MAZRAA SHARQIYA (West Bank): Members of the Azzam family gathered in their three-acre olive grove last Tuesday for a usually routine ritual that in recent weeks has become increasingly hazardous: the annual olive harvest.
As 16 family members, from toddlers to grandparents, shook the branches and raked through the silvery green leaves with their fingers to plunk the small, green olives onto tarps spread like blankets below the trees, they said they were on guard against Jewish settlers who this year are waging a violent and economically devastating war against Palestinian olive pickers.
Next to the family plot, hundreds of olive trees were set afire two weeks ago by residents of nearby Jewish settlements, family members said. Down the road, about 100 other trees were sawed to the ground. Ten miles north, in the town of Aqraba, settlers three weeks ago shot and killed a 24-year-old Palestinian man who was picking olives on his land, according to Palestinian witnesses.
Since the harvest season began in early October, Palestinian communities across the West Bank have reported almost daily attacks by settlers against harvesters collecting the bright green, rock-hard olives that are a staple of the Palestinian diet and economy. On several occasions, Palestinians complained that after driving them from their groves, the settlers collected the olives for themselves.
“They are trying to uproot us from our lands, and without our land, we will have no attachment to Palestine,” said Lufti Azzam, 54, as he sat with his family in the shade of an olive tree eating bread and chicken with spicy peppers. “But we are not going to be as simple-minded as our parents and grandparents. We are not going to leave our land like they did. We are not going to Jordan and Syria. We are going to resist them and harvest our olives.”
Settlers say their fight is primarily preemptive and defensive against Palestinians who might use olive harvesting as a ruse to sneak up to Jewish settlements and attack them. Palestinians have mounted numerous attacks on Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Palestinians see the settlers as illegal occupiers of Palestinian lands.
In areas near Jewish communities, “The army has set a certain distance to be a sterile zone, and no one is allowed into this area because of the fear of terrorists,” said Ezra Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Yesha Council, which represents Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
When Palestinians enter the zone, a buffer area that is a different size for every community, depending on the topography, settlers are allowed to fire warning shots, he said, so “if an unknown Palestinian were to approach, I’d be careful.”
But according to Azzam Tubaileh, a top official in the Agriculture Ministry of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, the attacks on the olive harvest have “nothing to do with security. It’s a kind of stealing. It’s economic warfare.”
Tubaileh said that in the two years since Palestinians began their uprising against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip _ which prompted the Israeli military to impose curfews and close access to many towns and roads _ the Palestinian economy has suffered about $700 million in agricultural losses, about a third of that from olive trees and crops.
He said that about 18,000 olive trees have been destroyed by Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers. This year’s crop, if fully harvested and turned into olive oil, would be worth about $250 million, he said.
A recent report by the international development organization Oxfam estimated that a quarter of the Palestinians’ agricultural output is olive production and that this year’s production “is at risk of being wiped out” because of Israeli security measures that have blocked many roads and prevented Palestinians from travelling between towns and from their homes to their farmland. The report said 7,000 olive trees were uprooted by Israeli soldiers in the last two years “as punishment for Palestinians throwing stones” at troops. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post