “unrecognized” village of al-Sira in the Naqab—who was unsurprised to learn of the recent attempts at agave farming in his homeland. “They can do everything,” he says, referring to Israeli farmers, “They have no limits. They have access to water. They have access to land.” Alamour explained that the Israeli government has left his people an ever-shrinking sliver of the land on which they have historically lived and grazed their livestock: “People are not thinking about agriculture today. [They are] thinking about only surviving.”

Although Israel is a largely urbanized country, a growing number of Zionists are returning to a strategic orientation around militarized agrarianism. During the Hamas-led incursion in October of 2023, many farms were attacked. Pushed up against the border with Gaza, agricultural operations in the Western Naqab suffered significant losses: in Kibbutz Alumim, for instance, nineteen Nepalese and Thai migrant farm laborers were killed, some of whom likely worked in the agave fields. Greenhouses were burned down, and irrigation infrastructure was destroyed.

In that day’s long shadow, far-right groups have moved from the fringes into the mainstream of Israel’s violent civil society, including those with an agricultural bent. One such group, Hashomer Hachadash, which translates into “The New Guardian,” is on the bleeding edge of where farming meets fascism. This organization—which receives heavy funding from the Israeli government—bills itself as the largest volunteer network in the country, connecting over two hundred thousand mostly young people with farms each year. Their website is plastered with photos of Israeli twenty-somethings, smiling as they harvest citrus and take rests in the shade, their arms hung around one another in youthful disregard. These scenes are not dissimilar to the images of idyllic rural work shown on other farm volunteer websites like the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms network. While WWOOF appeals to the wanderlust of liberal arts undergraduates, Hashomer Hachadash serves to promote a sort of Zionist manifest destiny.

In an article from April 2024 titled “The Farm: The Settlement Model of the 21st Century,” the group lionizes borderland farmers as pioneers carrying out “the next stage in the history of Zionist settlement, a stage that will make a decisive contribution to establishing the sovereignty, security, and prosperity of the State of Israel.” The authors continue: “These farms are a first-rate ethical and Zionist project, which expresses man’s attachment to the land and the country; at the same time, they also constitute a business project that allows young families to establish their economic status through independent entrepreneurship.”

Hashomer Hachadash is particularly active in the Naqab region. While Alamour has not interacted with the group directly, he is acutely aware of their presence. “I know that they are very extremist,” he tells me. “They claim they are protecting farmers and farms from Bedouins, Arabs in general. They are very violent, and they are trying to take more land and expand their properties. . . They are always armed.” I ask the CEO of the nominally nonpolitical Negave Estates about militant land-protecting groups like Hashomer Hachadash. He tells me that, while he was “not personally familiar with any of these more than hearing about them or reading about them in the news,” he is, “supportive of them.” Make no mistake, Hashomer Hachadash is an extreme right-wing organization, with ties to far-right elements of the Israeli government and settler communities in the West Bank. So much for Negave Estates remaining “non-political.”

The Zionist weaponization of agriculture predates the violent founding of Israel in 1948. Indeed, the first Jewish settlements in Palestine were established as agricultural villages. Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian scientist and founding director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, compares the deployment of these rural Zionist outposts to pioneer farms in North America. In both instances, he explained, colonizers could claim that “we’re just peaceful people that are planting beautiful farms and there’s these indigenous people that are attacking us, harassing us. So we formed defense committees to defend the new settlements.” In the early twentieth century, the proliferation of collectivist agrarian communities—known as kibbutzim—further entrenched this logic of perpetual settler violence. In the wake of the 1948 Nakba, when Israel violently expelled approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their lands, newly formed kibbutzim played a central role in settling the depopulated land. Today, their work continues in much the same way: to reinforce Israeli dominance of Palestine.

Leitner (who in the 1980s was reportedly involved in a far-right Kahanist terrorist organization) is also in touch with Zionism’s foundational agrarian mythology. Speaking with the Jewish News Syndicate last fall, he told them, “We want to turn the Negev green and this looks like a way to do so,” echoing a tired Zionist trope that claims the land known today as Israel was barren before colonization. The reality is much the opposite. Considerable tracts of the Naqab Desert are part of the Fertile Crescent, a large land mass in the Middle East watered by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers famous as the probable birthplace of settled agriculture. But what are thousands of years of indigenous farming to a movement whose mid-twentieth century proponents saw Zionist agricultural efforts in the region as “colonizing a damaged and wasted land”?

“The Zionists did not make the desert green,” Qumsiyeh tells me. “This is bullshit.” He estimates that up to 90 percent of the Naqab was farmland prior to the creation of Israel. Indigenous people in the region grew wheat, barley, and lentils, among other crops. They followed the practices of Baal agriculture, a method of farming named after an ancient Canaanite god of fertility. In dry seasons, when only one to two hundred milliliters of rain would fall on the Naqab, Alamour’s Bedouin ancestors got by. “Even if there was a poor quantity of rain in the year,” Alamour recounts, “it was enough to make barley and wheat. . . figs, grapes and olive trees. . . They were self-sufficient.”

In Mexico, agave is grown using similar dry-farm methods. The crop is known as a xerophyte, a subspecies of plants that have evolved to survive on little to no water. Yet, Niewood told me that Negave Estates is using drip irrigation in their fields since the region of the Naqab where he and his compatriots have set up gets less rain than the Mexican fields of agave. Which, more than anything, begs the question: Why replace the olives, barley, wheat, and lentils—cultivated with rainfed Baal agricultural practices—with this crop?

The answer is simple: Niewood sees “an opportunity for growth in the future globally.” Leitner maintains similar ambitions for his Blue Agave Israel Group. In a gauzy write-up in Ynet last year, he spoke in grandiose terms: “We’re doing something significant, and we hope to become a global center for spirits and agave farming. Building a brand takes time, but Israeli farmers might just make history in the Negev by growing agave faster and better than anyone else.” Not only will he grow agave faster than in Mexico, it will be better—millennia of cultivation practices stretching back to the Aztecs be damned.

Palestine was not a desolate zone before its colonization, an irredeemable no-man’s-land that the native populations couldn’t wrest a calorie out of. But to make room for Zionism’s founding myth, Palestine had to be largely cleared of its original inhabitants and their foodways. Only then could Zionists “make the desert bloom.” The agricultural system they created was one of resource apartheid, in which Palestinians are starved on their own land while Israelis cultivate it for whatever strikes their fancy.