Strange Fruit: Israeli Volunteers Serve as ‘Human Shields' in West Bank Orchards

October 29, 2002
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."

PCUSA News Service