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Strange fruit
02426
October 29, 2002

Strange fruit

Israeli volunteers serve as 'human shields' in West Bank orchards

by Alexa Smith

DIR ISTIYA, West Bank - Israelis and internationals were milling around on a
dirt road - deep in the heart of the West Bank - when Rabbi Arik Ascherman
started hollering instructions.

"We're not going to do this as one big group; that'll attract too much
attention," he shouted, as mini-vans full of volunteer olive-pluckers stuffed
water bottles into packs and pouches. "We're going to go as small groups,
with families. People here don't want provocations."

There has been no serious trouble in Dir Istiya. So far.

One anxious settler did stop to ask what the rabbis - a few, like Ascherman,
with yarmulkes pinned into place - were doing at the entrance to a
Palestinian village. He didn't stay long. He just wanted to remind Ascherman
that there were Israelis in settlements nearby with their own worries.

Last year, the Israeli army chopped and burned a few rows of olive trees next
to the highway, one of the bypass roads that ring the West Bank (giving
Israelis a way to get from one settlement to another and keeping Palestinians
bottled up). Apparently some Palestinian boys in the orchard had been
throwing rocks at vehicles.
But there have been few problems this harvest season. 

That doesn't mean there has been no fear.

Less than a week before, Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper, had run a story
about an incident in which settlers near Nablus killed a Palestinian olive
harvester and and wounded two others in the latest of many such assaults.
Apparently a group of settlers had been harassing olive-pickers, and the army
had done nothing to stop them.

In Dir Istiya, groups of soldiers from the Israeli Defense Forces are
stationed along the roadways, automatic weapons at their sides. Others were
driving up and down the stretch of the bypass road that parallels the town's
olive orchards.

Settler violence has farmers here on edge. Olive-picking is a family
activity. Men, women and children swarm over the trees, harvesting blue-black
olives to be pressed into oil, a dietary staple for the Palestinians and
their principal cash crop.

In Dir Istiya, many of the farmers are sharecroppers who labor for one-third
of the profit.

"There are poor people here," says Enas Al-Ahmod, a young Arab woman who is
helping move the volunteers along the dirt road. "There are many settlements
around us here, and there is some conflict between us and settlers."

That explains the way 70-year-old Khader Monsour reacts when he sees a few
Israelis and Anglo journalists approaching his family. He comes crashing
through the trees, shouting and gesticulating wildly.

His nephew Izzat hurries to him, assuring him that the visitors are friends,
not foes.

"How to get the olives this year, it is a problem," Izzat explains, in
heavily accented English. "For some people here, the only income is olives."

He demands of the journalists: "Where is the world? Americans talk all the
time about freedom. Why does it not apply here?  Why do Americans apply
United Nations resolutions to Iraq and China  but not here?" 

The United Nations Security Council passed resolution 465 in 1980 determining
that measures taken by Israel to change the demographic composition and
geographic character of the Palestinian territories since 1967 is unlawful,
since it violates the Geneva Conventions. The Fourth Geneva Convention says
that an occupying power may not transfer its own civilian population into the
territory it occupies.

Izzat Monsour runs the factory that presses the olives. His machines can turn
out more than a ton per hour, but this year he hasn't even turned them on,
because most of the olives are going unpicked. Last year, he says, the
factory was in operation 24 hours a day for 60 days in a row.

Monsour is an accountant. Before the Gulf War, he lived in Kuwait. He says
getting the olives to the presses isn't his only problem.

Because the only paved highway is open only to settlers and other Israelis,
and his truck has Palestinian tags, he can't use it to transport the oil to
market. No Palestinian can.

When he ventured onto the road, an uncle of Monsour's was stopped by Israeli
soldiers and fined 200 shekels, which he couldn't afford to pay. Now he has
to avoid Israeli checkpoints, or else he'll be arrested and forced to pay up.
Izzat can sell his oil to the Red Cross, but it pays less than the market
price. He says with a shrug that that the best he can do this year, given the
violence and the closures and the curfews.

Hava Keller, a 73-year-old Israeli woman from Tel Aviv who fought with the
Israeli army in 1948, works alongside the Monsours.

Her perspective has changed since then.
"I am here because I want Palestinians to have the right to work in their
fields," she says. "I am more or less a human shield."

Keller, who had lost most of her family in the Holocaust, emigrated to Israel
in search of a place where she could feel safe. She says she had an early
inkling that the search hadn't ended when, in 1948, she walked past a
Palestinian village whose residents had fled Israeli forces.

"It was a beautiful village, but empty," she recalls. "I kept wondering when
the people might return. Then, one morning, on my way to work, I saw that it
was gone, demolished. Then I knew that Israel was not going to make peace."

It is quiet in Dir Istiya, but it isn't peaceful.
Many Palestinian families are said to be living on $2 a day or less.
Unemployment has climbed steadily since the Intifada erupted more than two
years ago, and Israel closed its border. In rural Dir Istiya, many families
are fortunate to have goats for milk and cheese, and land on which to grow
vegetables and wheat. If they have no meat, at least they have bread, and oil
to dip it in. Before the Intifada, about 4,000 also had jobs; only about 200
are employed now inside the town. About 30 have permits to leave town to go
to a job.

"The main problem here is medical help," says a woman standing nearby "If
you're severely ill, you cannot get to Nablus (and the nearest hospital)
because the road is blocked."

Another olive-picker, Dan Tamir, is a 29-year-old Israeli reservist who has
refused to serve in the Occupied Territories. He says he'll defend Israel
against foreign attack, but won't fight a civilian population.

"The message here is that people are being harassed," he says. "In my
country, a farmer cannot go to work in his fields without being afraid. ...
I'm not naive; I'm not really helping to harvest trees. My hands, my work
(sends) a message. I hope I am able to make clear that  not all Israelis are
the enemy.

"If my father were alive today, I think he would join me in this." 

Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kellman, another volunteer in the orchard - a member of a
group called Rabbis for Human Rights - says he's there because devout Jews
have an obligation to "protect innocents." 

"To know about (this) is to feel responsible," he said, looking at the
village. "Zion will be redeemed through justice. I see it as the ultimate
form of Jewish activism to build a just society."

Because of projects like this one that enable rabbis and other volunteers to
form relationships with ordinary Palestinians, Ascherman said that some
Israelis understood Palestinians' frustration with the failures of the peace
process before the Intifada erupted over two years ago. "If we're going to
survive in this land as children of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, our
inheritance from Abraham is not just killing each other," he says.

 "There's also a spiritual and moral inheritance  (to do) justice." 

For photos and video clips related to this story please visit
www.pcusa.org/pcnews.

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