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Olive Picking
From: Bullet Points (used w/permission)
Today I picked olives. The valley, deep in the northern part of the West Bank, was hot and sunny - more than is apparently usual for November. Plastic sheets caught the fruit, as the men whacked the branches with a stick and the women gathered at the bottom.
A small group of 'internationals' plus Israelis including Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom had been called out by Palestinians to help them harvest the last of this year's olives from their land...
Not long after we started picking, 3 settlers appeared on the horizon. Some of the Palestinians froze instantly. Jewish settlers in many parts of the West Bank have a track record in violence towards Palestinians picking their crops and will do anything to stop them. Last Thursday, settlers threw a rock at an Israeli man who was helping the Palestinians pick olives. He ended up in hospital needing stitches to his head.
The land we picked on is disputed. According to one of the Palestinians, some of the land was registered in his grandfather's name who died over 50 years ago. There are 20 Palestinian owners for this tract of land who live in the nearby villages, but the deeds are locked away in the records office in Nablus, which is under curfew. Just over the hill there is Jewish settlement (Giliad) which also claims the land. The settlers say that the settlement was built on Jewish owned land. They say that some Palestinians sold the land to the Jews.
An army jeep appeared. After much discussion between army and settlers, some of the soldiers approached. A soldier produced a two week old order issued by their Brigade Commander stating that the area was a 'closed military zone...except for those I have given permission to be here'. The order was valid for 3 weeks. We were told we couldn't pick here. Rabbi Milgrom ( from RHR - Rabbis for Human Rights) read the order and said that the exception applied to the olive pickers. The soldier admitted that he did not know enough about the order and went to refer it to someone else.
Meanwhile, Israeli police appeared. One started videoing the group of us...then he suddenly grabbed one of the Palestinians and demanded his ID. He hadn't got it on him for fear of losing so precious a document, so his brother went back to the village to get it. He was interrogated as to the identity of his family, and the police and army took a long time phoning through the details to someone. Our passports were also taken.
Finally a Lieutenant Commander arrived with more soliders. One soldier told me that the land was being disputed between Palestinians from two different villages. Another said that it was between the settlement and the Palestinians and if the Palestinians could produce a document from before 1967 when the West Bank was part of Jordan, the dispute would be settled. (May I remind you that according to international law all of the West Bank has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967and that the 4th Geneva Convention prohibits building on occupied territory). When the Lieutenant Commander stepped in, rather full of machismo, the negotiation stopped. He told the Palestinians that it was not their land and inferred in a threatening manner that they should disappear. Fortunately the donkey had already taken a massive sack of olives away. The police were heard saying to the army in Hebrew that they could end this argument very quickly if they chose (e.g. tear gas). In fact, the army is restricting access to 2km of land around the disputed area of land and we never managed to ascertain if these olive trees were actually part of the supposedly disputed area or not.
We left with many of the trees untouched. As we left, the army spoke through a loud speaker to other Palestinians they had spotted in the olive groves ordering them to go immediately. Once back round the hill, we met other men who had walked all the way from Nablus on foot across the hills to reach family members in a nearby village. Walking over rough terrain for hours at a time is now the only way that many West Bank Palestinians manage to continue their lives. Under the Oslo agreements vast tracts of land are designated as Area C which is under Israeli military control. The West Bank land controlled by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) is intersected by 144 Israeli civilian and military installations. This makes it virtually impossible for the PA to control, and renders any so called 'Palestinian State' unviable as the land has become a fragmented mosaic of non-contiguous islands. A fact-finding committee led by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell on May 21, 2001 called on the Palestinian Authority to "make a 100 percent effort to prevent terrorist operations and to punish perpetrators." It also recommended that the Israeli government freeze all settlement activity, including the natural growth of existing settlements. To date this has not happened.
We were grateful the settlers kept their distance, but sorry that the army found two conflicting excuses for us not to continue to pick the Palestinians olives. The army and the settlers both work in the name of the state of Israel. The saddest thing I heard was the contempt they both had for the Palestinians...inferring amongst other things that we might find they had stolen the cars we came in.
Yet an hour later, we were all sitting in the house of one of the Palestinian landowners being treated to honey comb, mint tea and coffee and many 'thankyous' for coming.
"If you had not been here, they would have beaten us" said our host before escorting us a few miles across dusty tracks back to the main road. This kind of hospitality and gratefulness is beyond the mindset of the soldiers we encountered and would ruin the myth that they are defending 'their' land from Arab terrorists.
QPSW (Quaker Peace and Social Witness)
Israel & Palestinian Territories
If anyone would like to reproduce any part of this report verbatim, please contact Floresca Karanasou, on +44 (0) 20 7663 1073 or florescak@quaker.org.uk
