Olive Harvest Becomes a Palestinian Casualty

They heard the chain saws and the shouted Hebrew sometime around midnight Thursday and knew that their olive orchards were under attack again, the Palestinian villagers said. Too afraid to leave their homes and defend the trees from the men they assumed came from nearby Jewish settlements, they could only listen and wait for dawn.

Friday morning, the villagers found hundreds of mature olive trees cut down, their raw stumps shining in the weak winter sun, their silver-leafed branches lying lifeless in the mud. This year, the olive harvest, an important ritual of Palestinian culture, is just another casualty of the violence that has raged between Israelis and Palestinians since Sept. 28.

“Almost every day now, the settlers come and uproot trees,” said Hussam Daoud, head of the village council. And fruit on the living trees is rotting because the Israeli army has closed Hares, pushing earthen barriers across the two entrances into the town and stationing a jeep at the main entrance. Soldiers there Friday said the village now is a closed military zone, and no one is allowed in or out.

Army spokesman Yarden Vatichai said Friday night that he did not know who cut the trees of Hares. Usually, however, it is the army and not settlers who destroy orchards, he said.

“Many of the attacks . . . are carried out by people who were hiding among the trees,” Vatichai said. “Our main concern now is attacks on the roads and on army outposts. Many main routes run by plantations and orchards, and Palestinians are using trees as hiding places. Therefore, we have uprooted many trees in many places, to have a much better view of the road and not allow people to hide.”

If settlers cut down trees, Vatichai said, it is a crime for which they can be arrested. However, few Jewish settlers have been prosecuted for destroying Palestinian trees.

In normal times, the olive harvest, which began in mid-October, would be over by now, the oil pressed and bottled and the table olives curing in tubs. But across the West Bank in this abnormal year, Palestinians, fed up with the peace process, have attacked soldiers and Jewish settlers. Angry settlers and the Israeli army, in response, are keeping villagers from picking the fruit, and it is rotting on many of the hundreds of thousands of trees that dot the terraced hillsides.

“It’s not a matter of punishment” that Palestinians are kept from harvesting their olives, Vatichai said. The army’s closure of Palestinian towns “is because of this ongoing violence, these attacks. There are many places where we don’t want Palestinians to go.”

The limited olive harvest is an important component of what is rapidly developing into an agricultural disaster for the Palestinians as their confrontation with Israel drags into a third month, said Mohammed Shtayyeh, director of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, a quasi-governmental institution. He and other Palestinians see the attacks on trees as just another aspect of what Palestinians say is Israel’s systematic effort to choke the Palestinian economy.

“This is the agricultural season,” Shtayyeh said. “This is the season to harvest vegetables, citrus and olives, and we estimate that we already have suffered about $120 million in damage from lost crops.”

Crops Rotted During Closures by Israelis

Many of those losses have been caused by Israel’s long closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, during which many crops have rotted in the fields and orchards or in the trucks that have been blocked from traveling outside the Palestinian-controlled territories.

But other losses have come from the uprooting and cutting of trees. The Palestinian Authority estimates that 40,000 trees have been destroyed by soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the outbreak of clashes, Shtayyeh said. The army now routinely bulldozes acres of orchards where it suspects Palestinians might hide to launch attacks on traveling Israelis.

For the Palestinians, the olive trees are the most painful loss. Shtayyeh said that the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture estimates the replacement cost of each olive tree at $100. “But I told them they were crazy, that is way too low,” he said.

It takes seven to 10 years before a new tree begins to bear fruit, Shtayyeh noted, and in some villages there are old trees that “the villagers call Roman trees, that they swear have been there since Roman times,” he said. “When something like this is lost, it is something that you cannot, under any circumstances, value in money terms.”

Rituals Embedded in Palestinian Culture

The trees commonly survive generations of families, and the rituals attached to their care and harvest are deeply embedded in Palestinian culture. Every fall, for a month after the first rain, village life revolves around picking the fruit. Whole families spend days among the trees. They climb ladders to beat the branches with sticks, then collect the fruit on tarps spread beneath the trees and share a picnic lunch when their arms grow too weary to continue.

But this year, farmers often must resort to stealth to harvest their crops. Hares is just one of many towns and villages blockaded by the army. Palestinians are kept from traveling the roads for days or even weeks at a time. Even when they are allowed out of the villages, many fear attack by settlers or being caught in a cross-fire between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.

At the start of the harvest, settlers shot dead a 28-year-old Palestinian, Farid Nasara, from the village of Beit Furik, who was helping with the olive harvest near the settlement of Itamar, close to the West Bank city of Nablus. Settlers said they saw dozens of villagers approaching them armed with sticks and axes and feared for their lives. The villagers said they were only carrying the implements used for the harvest.

News of Nasara’s death spread like wildfire across the West Bank. Now, when they venture to the orchards, Palestinians go in small groups, sometimes accompanied by Israeli and international peace activists, and pick for a few hours at a time. Once the fruit is harvested, villagers said, they then go to the nearest olive press, where lines are so long that they sometimes must wait days to make their oil. And in the night, settlers retaliate for the shootings and stonings they endure by attacking the trees.

Daoud of the village council estimated that Hares alone has lost several hundred trees. Situated in the center-north of the West Bank, near the Jewish settlements of Revava and Ariel, Hares is what the army describes as a “flash point.” The main road that runs near the village also serves the settlements, and the cars of settlers and soldiers have been shot at and stoned there.

Daoud and other Palestinians see the harassment of the farmers as a form of collective punishment and the attacks on the trees as part of a coordinated effort by Israel to strangle the Palestinian economy. Palestinian workers are being kept from jobs inside Israel and now are deprived of any chance of earning a livelihood from the land, Daoud said.

Inside Hares, a village of 2,500, where 600 men who worked as laborers in Israel have been unemployed for two months, there is growing desperation, according to Daoud.

“Yesterday, a charity came and delivered 60 bags of canned foods and other basic foods, but how am I to distribute it?” he asked. “Everyone in the village says they need food for their families. How can I divide 60 bags among them?”

Mahmoud Ali, 65, said he does not know how he will survive if he is unable to complete the harvest this year.

“I wait for the olive season every year,” the father of 13 said. “I harvest the olives, keep some for my family and sell the rest. That is what we live off of for the year. This year, the season is excellent and we should have a wonderful crop. But we cannot pick the olives.”