November 11, 2002	Monday	Ramazan 5, 1423

AQRABA (West Bank): The first rain needed to wash the summer dust off the green leaves had not yet fallen. The fruit was still green, not the ripe colour of bluish-black. When squeezed, the precious oil did not easily ooze out.

It was too early to pick the olives.

But Khariah Zayaier was in a hurry. He must harvest his olives before the shooting season begins.

Perched in a scraggly olive tree that he thinks dates to Roman times, Zayaier grabbed a branch and stripped off the olives in a downward motion. The fruit fell and scattered on a white tarp spread on the ground.

His young children, sitting in the shade below, popped a few hard olives into their mouths and frowned at the bitter taste while their mother gathered up the harvest. They worked quietly and efficiently on the ancient stony terraces that climb this northern West Bank hillside.

Just days before, one of their neighbours was shot and killed during a confrontation with Israelis from a nearby Jewish settlement who are trying to stop Palestinian farmers from entering the fields, which belong to the Palestinians.

The olive branch, the symbol of peace in this biblical land, has become yet another reason to fight.

“We are scared,” said Zayaier, 52, one of the few people willing to venture into the olive groves, which have been in his family for too many generations to count. “We pick with one eye on the tree and another on the hillside. We are going as fast as we can.”

That means starting the 45-day harvest early to outsmart the settlers, who not only shoot over their heads to scare the farmers away but have begun entering the Palestinian groves and picking the olives for themselves.

Olives are a staple of the Palestinian diet and the only source of income for many rural farmers who have carved out an existence on this hard, rocky land. Here, olives are as good as money, wealth is measured in jugs of oil and a man’s status is rooted in the number of trees he owns.

But the two-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict has turned what should be a joyous and bountiful harvest into a dangerous enterprise.

Battles with the settlers have long been a problem during the olive harvest but have intensified this year because of growing frustrations and bitterness over the violence, which has people on both sides living in fear and seeking ways to exact revenge.

“The Palestinians must understand that there is a price for war,” said Daniel Shukron, secretary of the Jewish settlement of Tapuah in the northern West Bank. He admits to firing over the heads of Palestinian olive pickers, in part to protect his settlement but also to get back for roadside ambushes and suicide bombers.

The army has cleared away many of the trees close to Tapuah, creating a 400-yard-wide no man’s land between the grove and the settlement. Shukron said anyone who enters that zone is a security threat and risks getting shot.

Palestinian olive pickers have other problems as well.

Israeli army bulldozers routinely clear crops along roads used by settlers to eliminate hiding places for ambushes, and entire groves have been declared off-limits for security reasons.

Even if farmers can successfully harvest their crops, Israeli army checkpoints, closures and curfews imposed on cities will make it difficult to get the olive oil to market. Many Palestinians have gallons of unsold oil left over from last year.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Baltimore Sun