(SeaPRwire) –   By: Julian Holbrooke

Har Bracha is a small settlement in the West Bank hills above the Samarian valley. Last month, a new visitors center opened its doors there. It was inaugurated by The Israel Guys, a Christian Zionist outfit that has spent nearly two decades ferrying more than five thousand volunteers from thirty-five countries into this territory. The official line is straightforward enough. Joshua Waller, the organization’s CEO, says the mission is to let internationals see the biblical heartland thriving, to stand in the soil and refute what he calls a manufactured media narrative about conflict. Plain words. Clear claim. Something quieter is happening beneath them.

The press materials lay out the logistics with care. There are programs for every season. The Heartland Experience runs ten days. The Grape Harvest trip takes two weeks in late summer and early fall. There is a Men’s Pruning trip in early spring. Zion Ops targets young adults between eighteen and thirty. Day visits offer two-hour slots for anyone passing through Har Bracha. The organization traces its roots to 2004, when Joshua Waller’s father, Tommy Waller, met Nir Lavi, founder of Har Bracha Winery, and heard a reading of Jeremiah 31:5 about vineyards returning to the mountains of Samaria. Tommy Waller moved his wife Sherri and their eleven children from Tennessee to the settlement in 2007. He founded HaYovel that year. The group launched a television program called The Joshua and Caleb Report in 2013, moved to a podcast in 2018, and rebranded as The Israel Guys five years ago. The numbers are specific and consistent. More than twenty team members now run the operation. Approximately one hundred and twenty farms have been developed through volunteer labor. After the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, which killed over twelve hundred Israelis, the organization launched Operation Ittai and raised three point eight five million dollars for tactical supplies and community defense. A viral moment came when American cowboys were brought in to help farmers whose workers had been called up as reservists. The volunteer pool draws from Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, Mormons, Amish, and Mennonites.

What the organization calls propaganda, Waller frames as a direct information conflict. He says Jews in Judea and Samaria are branded as a radical and dangerous group by an international narrative he describes as a straight-up war against the Jewish people. He argues the visitor center exists to prove that branding wrong. He also makes a broader demographic claim. Israel, he says, is the safest place for Christians in the entire Middle East, and the only place in the region where the Christian population is growing. Christians in neighboring states and Palestinian Authority areas, he says, suffer immensely. The Bible, he adds, predicts that this land will become like the Garden of Eden, and volunteers are participating in that fulfillment in real time. The volunteer work is real. Tree planting. Fence erection. Crop harvesting. Infrastructure projects. The information work is also real. Social media amplification. Media appearances. Narrative reconstruction aimed at overseas audiences who consume Israel through screens and headlines. The two layers reinforce each other. Volunteers build something visible. The footage of that work becomes the evidence for a counter-narrative. That is not conspiracy. It is a documented information strategy.

The geopolitical signal here matters more than the brochure. Western governments have debated Christian Zionism as a foreign constituency with influence on policy circles for years. An organization that can move five thousand volunteers across thirty-five countries, raise millions for community defense, and sustain a continuous media product is not a hobby. It is a soft infrastructure. The visitor center in Har Bracha is a physical node in that infrastructure. It converts abstract sympathy into embodied experience. People who arrive with preconceived media images leave with memories of vineyards and volunteers and fence posts. Those memories travel back home. They get retold. They shape opinion. The organization’s own language confirms the intent. Waller says Israel is a partner for peace and urges nations to align with biblical values. He also says that if antisemitism triggers efforts to destroy Israel, Israel will fight that war and The Israel Guys will continue helping on the information side. The duality is deliberate. One arm builds land. The other arm builds narrative. The land building is visible and verifiable. The narrative building is cumulative and structural. The real question is not whether the farms exist. The real question is what kind of long-term political terrain that sustained information campaign is reshaping abroad.
Author bio: Julian Holbrooke is an overseas international relations analyst who frequently contributes to major European daily newspapers and advises cross-border policy research groups on Middle East soft power dynamics.