MOSHAV LIMAN – Reuven Kfir, 77, stood in his avocado groves 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) from Lebanon on Thursday and talked about the healing benefits of bee stings.
As Hezbollah rockets and artillery were fired from just behind the hilly border, he gestured to a stack of white beehives and cautioned, “But not on your face.”
Despite the instructions from the IDF Home Front Command to evacuate when the war began in October, Kfir and a few other farmers have stayed planted in the cooperative agricultural community, or moshav. Those who remain behind are some of the moshav’s elders who share a sense of boldness in the face of bombardments.
Before the Israel-Hamas war, some 850 people lived in this rustic community that is dotted with small family farms and private houses. That population has now dwindled to about 125, including the emergency response team. Most residents with young children have left since there is no kindergarten or nursery school.
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the Lebanese border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza during the war against Hamas there.
Some 60,000 people from a wide swath of northern Israel have been forced from their homes.
So far, the skirmishes have resulted in 26 civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of 22 IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria without any injuries.
The escalation in the north came after a wave of pager and walkie-talkie blasts in Lebanon that killed more than 30 members of the terror group and wounded thousands of others, according to the Lebanese health ministry. That was followed by a ramped-up campaign of Israeli airstrikes targeting top terror leaders. In the wake of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s killing on Friday evening in a suburb of Beirut, the area north of Haifa has remained on high alert.
Schools have been shut since last Sunday, and people have been advised to stay close to their shelters. At Kibbutz Sa’ar, only 6.5 kilometers (4 miles) from Liman, a house suffered a direct hit on September 25.
But farmer Kfir remains unfazed, determined to keep the 100-dunam (25-acre) family holding going. This is where he grew up, he said.
Almost every day since the war began, Kfir commutes from a nearby hotel where he and Clarise, his wife of nearly 50 years, and some 200 other people from the northern evacuated zone have lived for the past year.
Kfir is sturdy and strong, resembling a sort of friendly pit bull. He has knowing eyes under extremely bushy eyebrows that appear to have gone through a process of rewilding.
He said that he has only gone into a bomb shelter once since 1978 because “Clarise persuaded me.”
He lived through hundreds of Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon before 1982’s First Lebanon War, he said. Then he lived through that war and the Second Lebanon War that followed in 2006.
“We never evacuated in all those years, and we shouldn’t evacuate now,” he declared.
He returns to the farm every morning and stays until about 1 p.m. to take care of his land and trees. He also cares for a roaming pack of stray dogs: their owners have left them behind.
“Now it’s quiet,” he remarked, looking at the dogs.
A moment later, explosions were heard.
“When I hear the booms, I’m happy the bombs didn’t fall on me,” he said.
New farmers
In 1956, when Kfir was nine, his Romanian-born parents moved to Liman. In Romania, Jews were not allowed to own land, so they knew nothing about farming, Kfir said. His father was a professional photographer.
“We only knew cows from his pictures,” he joked.
Upon their move, he said, his parents were given one cow and “half a horse” to share with another family. He then laughed, remembering an anecdote about a neighboring family of new farmers trying unsuccessfully to grow carrots. Their farming adviser told them the carrots needed to be covered.
“Where can we get so many blankets to cover them?” they replied.
Kfir’s family started growing simple vegetables. Clarise said she grew flowers to sell, as well as avocados and bananas.
Now, even during the war, he harvests the avocados. He said that the previous day, he harvested one of the first varieties of avocado, Galil, hitched the crates to his pickup truck and drove them to a packaging plant across the road from where the fruit would be shipped to Europe.
In the living room where they raised their three children, Clarise recounted that in July 2023, three months before the October 7 massacre when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists slaughtered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 into Gaza, representatives from the IDF Home Front Command came to the moshav and said, “Hezbollah wants to invade and occupy the land. You can stay, but you need to be prepared.”
“How can we be prepared?” Clarise remembered thinking. “We have 10 people on our emergency response team.”
“You can’t imagine the tension and the emotional distress,” she said. “I can’t even explain the fear.”
