The Binyamin Regional Council launched a new initiative this week known as the “Shepherd Camera Project” to equip farmers and shepherds throughout the region with body cameras similar to those used by police officers and security personnel, in an effort to ensure that confrontations with anti-Israel activists are accurately documented.
A launch event for the project took place on Thursday at the newly established Ruach Ha’aretz agricultural farm (“Spirit of the Land”) near the community of Ma’ale Michmas, where several dozen area farmers and shepherds arrived to pick up their body cameras.
According to the council, in recent years it has repeatedly encountered short video clips that begin in the middle of an incident and are circulated in Israel and abroad as examples of “settler violence”—violence allegedly committed by Israelis against Arabs in Judea and Samaria—without showing what preceded the confrontation.
The new program will give the Israelis continuous footage from the beginning of an incident, allowing them to document events as they unfold and share the footage with media outlets and on social media in real time.
The council initiative is being carried out in partnership with the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism and Generation Zion, a U.S.-based nonprofit whose mission is to educate and mobilize Generation Z Americans, aged 14 to 29, to stand with Israel.
Binyamin Regional Council Chairman and Yesha Council head Yisrael Ganz told JNS at the event that the government ministry backed the initiative so the footage could be used for research to identify potential criminal activity by foreign nationals or to counter anti-Israel claims they might make.
Ganz added that the project is particularly important with the beginning of the olive harvest for Arabs throughout the region. He said that in the past week alone, there were at least 48 incidents of violence carried out by Arabs and anarchists targeting Jewish shepherds in Binyamin.
“The anarchists who arrive from all over the world attack the farmers, capture it on video and then level charges of settler violence. This new initiative will prevent that,” Ganz said.
He added that footage taken by the farmers’ body cameras could help establish who was responsible for an incident and provide evidence to police.
Ganz also noted from the podium that this week, Arabs from the nearby village of al-Mughayyir were accused of pouring a toxic substance into a water trough used by sheep belonging to Jewish farmers, killing nine of the animals.
“Today it’s the sheep [being attacked]; tomorrow it’s our farmers,” he said.
‘Fighting back against fake news’
Dror Granevic, proprietor of the Ruach Ha’aretz farm, where he lives with his wife and two children, told JNS that he was grateful to be receiving a body camera. The farm, which recently moved from another location, is now home to a herd of 60 cows. Granevic said he wished he had been wearing a camera during an incident with local Bedouins last year.
Granevic said that in mid-2025, Jewish hikers near his farm were surrounded on Shabbat by a group of local Bedouins who began attacking them. Granevic arrived at the scene to help when, he said, one of the Bedouins struck him over the head with a metal rod. He was briefly hospitalized but made a full recovery.
“If I had a camera on me, I could turn the footage over to police to show what happened. No arrests were made in that incident,” he said.
Granevic emphasized that, in his view, Jewish farmers in all potential areas of confrontation should wear the cameras to document violence against them.
“This is an organized campaign accusing ‘settlers’ of violence,” he said. “We need to catch those who are actually carrying out violence while also fighting back against the fake news.”
‘Footage from our side’
Generation Zion founder Luke Moon, who attended the launch with 15 pro-Israel Christian activists participating in a Generation Zion educational tour of Israel, conceived the initiative and donated the cameras.
Moon told JNS that the idea came after he noticed what he described as a recurring imbalance in footage emerging from confrontations in Judea and Samaria.
“I would see all the video from the Palestinian side, but not from our side,” he said.
Moon said he searched Telegram and other channels for footage from the Israeli side but could not find what he was looking for. That led him to a simple solution: putting body cameras on farmers and shepherds on the ground.
“I decided that I need to get body cameras on every shepherd boy out there, so when a CNN crew runs up on some 13-year-old kid, we got the footage of that,” he said.
Moon said having cameras present changes people’s behavior while providing a more complete picture of what takes place.
“People behave differently when there’s more cameras around,” he said.
He pointed to the widespread use of body cameras by U.S. police as an example, saying that the footage helped change the narrative surrounding allegations of police violence.
His hope, he said, is ultimately to see less violence in Judea and Samaria, arguing that greater visibility can help achieve that.
Moon said Generation Zion brought 30 cameras to Israel for the initiative and that he has another 70 in the United States that he plans to bring on a future trip.
Eliana Passentin, international desk director for the Binyamin Regional Council, told Moon that she greatly appreciated his support and that of Generation Zion. She told JNS that the event was just the beginning of an effort to “spread the truth.”
“This is the beginning of a new world where everybody gets the true facts immediately before lies are spread,” she said.
