Avraham "Avri" Ran (born 1955) is an Israeli settler activist and businessman, with a record for repeated criminal offenses against Palestinians. He has been called the founding father and "undisputed symbol" of the Hilltop Youth movement. His approach to developing Palestinian lands has been described as "environmental racism", combining working the terra while applying terror.
An organic food entrepreneur, he is also a reserve lieutenant/colonel in the IDF. He has been indicted several times, and convicted on four counts, three of assault and one case of aggravated assault. Considered in right-wing Israeli religious circles to be a "messianic hero", by some sources as a "charismatic guru", or one of the "biblical sabra", his presence in the area of the Palestinian village of Yanun has spelled "disaster" for the latter's inhabitants.
Life
Ran was born in 1955 in Nir Hen, in the Negev. He was raised in a secular family in the Israeli coastal settlement of Nahsholim until his late teens, when his family, mother and brother (who later joined the Israeli security service, the Shin Beit) left the kibbutz. Inducted into the IDF, where he became a commander in an armoured division. In 1995, Ran also served in an elite operations unit, the Sayeret Matkal. He worked in a shoe factory in Tel Aviv, and became strictly orthodox, together with his wife Sharona, who came from the moshav Neve Yarak. The couple has ten children.
Shortly after the signing of the Oslo Accords, in September 1993, Ran moved with his wife from moshav Meir, where he says he owned a farm, to the Israeli West Bank settlement of Itamar, near the Palestinian town of Nablus, an area he was familiar with from his reserve duties in the armoured corps. There he built and ran an organic chicken coop. With the confirmation of the Wye River Memorandum, on 15 November 1998 Ariel Sharon declared to a crowd of militants "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours..Everything we don't grab will go to them."
That December Ran made his own move, venturing beyond Itamar's fencing to pitch a tent on an open, windswept hill some six kilometers east of Itamar, naming the Israeli outpost Giv'ot Olam (Hills of Eternity/the Universe.) He reached it by stages, starting at "The Spot", shifting then to Hill 851, until he gained the summit. Over time, Ran dispossessed Palestinian families of over 900 dunams of personal property to establish his business.
According to the Israeli political scientist Hagar Kotef, his Giv'ot Olam farmland was founded by means of "land-grabbing, intimidation, harassment, and physical violence". Ran is said to believe that brutality is integral to living in nature. Though many settlers running organic farms consider the traditional Palestinian methods of cultivation (handpicking olives and ploughing fields by harnassing donkeys) as primitive, it has been argued that their fair trade cooperatives have been certificated to sell high-quality organic products on the international market.
Despite drawing on heavy government subsidies, Ran considers himself both a self-made man exemplifying "Jewish genius", and a Mapainik, as having followed the Mapai approach of taking land, of being indifferent to what others say, asking no questions, and developing it, something he says he learnt on his kibbutz. Many of those he recruits are high school dropouts and, of the 50 youths working on his farm, behaviourial problems are common.
Ran, who has faced bankruptcy problems, obtained a loan from the World Zionist Organization, and from Bank Leumi, using a chicken coop as collateral, and by mortgaging what he called Havat Itamar (Itamar Farm).
Ran himself lives on his self-styled "Avri Ran Ranch" a mile from the mother outpost of Giv'ot Olam.