But Reuven said he remained undaunted. He took this Times of Israel reporter for a walk among his avocado trees. Under a bright sun, the groves were full of dappled sunlight and shade.
He pointed out the beehives, explaining that he keeps bees to pollinate the avocado trees.
Along with his enthusiasm for apitherapy, an alternative therapy that uses products such as bee venom, honey, and pollen for medicinal purposes, he also recommends grating the pit of an avocado and eating one teaspoon a day. He said it has a nutty flavor and it’s “good for you.”
“Not too much, just one spoon,” he said. “I don’t have time to be sick.”
Despite his seemingly upbeat nature, he believes there will “never be peace.”
“The charters of Hezbollah and Hamas say that they will never accept Israel here,” he said. “Not until they’re educated from kindergarten to accept us will there be peace.”
But then he changed the subject with a shrug of his shoulder.
“To get to Malachi’s nursery, take the first left and then count three streets, and you’ll be there,” Kfir said.
‘My jungle’
The roads throughout the moshav were empty, the synagogue locked, and houses deserted.
Edna and Itzhak Malachi were sitting in their side yard, not too far from the fortified bunker inside their house, talking about their refusal to leave their home and their nursery.
“If we leave, who will take care of our plants?” Malachi said.
The couple have run their nursery for 40 years. It used to be a thriving business; now, Malachi said they earn about 1 percent of what they used to make.
There is always a sense of a possible attack coming from just over the border. Yet, walking through the nursery, the war didn’t feel close at all.
“This is my jungle,” Malachi said.
Birds fluttered in and out of the overhead netting, where foliage was abundant, including rosemary, sage, and thyme, along with flowering cacti.
Every day, the couple tends the plants, ready to open the nursery’s gate and reboot their business as soon as the war ends.
The couple also grows lychee trees. Beyond them, there was a line of towering pecan trees that belonged to the moshav.
“You can come back and pick as many as you want,” he said.
This is the couple’s second frontier town: The Malachis lived in Moshav Dikla in the Sinai until the peace treaty was signed with Egypt in 1979. They were forced to leave the area and moved north.
“We used to go to the market in Rafah,” Malachi reminisced. “Our bank was in Rafah.” He was one of the people who protested having to leave the moshav then; perhaps, he said, that was the reason he has stayed through the war now.
“We can’t leave here,” he said. “This is our living. We have to leave it for our children.”
Learning to do everything
In the kitchen of their comfortable house, Bella Shusterman was frying onions and mashing potatoes.
She said that her husband, Itzhak, had lost 22 kilos since the war began.
“He couldn’t eat the food in the hotel,” she said.
A few months into the war, they returned to live in their house out of concern for their 80 dunams (20 acres) of farmland, where they grow mangoes, lychees, avocados, and bananas.
Bella recounted that they fled Liman after October 7, “leaving everything.” She said they tried to harvest the fruit, but it was “under stress, SOS.”
“Did you ever see a banana tree with fruit that hasn’t been cut?” Itzhak asked, not waiting for an answer. “The bananas drop to the ground. The tree looks like a skinny pole, that’s all.”
Bella said she came to Liman when she was 18 years old.
“I was a city girl,” she said, “but I raised our five kids here and learned to do everything.”
She said they decided to stay in the moshav despite the dangers. Listening for sirens and rockets overhead, she pointed out the stairs leading to the underground shelter in their house.
“When you live in this reality,” she said, “you still can’t get used to it.”
Return to their homes?
Two days after the killing of Nasrallah, Moshe Davidovich, the head of the Mateh Asher Regional Council and Conflict Zone Forum Chairman, went to the Aqueduct Hotel, where residents of various towns in the region were staying, and told them he hoped they would be able to move home in a few weeks.
“I don’t believe him,” said Kfir, speaking to The Times of Israel in a follow-up conversation this week.
Kfir said that the killing of Nasrallah didn’t bring hope – it brought more bombs and sirens.
“I use humor because life isn’t simple,” he said, apologizing for the darkness of his quip.
“Sometimes when you see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said, “it’s only the light of a train headed right at you.”
