wfn.org | Violence keeps Palestinians from olive harvest

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Note #6274 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

21-November-2000
00418

Violence keeps Palestinians from olive harvest

Sympathetic Israelis take to the groves to help neighbors fend off rot and
ruin

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE -- Neta Golan had 40 volunteers picking olives last week in
Hares, a scruffy Palestinian village of tumbledown homes south of Nablus.

	That's not unusual; it's olive-picking time in Palestine.

	 But there was something odd about the pickers in Hares: They were all
Jewish.

	It is the pragmatic opinion of Golan, Hares' newest resident, that if the
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are going to confine Palestinians to the
villages of the West Bank, somebody's got to pick the olives before they
rot.

	 And that leaves only Israeli Jews, left-wingers like herself.

	"The villages on the West Bank and in Gaza ... are under seige," says
Golan, 29, a therapist from Tel Aviv who has been in Hares for a week,
monitoring the violence and coordinating Israeli and international
volunteers in a village near the old Green Line, the demarcation that,
before the 1967 war, separated Israeli-controlled land from property in
Palestinian hands.

	The villagers say Hares is a focus of intimidation because it is close to
Israeli-controlled areas and probably destined for Israeli annexation in the
event of a peace agreement.

	"People here depend on the olive harvest for their livelihood, and they
aren't allowed to enter or to leave the village," Golan says. "They're not
allowed to pick the olives. So the harvest is rotting on the trees."

	She notes that money has dried up from the odd jobs of the Palestinians of
Hares, who are among Israel's cleaners, factory hands and day laborers.
"When I asked what they needed help with, they said, ‘First, help with the
olives. Second, the uprooting.'"

	Stage two of the harvest work in Hares is re-planting olive trees that have
been bulldozed periodically to make way for Israeli settlements -- makeshift
"instant villages" established on contested land, often with military
protection -- along the border.

	For Golan, this has been an awakening.

	She is trained as an international civil observer, and she wants the rest
of the world to see what she has seen -- what she calls "excessive" force
employed by the IDF in restraining unarmed Palestinians, and equally
excessive lassitude toward carloads of gun-toting Israeli settlers in the
area who show up at the outskirts of Hares at night, firing weapons and
shouting obscenities -- hoping, she says, to incite a riot for the army to
quell violently.

	She wants the world to see this and to demand that it stop.

	But this is how life has been in Hares, according to Nawas Soas, a
Palestinian resident whose life in the city has become less and less free.

	Soas estimates that 500 olives trees have been uprooted over the past
decade by settlers and by the IDF -- including 15 of them his own. Water is
regularly cut off, for which he, and most of his neighbors, blame settlers,
not the water company. Stones are thrown at Arab cars from nearby
settlements. At night, villagers have grown uneasily accustomed to the
sounds of shooting and hollering, honking horns and swearing.

	"This is ethnic cleansing. They want to clear the land of Palestinians. ...
They are choking them," says Soas, whose family was able to pick and press
olives from his 200 trees in an orchard safely inside the town's border.
(However, none of the pressed oil has made its way to market.)

	"They're doing what happened here in 1948," he says, describing efforts to
run Palestinians off their property to make way for Israelis.

	Soas is grateful for help in the olive groves, but points out that only a
few Israelis show up to do it: "Of all the Israelis ... only a few come."

	One of the few is Naama Faragoun, 31.

	She admits that she's not typical; she grew up in a left-leaning house
where Jews and Palestinians co-mingled. She knows how its feels to be
thought of as a traitor, but she seems things differently.

	"I think what I am doing is trying to save this place from total war," she
says. "The only way to live here is by respecting the full civil and human
rights of the population, who've been living here for years, and who should
be living here."

	Faragoun says she wants to see international troops stop the killing. An
international presence between Israelis and Palestinians would stop even the
threat of killing, which is enough to keep farmers out of their orchards.

	The newly formed organization Faragoun is aligned with, called The 29th of
September to memorialize the first day of the violence, wants the same. The
violence hit close to Hares just last week, when a boy was shot among the
olives; it is not clear whether the fatal bullet was fired by the military
or by a settler.

	Golan has felt the violence personally.

	She has a loudspeaker over which she calls out to the army to stop settlers
who shoot and shout and honk horns at Palestinians. Just a few nights ago,
she says, there were 60 cars and three gunshots, including one that was
fired toward the sound of Golan's voice, but missed her. And one day while
she was picking olives, a settler shouted a coarse threat of sexual
violence.

	But threats are nothing new at Hares.

	"A settlement was planted 10 years ago, practically on top of Hares,"
Faragoun says.  "The point is, it is at the very edge of the land. ... And
the people cannot work if we are not there ... Or the settlers come down and
harass them. They are really afraid. I know that is the case, all over the
West Bank.

	"In Hares, they're on the verge of hunger, and they're not allowed to
physically leave the town. Settlers are gathering around there every night.
By chance, we heard about this. But I believe there are other villages in
same situation;  I just had a contact here."

	Golan says Israeli leftists have picked olives for hunkered-down
Palestinians before, just not during this Intifada.

	But during this Intifada, people on both sides are more fearful.

	According to Golan, most Jews are too frightened now to come to what are
commonly called the Occupied Territories.

	"Palestinians are being presented as a wild mob," she says. "There's a
massacre going on here that's being presented as a war, which it is not.
Palestinians don't have an army, not any real way to defend themselves.
Nobody in this village has a gun."

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