[The following are excerpts from the full-length feature story on IsraelNationalNews.com]
"I was born to live free," Ran told the court Wednesday. "I was born on a Kibbutz. I was injured in the army. I was released. I opened a factory. About twelve years ago, I received agreement from my family to engage in settlement. I took a backpack and settled on a hilltop that I had ascertained was ownerless. A struggle ensued that continued for many years - with Palestinians, with members of the left, and with the Israeli government."
Avri's Wednesday court appearance marked the end of a five-month episode, which started with Ran's arrest during a provocative left-wing/Arab trespass on his planted farmland, continued with a court order confining him to a house not his own, and concluded with his arrest by the police on August 31st while vacationing with his family on the Jordan River, after being on the run for four months.
Ran's achievements are impressive. He founded the largest and most elaborate organic farm in Israel using only his personal funds; building it little by little, without any help or protection from the police or IDF. Everything on his hilltops was built using Avoda Ivrit - Jewish labor, an old-time Zionist concept that Ran considers critical in renewing the Jewish connection to the land. There are also no fences surrounding any of Ran’s hilltops. He considers fences to signify defensiveness and a willingness to forgo that which is outside the fence. Many others have now emulated Avri's way of settling the land - leaving the confines of the gated communities for the biblical bounty of the barren hills and valleys of Judea and Samaria and making them blossom...
Ran, who is 50, was born in Kibbutz Nir Chen, in the Negev - the older of a set of identical twins. His grandfather, Natan Rabinovitch, was a renowned agriculturalist, who grew the most widely consumed melons in Israel. He is the one who changed his family name to Ran. His grandmother, Penny, was an actress at Tel Aviv's HaBima theater. They arrived as part of the founding core-group of Kibbutz Sha’ar HaEmekim. Ran’s father was the first child born on the kibbutz, which his family eventually decided to leave. They then joined the core-group founding the town of Yokne’am.
Ran's father grew up and was injured fighting in the War of Independence, during which he met Avri’s mother. They married and founded Kibbutz Nir Chen, which was eventually dissolved, along with their marriage.
Avri’s identical twin brother Nir rose up in the ranks of the security department of the Shabak to become the equivalent of an IDF brigadier general in the agency. Avri’s name came up more than a few times in the Shabak’s Jewish Department, which has somewhat of an obsession with the ‘hilltop youth’ who worked on Avri's farm. The two brothers’ positions on opposite sides of the political barricades never lead to any division between them, though.
Nir Ran, despite his years working at the Shabak, refuses to believe the hype fed to the media by members of the agency's Jewish Department. "In my assessment, there is no such thing as the ‘hilltop youth.’ That is not to say that there aren’t youths on the hilltops and in Judea and Samaria. They are there and they are, by and large, wonderful. But when they say ‘hilltop youth,’ it sounds like there is some organization with such a name. It doesn't exist. This originated from the left, from the police and from all sorts of sources with interests in presenting such a thing. Avri is the leader representing what they termed the ‘hilltop youth’ in one respect: That he acts as a role model for them.
"There are, in the territories, left-wing activists - mainly from the Ta’ayush organization. They call themselves 'peace activists,' but basically they are 'war activists.' They have a religion they call ‘peace’ - it is a fundamentalist religion that is very dangerous. They are warmongers that sow the seeds of war in every case where there is a chance for coexistence and peace."
[...]
At 16, Avri left the Kibbutz he was living on. He had a girlfriend older than he that the Kibbutz did not approve of so he left and went to Sharm el-Sheikh to work. He eventually joined the IDF, serving first in the elite Sayeret Matkal reconnaissance unit before leaving it to join the armored corps. He took an officers training course, finished with honors and became a division and eventually company commander. Today he is a captain in the reserves.
“The other soldiers admire him very much,” a fellow soldier who served with him in the same battalion told Maariv. “He was the best officer and the best navigator. They look at him like he’s G-d. When they would go out to inspect a roadway in the morning he would go on foot ahead of the armored personnel carrier - he was better than any of the Bedouin trackers. It was important for him to show them that a Jew is also able to do such things."
[...]
Ran tries not to attack the mainstream settlement movement, “but,” he said, “it is impossible to settle the land with fences and barbed wire - and with the army watching over you. There is a public here that for years has been slaughtered - and they respond by adding more defense systems and even giving up on being responsible for their own well being. One of the central hallmarks of settlement was guarding your community. How can you just go to sleep in your bed while an entire IDF company watches over you?"
Ran is particularly irked by the practice of enforcing car-windows and security-fences to protect Jews from stone-throwers and infiltrators. "In Itamar, five children were killed," Ran recalled. "The rabbis said at the funerals, ‘for every victim we will plant a tree, for every victim we will build a new house.’ What can you expect when a person’s response to those who throw stones at him is to build another fence.”
Ran also has harsh words for the acceptance committees in most Yesha communities. “They destroyed settlement,” he said. “They say, ‘We want communal life here, everyone needs to be religious - not just religious, but with the same kippa.’ Where were we during the Aliyah from Russia? Why didn’t we bring one million immigrants to settle here [in Yesha]? By what right does an acceptance committee say to a family that wants to move to a settlement, ‘You aren’t suitable.’ Why? Because the woman is a Freicha[partier, perhaps less concerned with laws of modesty -ed.]? So what, a Freicha is not part of the Nation of Israel?”
[...]
"I think that this land belongs to me," confesses the grandfather of the biblical/hippy hilltops. "It belongs to me, from where I am now able to be, all the way to where I am currently unable to be. If I could, I would make my next outpost in Jordan. It has nothing to do with the Arabs. I don't hate Arabs. Absolutely not. I am simply indifferent to them. They are not in my field of play at all. I am not G-d’s executioner. I am not a violent man, but if there is a war, I will fight it."
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