Men (and Women and Children) of the Fields
I’ve been olive picking with CPT in Hebron, at two sites near the Israeli
settlements of Kiryat Arba and Givat Ha’avot. The settlers have built a
stylish brick staircase from the road up to Givat Ha’avot, for easy passage
from the western entrance to Kiryat Arba.
CPT joined the Palestinian landowners, neighbors, and other internationals
picking olives off the trees next to the staircase. Israeli police or
soldiers monitored the situation from the foot of the staircase. Two
Israeli Jews from Tel Aviv stood nearby chatting with some of the
Palestinians. A middle-school-aged settler child appeared and tried to pick
a fight with the Palestinian children there. A Palestinian adult got in the
way and diffused that, and one of the Tel Aviv visitors gently admonished
the child when he got out of hand again. When a Palestinian moved close
enough to the child to brush his arm accidentally, the child ostentatiously
brushed his arm off as if something dirty had touched him. A settler adult
came by, stepped onto the land, and picked an olive. When an Israeli
activist stopped by later and learned about it, he said, “You should file a
complaint! Did you get it on film?” We had. It will be up to the family
if they want to file a complaint with the Israeli police. A member of the
settler community with his tour group pointed out the CPTers and other
internationals and said, “There are CPT and ISM, two of the most anti-semitic
groups around.” Several Palestinian photojournalists appeared and chatted
with the group, and a young Palestinian activist videotaped the action. We
adjourned to the family’s home for tea after we finished picking.
The next week we headed back up the road with the visiting CPT delegation to
the same piece of land. As we waited for our Palestinian colleagues to
arrive – they had been delayed at a checkpoint – a van pulled up next to
me. The driver, a settler, asked, “What’s happened?” I replied,
“Nothing.” He asked again. “We’re waiting for friends.” Then he said,
“Are those Arabs or Jews walking up there?” “They’re Palestinians,” I
said. Then he started off with “The Bible says the land doesn’t belong to
them.” “That depends on how it’s interpreted,” I responded. I wanted to
use the quote about the prophets that my friend Katherine says her father
used: “And God said to the Israelites: ‘If you do that, I will be angry and
I will punish you.’ And they did, and he was, and he did.” Unfortunately,
someone else joined the conversation and the topic turned away from what the
Bible says about who owns the land, and how you lose it when you break your
covenant with God.
When our colleagues arrived, we split up between the land from the week
before and the land down the wadi and on the other side of the road.
Although this land is directly below the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba,
it’s not as risky to pick olives there as on the land with the staircase. We
had fewer buckets in which to throw the olives, and fewer children to climb
the trees and beat the branches with sticks to bring down the olives onto
the blankets spread underneath. We picked every olive – green, ripe,
shriveled. Unlike the week before, we watched the patriarch sit on the
ground and pick up every fallen olive. Each one was precious. I split my
time between picking olives off the trees and sitting on the ground sorting
olives from stems and leaves and keeping a wary eye out towards Kiryat Arba
in case settlers came down to disrupt the work, as they had come down the
week before and damaged the grape vines. And I had memories of five years
ago on property nearby when Israeli military and police did their best to
chase us away as we documented a bulldozer tearing up the Palestinian-owned
land for settlement expansion. Sadly, they succeeded in taking the land.
So the olive harvest continues in the West Bank, with varying degrees of
settler interference, assaults, and damage. In Hebron the land is still
contested, with the settlers believing that Abraham purchased the land to
bury his dead, and that it shall always belong to the Jewish community who
will take it back from the "Arabs" whom they will force out of their homes
of many, often hundreds of years. I am grateful for the quietness and
purposefulness of the harvest and for our Palestinian sisters and brothers
who fulfill the promise of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s song of forty-odd years ago:
Men of the hills, men of the valley
Men of the season and the soil
Strong hearts and hands molding the land
All over earth they toil.
May it be so.
2 November 2007
Hebron
West Bank Palestine
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