K A S H R U T . C O M_©

Undeterred by Oct. 7 massacre, foreign interns keep Gaza-periphery dairy farms afloat

January 13, 2024 - from the Times of Israel:

"Dairy farms along Israel’s Gaza border have been supplying milk uninterruptedly since the outbreak of the war on October 7 owing to a small cadre of staff that remained behind while most residents evacuated to the center of the country. Among those who stayed are an unlikely group — university students from Africa and Asia.

"The students were offered the opportunity to relocate, says Altmark, but unlike Zikim’s foreign workers who were quick to leave, the students insisted on remaining.

"Zikim’s five interns are among more than 3,200 university students from 30 countries in the developing world currently training at farms across Israel. About 250 were on farms near Gaza when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed the border and brutally massacred 1,200 people in southern Israel and abducted roughly 240 more to the Gaza Strip, leading Israel to launch an ongoing military operation aimed at returning the hostages and removing Hamas from power in the Strip.

"The main difficulty faced by Israeli residents in the vicinity of Gaza seems to have passed, says Emily Di Capua, noting that the incessant rocket attacks of the past few months have nearly ceased. Belgian-born Di Capua is the manager of the dairy farm at Kibbutz Karmiya, located two kilometers (1.2 miles) to the east of Zikim.

"The agricultural interns working at the kibbutz dairy farms are participants in a one-year program administered by MASHAV, the Foreign Ministry’s Agency for International Development Cooperation. In addition to dairy farming, students are training in orchard and field crops, poultry and livestock raising, and fisheries. The students do paid work on a farm five days a week and spend one day studying at one of the country’s five international agricultural training centers.

"Unlike the temporary foreign workers in Israeli farms, who usually come from small villages and have a limited educational background, the agricultural interns are all university-educated and many are aspiring entrepreneurs.

"The Internship in Agriculture Program was initiated by the Arava International Center for Agricultural Training in 1994, but Israel has a long history of reaching out to the developing world, going back to the 1950s when then-prime minister David Ben Gurion mandated extensive programs that lasted for decades. A United Nations Development Program report noted in 1975 that Israel was the largest contributor of assistance per capita of any country in the world.

"Many of those programs have dwindled since then, but as the agricultural internship program in the past few months has shown, Israel continues to reap benefits in unexpected ways."