A brief report from the European volunteer team participating in the Palestinian olive harvest 2005
saleh on November 22nd, 2005Zaytoun 2005 harvest report
by
Dave Owen
On Sunday, 6th November a group of volunteers set off from Jerusalem for a West Bank village in the Salfit region to pick olives with Palestinian farmers. The core group of ten (eight British, one Irish, one German) was joined by others over the following two weeks, including a photographer and a journalist. We stayed for five days each in two villages and participated in meetings and cultural visits. This is what we witnessed.
Zaytoun is the arabic word for olive, and is a British-based organisation distributing and selling Palestinian olive oil on fair trade principles The olive harvest is a time for volunteers to help directly with picking the crop, monitoring conditions and trying to protect the farmers from harassment and attack. To see for ourselves what is happening today in the West Bank. A disturbing and frightful sight.
It is hard for anyone who hasn’t visited Palestine to appreciate the difficulties involved in the simplest journey. Roads are blocked by permanent checkpoints mounted by armed Israeli soldiers. From Jerusalem we had to get out of our bus after a few kilometres, carry belongings across a nightmarish landscape of concrete barriers, walls and fences, and find other transport to continue the journey. This process continued throughout the West Bank, so that a journey the distance from London to Brighton could involve four changes and five separate payments.
There are also ‘flying checkpoints’, set up at a moment’s notice across roads; earth mounds and fences blocking off access to villages; restricted movement on many roads for non-Israeli vehicles; and endless delays, harassment and questioning, much worse for Palestinians than for foreigners.
The people who live here are treated as worse than strangers in their own country. To the indignity is added the suffering of economic stagnation and massive unemployment as work grinds to a halt; teachers are unable to travel to school; medical staff cannot reach villages. More than 30 cases of mothers dying in childbirth while waiting at checkpoints have been recorded.
At the villages we were treated to wonderful hospitality, lavish meals and heartfelt words of welcome. Most of all, the request : please tell the rest of the World what is happening to us! Israeli settlers from hilltop encampments invading schools with sticks, frightening the children. Setting dogs on farmers who pick on their own land too close to settlement fences, attacking them and brandishing guns with inpunity as the Israeli army looks away or tells the farmers they must leave.
Olive trees, the mainstay of 80% of Palestianian agriculture, are burnt down and uprooted for more settlements, barriers, roads and fences, or simply out of spite. A people terrorised on a daily basis at every turn.
We were lucky as our visit did not involve any direct physical confrontation. We were told to leave the olive fields by armed soldiers and saw settlers with guns staring at us behind their fences. Our success was to pick in some places where the farmers had been fearful to go without international volunteers. Those trees they did not pick would not bear fruit again, so they would lose more trees and land by default. In the second village we visited 50% of all the land and tress has been lost over a 25 year period, by a series of confiscations and wantom destruction.
A new hazard is the building of a continuous barrier between Israel and the West Bank, known as the ‘Apartheid Wall’. This structure does not follow the Green Line dividing Israel from Palestine, but snakes deep into Palestinian land, stealing more territory, dividing communinites and isolating farmers from their land. At our second village constructrion work on the barrier had started on the hill above, laying waste to a wide strip of land and destroying more olive trees. The barrier is said to be for security. In fact it only impoverishes and hems in ordinary Palestinians; anyone who is determined and resourceful can find a way around it.
Our visit did contain many charming and delightful moments, in amongst the horrors. Simple lunches on blankets in the olive groves, with bread, homous, cheese, fruits and tea; games of football and frisbee with charming children; evening meals and conversation with farmers and their wives; a folk music and dabka dance performance in the village community centre; self-help and resilience using minimal resources. The beautiful scenery of gently rolling hills, interspersed with curving olive groves and dotted with arab villages, each displaying the distinctive minaret of a mosque from where the haunting call to prayer of the meuzzin issues five times a day. A land of potential plenty and paradise.
The Palestinians are often portrayed as dangerous terrorists, hell-bent on violence and destruction. The reality is they are a peaceful and greatly suffering people, terrorised by a brutal neighbour who is armed to the teeth by the richest nation on earth. The only land they have remaining that has not been directly stolen by this neighbour is occupied by him. The only hope they have for survival, other than their own heroic resistance in surviving, is understanding and help from the international community. They need your help now.
What can you do? :
- get information from Zeytoun, other websites and books;
- write letters to your Council, MP, local press, organisations;
- raise the issue and invite speakers to your meetings;
- buy Palestinian olive oil and other products;
- boycott products from Israel;
- come on the olive harvest in October next year!
