No Olive Branches in the Grove

The villagers gathered at first light on a road running along the ridge of a hillside dusted with olive trees. They carried burlap sacks, rakes and tarpaulins, and their donkeys carried ladders, as they prepared to harvest olives with the same techniques used since biblical times.

They were scampering down the hill toward the trees when four jeeps came careening down the road, churning up dust and screeching to a halt.

Out of one jeep hopped a red-haired man wearing a skullcap and earrings and swinging a metal pipe -- a resident of the nearby Jewish settlement of Tappuah. Three others carried automatic weapons. Another settler with a grizzled beard arrived on a donkey. He carried a machete along with an M-16.

“Get the hell out of here!” screamed one of the men as he ran down the hillside after the Palestinian olive pickers. When he was just above them, he scooped up a stone and took aim.

An elderly Palestinian supervising his sons at work propped himself up with his cane and gestured for his family to run to safety.

“Yalla,” Ahmed Abdullah Obya, 74, told his sons. “Let’s go.”

So began a fairly typical morning in the olive groves of the West Bank. Almost every day since the start of the olive harvest early last month, Jewish settlers have harassed or even attacked Palestinian pickers. These ugly encounters represent some of the most in-your-face violence between Jew and Arab and are frequently likened to the Wild West -- although a more geographically appropriate analogy might be the eye-for-an-eye code of the Bible.

Jewish settlers readily admit that they send out posses to administer crude frontier justice to the Palestinians, but they say such actions are warranted by Palestinian terrorism.

“If the Arabs hit us once, they get it back a thousand times,” said Yaacov Hayman, 48, who lives in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, where 11 Jews have been slain by Palestinians over the last year.

The settlers also fear that Palestinians will use the olive trees as cover to creep up on their homes and attack. “We live out here, and sometimes we have to take matters into our own hands,” Hayman said.

Most of the olive battles take place near the West Bank city of Nablus, where some of the most militant settlers live.

The jeeps at the Yasuf skirmish, which was witnessed by a reporter, photographer and peace activists, were plastered with bumper stickers advocating the expulsion of Arabs from Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. One settler wore a T-shirt bearing the image of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the late militant. Kahane was the spiritual inspiration for Kahane Chai, which is banned in Israel and listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization.

“Be careful. These people are mishuggah,” warned a young Israeli soldier, using the Hebrew word for crazy, speaking at the skirmish in Yasuf to a couple of the peace activists. The army, called in that morning to head off a clash, arrived late but stepped in between the two groups and prevented the rock-throwing from escalating into worse violence.

Peace Activists Hurt

The so-called olive wars have been waged in the West Bank since Jewish settlements started sprouting in the late 1970s, but never have they had such ferocity. A 24-year-old Palestinian was shot to death Oct. 6 as he helped a neighbor pick olives in Aqraba. Scores have been injured, among them four peace activists who were beaten with stones and rifle butts Oct. 27 while helping olive pickers in the village of Yanoun.

Yet another casualty of the olive wars is the West Bank economy, already hobbled by two years of violence and increasingly dependent on earnings from the olive.

The arid, stony hills of the West Bank produce about $150 million of olives each year, less than 4% of the Palestinian economy in a good year. But in bad times -- and these are the worst of them -- the olives are the bedrock of many a family’s household budget.

“They will make us go hungry by preventing us from picking our olives. It is their way of kicking us out,” complained Obya, the old man who went slinking home after the incident in the groves.

Obya is the patriarch of a family of 27: five sons, their wives and children, all living under one roof. Theirs is a rambling three-story house, attesting to the $1,000 a month each that four of the sons -- the fifth is a student -- used to earn working in Israel before the current uprising.

When the men had jobs, they would send their wives and children into the groves. Olive picking is not terribly arduous work; it involves brushing one’s hands along a branch until the olives fall into a basket or onto a tarp. Picking was more of an autumnal picnic than serious employment. Families would gather under the trees, bringing thermoses of tea and eating fresh figs; a fig tree is planted on each terrace of olives to provide the snacks.

“You couldn’t build a house like ours with olives. When the work was good, some people wouldn’t bother to take a day off for the olives,” Obya said. “Now everybody is out of work. The olives are all we have.”

The Obya family owns 300 trees, each producing on average enough olives to give a barrel, or 5.3 gallons, of oil. Prices are low this year because the harvest is especially bountiful and the economy poor. Still, the oil should fetch at least $30 a barrel. (The leftover chaff is used for fire-starter.) That means that after expenses the family could get about $5,000 for its oil. Not much for a family of 27, but enough to get by -- if only they can pick the olives.

Olive Trees Off Limits

The problem is that about half the family’s trees are near Tappuah. The Jewish residents have decided that no Palestinian may pick olives within a clear view of the settlement, whose red-roofed homes are perched high on a hill that can be seen from more than two miles.

