Two Farmers, Two Stories, One Occupation

October 17 - Today our group picked for three different farmers in the Makhrour Valley. I was helping "Im" Mohammed, also known as Jamila Ilayan. She needed help with her 60 trees because settlers come to harass them. Israel's military occupation does not allow her to bring a tractor to plow under the trees - part of the maintenance they need, but she can hire a mule for the job. Her biggest problem is that she can't construct the simplest shed to store her tools or to take a rest from the sun. Every gardener and farmer needs tools. Just to pick the olives one needs tarps to spread under the trees to catch the olives, ladders to climb to the higher branches, buckets to collect olives from the tarps and ground, and sacks in which to put the buckets full of olives to take to the olive press. That is the bare minimum. One should also bring pruning sheers and a small saw, not to mention water and hopefully food for the mid-day meal. Without a shed in which to store most of this equipment, it must be transported back and forth every day in a car or truck.

Im Mohammed used to be able to come by foot, a half hour walk from her home, and it was pleasant. She and her family liked to stay sometimes until dark or even to spend the night in the small stone shelter that has crumbled to the ground because even maintenance is not allowed. Nor would the night be safe anymore. The settlers see to that. A poster I saw today said, "You are free to do whatever I tell you to do."

There were many volunteers today, we internationals and a lot of Palestinian university students from E. Jerusalem, Beit Sahour and Bethlehem. The young men climbed up in the olive trees and belted out traditional songs, making us forget for a while why we were needed there. I met one woman who had been a professional athlete, a competitive swimmer on a team representing Palestine. She was just back from a year in Spain, getting a degree in sports education. Anyway, all together we were able to finish harvesting this farmer's trees, which otherwise would have taken a week and required hiring farm laborers.

PICKING IN WADI FUKIN, POPULATION 1,100.

If you live in Wadi Fukin and want to go to the nearest center of commerce, which is Beit Jala, you have to pass under the Israeli super highway via a tunnel. It is symbolic of the status of Palestinians who are allotted a subterranean passage --easily blocked off by military order --while Jewish Israelis travel above ground on roads only they can use. . Likewise, we international volunteers had to go through the tunnel to get to the village to pick olives.

Beitar Ilit settlement, now boasting 52,000 residents, is built on Wadi Fukin land, and it continues to swallow Wadi Fukin, as new construction moves down the side of the hill toward the spring-fed valley below where the village grows its fruits and vegetables. Settlers send their kids to play under the village's olive trees in order to provoke the ire of the villagers and to make the statement that they are taking over this whole area. Soldiers appear immediately to protect the settler children.

Abu Saadi has trees right near this creeping monster, and the settlers try to prevent him from harvesting them. Today, he preferred for us to pick trees a little away from Beitar Ilit's buildings in order to avoid a confrontation. But his kids are afraid to venture into the valley anymore.

Wadi Fukin will lose an additional 1480 dunams (370 acres) to the new settlement that Netanyahu just announced he would build in this area. Israel claims that the 4000 dunams it is confiscating from 5 villages to build this new settlement is uncultivated land. But by what rule of nature or men must you cultivate every piece of land you own? Yet Israel passed a law in 1950 to assure that any land not cultivated for 3 years should revert to the State. Then all they had to do was make it impossible to get to that land in order to expropriate it. End of story.

Well, not quite. There is more. Settlers recently dug up Abu Saadi crops and trees, and Abu Saadi has to pay the bill for this destruction! The rationale behind this bit of madness is that the farmer planted in the buffer zone between the village and the settlement. Since this buffer zone keeps changing with the expansion of the settlement, Abu Saadi didn't know its boundaries -- as if it were legal for Israel to have built the settlement and its buffer zone in the first place.