23 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
Olive farmers and volunteers were picking olives on 23 October 2011 when they were circled by two Apache helicopters and were faced by four tanks at certain points in the day. This video shows one of the tanks.
16 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
The olive harvest started in theWest Bankin early October and will continue in some villages until mid-November. Olives have been cultivated in Palestinian land for thousands of years. Around 95% of the harvest is used to make olive oil, with the remainder for pickles, table olives, and soap. The harvest is worth around 364m shekels (£64m) a year to the fragile Palestinian economy, struggling under the burden of occupation. Up to 100,000 families depend upon the olive harvest for their livelihoods to some extent, according to the UN.
Olives are also symbol of Palestinian culture and a connection to the land. Olive picking contains a strong political dimension; particularly in villages which are vulnerable to settler attacks and interference from the Israeli military.
Settler attacks on olive groves have escalated in recent years. In previous harvests settlers have fired live ammunition at olive farmers and have burnt and uprooted thousands of trees. Israeli security forces are often unwilling to intervene during settler attacks and they regularly interfere with olive harvests, forcing farmers to seek permission to pick olives on their own land and only granting short periods to complete picking over large areas. Even when permission is granted, the Israeli military may still arbitrarily force olive farmers to cease picking; often offering no reason or falsely declaring ‘closed military zones’.
The presence of international volunteers to document and use non-violent action to intervene can reduce the threat of violence from settlers and the Israeli military. It is also a vital expression of solidarity with beleaguered Palestinian farmers.
Whilst the heavily armed settlers often attack olive farmers with impunity, the Palestinian farmers have limited means to protect themselves. As Ibrahim El-Buriny, a 27 year old olive farmer from Burin, says “We don’t have anything to protect ourselves except a rock, our heart and God.” El-Buriny remains defiant in spite of the mounting pressure he faces, “The land is like our mother and father. We can’t leave our land and who would?”
by Alistair George
17 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
The Israeli military conducted arrests, mistreated detainees and continued to prevent villagers from picking olives in certain areas of Burin, near Nablus, yesterday on October 16 2011. International activists have been prevented by the military from attending olive harvests during the past two days in some areas and settlers harassed and threw stones at villagers picking olives in Burin today.
Two villagers from Burin were detained yesterday whilst picking olives. Hussain Hamed Najjar, 21, was arrested yesterday morning by the Israeli military and is currently being held in Ariel, an Israeli settlement. His family claim that he has been accused of throwing a stone at an Israeli settler around three years ago – a charge that Najjar strongly denies.
A group of around 10 settlers from the nearby settlement of Bracha entered the Palestinian land yesterday morning and attempted to harass olive harvesters, under the watch of the Israeli military, by taking photographs of them. Najjar was reportedly arrested for pushing a settler’s camera away, causing it to fall on the ground.
Najjar’s uncle, Akram Ibrahim Ali Imran, expressed concern for his nephew and insisted that he was innocent of any wrongdoing; “I can’t describe how worried I am, particularly about his family.” Najjar dropped out of university in order to earn money to support his family after his father was imprisoned by the Palestinian Authority and is financially responsible for 9 people.
Bashir Imran, also 21, was detained by the Israeli military in the same area at the same time for unknown reasons. He was handcuffed, hooded and left in the sun for at least six hours before being released. He was only allowed water during this time and was intermittently kicked, punched and slapped by Israeli soldiers.
The arrests occurred after the Israeli military had ordered international activists to leave the area yesterday. ‘Maggie,’ a volunteer with the Friends of Madama and Burin group, said that the Israeli military had threatened to prevent villagers from harvesting olives in that area unless the international volunteers left. She also reported that the military allowed around 10 Israeli settlers to remain in the area. The international group was prevented from being present in the same area again today.
According to Mahmoud, a farmer from Burin, around 20 settlers arrived in the area again today and took pictures of olive farmers, although the Israeli military did instruct them to return to their settlement.
However, a group of around seven settlers from Bracha settlement hid amongst the trees and threw stones at villagers picking olives in an area further down the mountain at around 10am this morning. No one was injured and no further attacks were reported today.
Alistair George is an activist with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).
16 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
I had just finished off a plate of homemade bread knaffe yesterday with a family in the south of Gaza, when we got the call: farmers in Beit Hanoun, a village in the north of the Gaza Strip, requested that ISM volunteers accompany them to pick olives near the buffer zone.
The buffer zone. I had heard of this area back in the fall of 2002 when I had come to the West Bank for the ISM’s first olive harvest campaign. Back then, Israeli two-ton Caterpillar bulldozers were crushing homes, orchards and all other life forms to create this dead zone between Gaza and Egypt. Israel displaced more than 10% of the population of Rafah, Gaza’s sourthernmost town, at that time, making Palestinian refugees from 1948 refugees yet again.
