Olive Harvest

I intended to keep writing about the tour we made with Dad through The Holy Land, but was sidetracked by yesterdays events:

A few days ago we met Ezra [1] in our neighbourhood because we literally live one street away. He had been working all day but invited us in for tea because he hadn’t see Elle in probably 2 years. He told us of the work he was doing around Hebron, which is in Palestine, south of Bethlehem. He explained that he had been trying to work with Palestinians and Bedouins on the water problem in the South which was becoming more and more serious for the poor who simply didn’t have enough for their livestock, olive trees or drinking. He was fairly unimpressed with our plan to live in Ramallah, as it wasn’t the “real Palestine” but agreed to take us along with him on Saturday as that was his usual day of causing trouble in the Occupied Territories.

We left this morning, and picked up Nissim, yet another filmmaker who has made a film about Ezra and set off for Hebron. We didn’t really know what we were going to do this day and soon realized the day would just unfold with Ezra the way it would. I thought we were going to look at some dry wells but it seemed we were going to help some Palestinian villagers harvest their olives. Not knowing anything about how to pick olives, I asked the stupid question as to how this was done and he said, “olive by olive”, which apparently was some kind of dirty joke in Hebrew because they all started laughing.

It was olive season and we had heard through Neta, that various peace activist groups had organized around helping Palestinians in areas where their groves were close to settlements. Despite the fact that Palestinians owned the land, settlers were harassing them when they went anywhere near them. We had read about an incident a week ago, where some settlers beat up a Palestinian journalist who was reporting at one of these harvests. The government had been getting some bad press for essentially letting these situations get out of control so the army was apparently now taking a greater interest in keeping the peace.

We ended in a tiny village (which I couldn’t find on the map) next to a small village called Beit Amra. The settlement next door was called Otni’el and we made our way into the olive groves in the valley between the village and settlement. The villagers had picked the trees closest to their village but were afraid to go to their other grove, which was in the shadow of the settlement. There ended up being approx. 15 of us ‘whiteys’, who, through our presence alone, was hopefully going to deter the settlers from behaving badly.

Well, nobody was beaten but it didn’t exactly stop them from descending on us before we could even reach for an olive. I quickly understood why the old men were hustling us along to pick those olives toute suite, as we were suddenly being yelled at by lot of young settler guys, most of whom were carrying very large guns. There was one soldier who seemed fairly nervous about the increasingly tense situation, and another guy, a.k.a ‘big asshole’, who seemed to be the self-appointed authority, who we learned was the ‘security officer’ from the settlement. The general argument being yelled by the big asshole was that this was a military zone and we needed authorization to be there. The argument being yelled back by the old Palestinian man was that this was his land and he didn’t need anyone’s permission to be on it. [2] So this went back and forth as the rest of us tried to get those damn olives off the trees, meanwhile more soldiers were showing up and more settlers were coming down from the settlement. The soldiers were trying to calm everyone down but were making it clear that we weren’t going to be able to cross the road to pick the last grove. Things were fairly tense with all the yelling and the large weapons but I weirdly wasn’t that scared and admittedly a little excited by all the action. The person I wanted to yell at was this annoying activist who was playing some kind of ‘Friendly Giant’ music on her lute when I think she could have been more useful filling up pails of olives like the rest of us. Apparently this was some kind of political statement because you weren’t supposed to play music on Shabbat.[3] To be honest I thought this kind of provocation was unnecessary.

At a certain point, once the police from Hebron came, Ezra decided it was time for us to call it quits. We walked back to the village and were invited to tea. A bunch of little kids came out and instructed us to take their pictures. They were very cute and excited to see us until one of the men beat them off with a stick. Apparently he was from the child rearing school of ‘not seen and not heard’. Sigh. Anyway, we had our tea, took our photos and then left. We stopped at another harvest site where there was a large group of Israelis and foreigners helping out but it was already over. At this point Ezra had bigger fish to fry at some mysterious ‘situation’ and didn’t want us around so he packed us off on the do-gooder bus and back we went to Jerusalem.

Footnotes

1. Ezra is the star of the award-winning documentary Zero Degrees of Separation by Elle Flanders. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it.
2. Palestinians around Hebron refuse to apply for permits in these situations because in doing so, it would be some kind of acknowledgment that the land is somehow not theirs, when in fact it is. Even the settlers today did not take issue with the ownership of the land.
3. Saturday, the Sabbath.