“Wait while my husband puts on his shoes…”

Ramot Naftali is an agricultural moshav in the Upper Galilee lying two miles southeast of Israel’s border with Lebanon. Upon a breezy hilltop overlooking the Hula Valley, a scant fifteen miles from the Syrian border and only fifty miles from the fated city of Damascus, the tiny kibbutz was founded in 1945 by liberated members of the Palmach, the elite fighting force of Israel’s underground army during the British Mandate.
Like so many small communities in northern Israel and the Shomron, Ramot Naftali’s past—and sometimes its present—has a distinct, wild-west, frontier town flavor. Almost continually under fire during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, it is now better known for its apples, peaches and grapes than for its storied heroic defense efforts though, by any standard, it is still a rowdy place to farm.
[Read more…]