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Oct. 27, 2006
Opening up the old olive trees
Volunteers help Palestinians gather fruit under the watchful eye
of security forces.
ZACHARY GOELMAN
If you think that security won't respond in time," said Rabbi
Arik Ascherman, the director of Rabbis for Human Rights, "or
people are being attacked, then position yourselves between the
attackers and their targets."
Despite these somewhat sensational directions, at no point did Ascherman
use the term "human shield." The objectives were threefold:
to volunteer with the physical labor of a poor agricultural community,
to act as observers and witnesses in the event of any illegal conduct
and to deter, by our very presence, any such activity.
The seven of us stood on the slope of a terraced, cultivated hillside
overlooking the Hawara checkpoint in the West Bank, just south of
Nablus. "Do everything to prevent the situation from becoming
violent," Ascherman continued, "if you think that you
or the people with you could be attacked, call the regional security
headquarters and report the incident. We have a contact there who
has worked with us before."
Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli humanitarian group that advocates
equality and social justice for Palestinians, is one of several
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) organizing volunteers to accompany
Arab olive farmers in the West Bank during the seasonal harvest.
Seven of us, all volunteers, were there that day to work with Palestinian
farmers from the village of Kafr Kalil in their olive orchards.
We listened intently to Ascherman's instructions. I felt hyper-aware,
due to reports that this year's olive harvest would be a likely
flashpoint between Palestinians and settlers.
During the harvest of 2003, settlers physically assaulted the farmers
and discharged rifle fire into the fields where they were picking.
The army intervened and separated the harvest-crashers from the
Arab farmers. Each year since then, to pre-empt any disturbances,
the district army command has declared the fields a closed zone,
forbidden to all. The unpicked olives were left to fall from the
trees and rot. These olive trees had not been fully farmed since
2003.
There were two other volunteers with me as we made our way down
the hill towards a group of farmers. One was David, who moved from
London to Israel some 20 years ago. David wore a kippah, worked
in a high-tech solar energy company and, as we talked, said he faced
criticism from his relatives in West Bank settlements for his activism.
The other was Kajsa, a Swedish journalist in her late 20s. Kajsa
wore a vest printed with a dove-and-olive-branch logo and the words
"Ecumenical Accompanier." She lives in the West Bank with
a group of Christian pacifists sponsored by the World Union of Churches.
Her work as an accompanier, living alongside Palestinians, is what
brought her to the olive fields that day.
We introduced ourselves to the family whose trees we would be harvesting.
The father, Fuad, has four sons and one daughter. His two youngest
sons helped with the harvest. Nimr, 28, also works part-time painting
walls. Amr, 14, is dressed in jeans and a soccer jersey.
The family demonstrated the technique: first they laid a tarpaulin
beneath an olive tree. Amr lithely climbed the trunk and positioned
himself within the branches to get at the highest fruit. Nimr circled
the tree with a ladder, pulling olives off the outer, upper limbs.
Fuad plucked the lower branches. They used small plastic hand rakes,
combing the olives off so they fell onto the tarpaulin. Their mother,
Na'ul, collected the strays that fell to the earth. I could not
help romanticizing about how much, or how little, this form of harvest
had changed over centuries of olive cultivation on these very hills.
Once a tree was stripped of its fruit, the tarpaulin corners were
drawn in, filling the cloth's centre with olives, which were then
poured into a bucket. I lifted a bucket, half full with the fruit
of a single tree, and asked Nimr in my halting Arabic: "How
many kilograms?" He took the bucket, felt its weight and answered
"three, four." Then I stood and gestured widely, indicated
the whole field and repeated the question. Half a ton, he answered.
It was Ramadan, so Fuad and his family paced themselves, fasting
in the heat of the day. We volunteers followed their lead, occasionally
slipping away for a sip of water. Our conversation was limited by
vocabulary, but stimulated by mutual interest. Fuad explained, in
a mix of Arabic and Hebrew, that 14-year-old Amr was not in school
because there was no school. There was no money, he said, for teachers.
At one point, Nimr and I were combing the branches of a tree, just
the two of us. Something prompted Nimr to point his finger at a
scar on the side of his face, a twisted knot extending from his
left corner of his mouth along the jaw. He stopped picking olives
to explain: a year ago, he was asleep in his bed when an Israeli
soldier entered his room and shot him in the face. As he sat up
in shock, another bullet struck him in the chest, near his collarbone.
The Israelis then realized that they had invaded the wrong house.
Nimr's cousin drove him to the hospital. The army apologized. He
still needs more surgery on his jaw. After he finished, we picked
in silence for about an hour.
Fuad disappeared a little after noon. When he returned, he was carrying
pita bread, cheese spread and bottled drinks. He took a tarpaulin,
laid it down in the shade of a harvested tree and set a picnic out
before us. David objected, saying he didn't want to eat while the
family fasted, but Kajsa urged reason and the hospitality was accepted.
Fuad passed around bread and poured drinks.
At about two in the afternoon, the family announced that the day's
work was done. The heat, their fast and the good number of olive
buckets filled convinced them that what wasn't done today could
be completed in a few hours tomorrow. Nimr said that they still
had to take the day's yield back to their house, where they would
spend another few hours sorting and washing the crop. We sat on
the slope, thanking each other, with much hand-shaking and back-clapping,
staring down into the valley.
Perched atop the hill to the west was the Israeli settlement of
Har Bracha; to the south was the settlement of Yitzhar. On the hills
across the road are Itamar and Elon Moreh. The inhabitants of these
settlements have a reputation – many of the most ideological
settler activists hail from here.
Despite Ascherman's warnings about how to react to potentially violent
situations, our only encounter with settlers was at a small water
spring where we parked before entering the orchard. A group of Israeli
settlers and their children had come to cut leaves from a lone willow
tree, to be used during the next morning's Hoshana Rabba prayer
service. We washed our dusty hands in the cool spring water, as
their small children splashed in the pool. David approached one
man, asking if it was permissible to use branches stolen from a
tree, on land that didn't belong to them. The father frowned and
replied that this was their tree, planted six years prior, explicitly
for this use. On the drive home, David reasoned, "it's the
only willow tree around for miles, why would an Arab plant it? Arabs
have no use for willow." I was too tired to dispute this. As
long as the farmers can get their olives, I thought, we can let
those Jews have their willow.
Zachary Goelman is a former Vancouverite currently working
as an editorial intern at the Jerusalem Report.
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