Today, this unilaterally-imposed 300 meter buffer zone extends all around the sliver of land that is the Gaza strip, to the north, east, and south, an effective kill zone for all who dare enter it. (To the west is the sea, also patrolled by the Israeli navy).
Nonetheless, I was excited about the idea of going out with the farmers. I love picking olives! I love being out on the land, feeling the hard purple and green fruit pop off the branches and onto a tarp spread on dirt below. And besides, we weren’t going inside the buffer zone – those trees were long gone – just in some area nearby.
L, the woman who had baked the deliciousknaffesnack, and J, her husband, had also lost the majority of their farmland to the dead zone. J had just finished telling me about it, and L was quizzing me about my love life.
“Do you have any children?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Why not? Children are wonderful. I have five.”
I provide the response that seemed easiest at the moment. “Well I just got married a few months ago.”
“You should be on your honeymoon!” she exclaimed. “Where is your husband? Your husband should be here!”
Alas, I’m not sure if she really believed I was married, and I promised that next week I would bring photographs of my wedding.
The next day, Saturday, our group head to Beit Hanoun to pick olives.
“Be prepared to get shot,” said Saber, the founder of the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun, an organization which works with farmers in the buffer zone to resist the Israeli occupation through nonviolence. “The Israeli army, they don’t distinguish between foreigners or Palestinians,” he added, pointing to the fluorescent yellow vests and megaphone we had brought along.
Then why are we here, I wondered. Surely not for our physical prowess in picking olives. But I understood that he was making sure were fully appraised of the situation. The task may seem mundane, but here there is always a risk.
We drove out to the edge of Beit Hanoun, where the trees suddenly stopped and nothing but barren land lay between us and the border. It was a sunny day in Gaza, and if you squinted your eyes and looked really carefully, in the distance, army towers could be seen, and beyond them, the town of Sderot in Israel. Surely, there could be no danger from the Israelis back here, I thought, we are much farther back than the designated 300 meters.
Turns out I was right and I was wrong.
Mohamed AshureShimbari and his family had already begun picking olives by the time we arrived, on a small plot of land next to a cement block house. Every time the Israelis invaded Gaza, they locked the family in a room, and used their house as a base. And though we were indeed, 800 meters from the border, the area was far from safe.
We began picking olives, and the elderly farmer who owned the land seemed exhausted, not from picking olives, but from living life in Gaza. J too, though in his mi-50s and younger, had had that look as well. After his family had lost everything in 1948 and fled to Gaza, J had managed to by farmland after working in Israel for over twenty years, as an electrician, a restaurant worker — “everything” — only to see it taken yet again.
In this area of Beit Hanoun where we were picking what was now the barren buffer zone, ten years ago been filled with orchards of lemon, orange, grapefruit and olive trees. There were also greenhouses of tomato, eggplant and cantaloupe. Saber pointed all around, explaining what was where and how there was no clean water. I couldn’t imagine it. It was like pointing to the Sahara desert and saying, “ imagine these sand dunes are jungle.”
We picked for a couple of hours, occasionally breaking for tea, when someone called out “jeepat.” Jeeps. Israeli army jeeps were patrolling the border. Then came a tank. A few people stopped picking, to peer at the tank.
“What’s it doing?” I asked.
“Showing they are strong,” one of the young Beit Hanoun volunteers answered.
The army was relatively far away, but apparently, one never knows if the Israeli army will shoot at you. Since Operation Cast lead in 2009, the U.N. estimates that Israeli tank and gunfire killed five Palestinian civilians, three of whom were children and injured twenty in areas near the buffer zone.
After we stripped the trees of their olives, we dumped them into large, 40 kilo bags and then head back into town. The day passed without incident, as it should have, but it was no honeymoon.
14 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
Near the concrete wall which separates Bil’in from Modiin Illit colony, occupied by ultra-Orthodox Jews, there is an olive tree. It is impossible to know how it survived the construction of the wall and how it continues to resist to the lack of a few cares that the specie demands – a lack caused by the Israeli barbed wire fence that prevents the access of the residents to the point where it is, in the buffer zone. This survivor came to the attention of the villagers since some time ago. Today they finally managed to breach the fence and to go to the lonely olive tree for harvest.
The tear gas grenades fired by Israeli soldiers, who lurked on the other side of the wall, attempted to prevent the harvest, a time of year that mobilizes the entire population of Palestine. One of the canisters fell on dried plants, and the heat of the metal caused a fire which the residents were able to control. Spread by the strong wind the gases reached even the activists more distant from the site – people from the village, from Israel and from around the world –causing suffocation, burning eyes and skin.
October 14th’s demonstration was dedicated to Palestinian political prisoners on hunger strike and to the beginning of the olive harvest.