And the Obya family takes the settlers seriously when they say no. In 1988, two relatives were shot in a skirmish with Tappuah residents. The radical settlement, which is built largely on land confiscated from families in Yasuf, has a yeshiva dedicated to Kahane. The late militant’s son, Binyamin, lived in Tappuah until December 2000, when he and his wife were slain by Palestinian militants.

“We know enough to be scared of those people,” said one of Obya’s sons, Wajdi. “We’ve tried four times to get out to pick those olives, and each time they chase us away.”

“Those olive trees were there when I was boy, when my father was a boy, before the settlers ever came here,” interjected his father.

Mahmoud abu Salah, the head of Yasuf’s council, says many families are in a worse predicament. “The poor people don’t have anything more than olive oil and bread,” he said. “We used to grow wheat here too, but the land was confiscated.”

About 30 minutes down a bumpy dirt road lined with prickly pear cactus is a slightly larger town, Salfit, where Yasuf residents bring their olives to be pressed.

The press is an elaborate contraption that fills a garage. It cleans the olives, grinds them pits and all, then presses out the oil. The machine was imported from Italy three years ago at a cost of $350,000 by an agricultural cooperative, which receives as compensation one barrel of oil for every 10 it presses for the farmers.

“There’s no way we’ll ever make back the money,” said Abdul Aziz Masri, the manager of the press. “It’s a bad year. People are afraid of the settlers so they pick their olives too early. It makes the oil bitter and acidic. You can’t export it. We can barely sell it.”

By some estimates, 13% of the West Bank is covered with olive groves. One reason is that Palestinian landowners tend to plant the trees to mark territory, some under the erroneous belief that the move will prevent the land from being confiscated.

The Salfit area used to boast the best olive oil in the region and exported it to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

To the extent that Yasuf (population 2,300) has a tourist attraction, it is an olive tree that legend says dates to the Roman period. When villagers grow new trees, they graft a branch from the ancient tree onto a sapling grown from an olive pit that is fed to a sheep, then extracted from its stool -- a West Bank tradition that is believed to give strength to the new tree.

Palestinians like to say that the olive tree is their symbol, just as the cedar is the symbol of Lebanon.

“The Palestinians identify with the gnarled roots of this tree dug deep into the land,” said Arik Ascherman, a rabbi and director of Rabbis for Human Rights.

The olives have become a favorite cause of Israeli and foreign peace activists. Each morning for the last month, volunteers have traipsed into the groves, bringing cameras and cell phones, to help the Palestinians, who are often too terrorized to call the police.

Ascherman’s group has been pushing the Israeli police and army to be more proactive in protecting the pickers. Too often, he says, security forces are so wary of the settlers’ short fuses that they order Palestinians out of their own groves.

“I know they feel the same anger toward Palestinians that all Israelis do after two years of terrorism. They may have lost friends or relatives,” Ascherman said. “But when they don’t do their jobs, they send a message to settlers that they can do what they want with impunity. That also sends a message to Palestinians that there is no point in going through established channels, that there is no law and order, and in the end that endangers all of us.”

In Aqraba, also near Nablus, villagers complain that police ignored an Oct. 5 attack by 20 settlers who surrounded six pickers, beating them with rifle butts and stones, seriously injuring four people.

“I would know his face. He had red hair, sideburns,” said olive picker Atef Beni Jaber, 41, of the settler who led the pack. Beni Jaber sustained a deep gash in his forehead, which required seven stitches. His cousin lost an eye from being hit by a rifle.

“Nobody [with the police] took a statement from me,” Beni Jaber said. “When we complained, they said we should get a camera and try to take a picture. A picture! Can you imagine?”

Slain by Settlers

The next day, the settlers struck again. This time Hani Minyeh, a grocery clerk who was helping a neighbor pick olives, was shot and died.

Gil Kleinman, an Israeli police spokesman, said seven settlers were detained for questioning in the killing and later released. A gun belonging to one of them was seized for ballistics testing.

“We do arrest Israelis if they are breaking the law. We try not to make distinctions between Israeli and Palestinian lawbreakers,” Kleinman said. There were nine arrests in the last two weeks of settlers who allegedly attacked Palestinians or picked olives from trees that were not theirs. All have been released on bail.

It is hard these days to find anybody who will defend the behavior of the settlers toward the olive pickers. Even the spokesman for the Yesha Council, the settlers’ lobbying organization in Jerusalem, complains about the more militant communities, such as Itamar and Tappuah, implicated in the attacks.

“We have no control over these people,” said Ezra Rosenfeld of Yesha, though he added that settlers have legitimate security concerns. “We are living in a reign of terror, and people have to take precautions.”

Law enforcement officials say the olive wars have less to do with olives than with the struggle in the West Bank over the land and who controls it.

Hayman, the settler from Itamar, agrees:

“God gave this land to the Jewish people. The minute other people question Jewish sovereignty over the land they not only have no right to pick olives, they have no right to be here,” he said. “They can decide what is more important to them: olive oil or [their] blood.”