A Palestinian family that cultivates crops and kindness
The Nassar family is amazing. They live on their farm in the West Bank near Bethlehem.
As the family watches Hamas shoot rockets into Israel from Gaza and they hear the boom of intercepting Israeli rockets, they are also aware of more than 1,000 Palestinians who have been jailed in the West Bank, (many of them children), more than 4,000 Palestinians who have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers since the war began, and over 40,000 Palestinians (including many women and children) killed in Gaza by Israeli Defense Forces since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas.
Daoud Nassar and his family, the owners of the Tent of Nations farm, are Lutheran Christians who are involved in their own battle — trying to rebuild their farm again, which has been destroyed several times by Jewish settlers and then rebuilt over and over by the Nassars.
The Nassars call their farm the Tent of Nations because they have set up a tent next to their farm house where volunteers from over 30 countries have come to stay and help protect the family from aggressive settlers. Those Jews are trying hard to take this property because then they would be able to connect several settlements and roads.
My wife Marilyn and I first heard of the Nassar farm about 15 years ago, and we helped on the farm during two summers. Daoud explained to us that the usual way for Palestinians to respond to fanatic settlers is either to try to get even or to just give up. He said that there is a third way — by refusing to be victims and by not giving up in court. The Nassars have been involved in numerous exhaustive court battles. Many of the court cases have been either postponed or canceled by the Israeli government.
The Nassars have sponsored summer camps for Palestinian children, teaching Muslim and Christian Palestinian children how to be nonviolent, encouraging optimism and teaching peaceful resistance strategies. We were able to help one summer at the children’s camp, and another summer we helped picked olives.
We attended a birthday party for one of the Nassar children in 2018. That was also a year of violent abuse. Israeli settlers attacked the Nassars and put up boulders in front of their driveway to keep them from entering their farm by car or tractor. The Nassars attached a sign to one of the boulders that reads “We refuse to be enemies.”
In January 2022 members of the Nassar family were violently attacked again by Jewish settlers wielding knives and hammers. Two members of the family had to go to the hospital with serious, life-threatening head injuries. They are still recovering two years later.
The Nassars have spent most of their lives experiencing hardships, but they continue to show resilience. They have been a model of Christian love for our family.
For every Palestinian extremist, there are many more Palestinians of softspoken intellect, who are warm-hearted, who show deep pity and compassion, who are incredibly generous and are working for peace. Like the Nassars, these Palestinians are seldom in the news.