In a Harvest, Palestinians Cast a Light on Hardship
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Version 0 of 1. BURIN, West Bank — For most of his 58 years, Ahmad Najar has picked olives each autumn with his family, the women and girls cooking a hot meal in the fields as the men and boys topped ladders to fell the black and green fruit onto large tarps. On Tuesday, Mr. Najar earned about $21 for nine hours harvesting a neighbor’s grove, part of a new program that pays Palestinians whose trees have been destroyed by Jewish settlers to help farmers whose access to the land is limited to a few days by the Israeli authorities. The olive harvest has been a beloved annual ritual for Palestinians for hundreds of years, as important to the culture as to the economy. Lately, a new tradition has been added, in which Palestinians and the advocacy groups that support them use the harvest to highlight hardships under Israeli occupation. The two major complaints have to do with access and vandalism. Most of the olive groves are in parts of the West Bank where Israel controls security, and years of clashes between settlers and Palestinian farmers have led to an arrangement in which farmers are allowed to harvest on only a handful of designated days. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded damage to 7,714 Palestinian-owned trees in the first eight months of 2013, a 27 percent increase from the same period a year before. Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, said in a report published this week that Burin, a village of about 3,700 people near Nablus that is surrounded by three Jewish settlements, had lost the most trees. On Sunday, the report said, two Palestinian farmworkers and two Israeli helpers were injured when masked men with batons attacked them while they were harvesting. The report also said that of 211 tree vandalism cases investigated by the Israeli police since 2005, only 4 ended in indictments. “Our major concern is a culture of impunity that surrounds settler violence,” Saul Takahashi, a United Nations official in Ramallah, told a delegation of diplomats visiting the village’s farmers on Tuesday. Israeli soldiers were arrayed on the hills surrounding Burin’s olive trees on Tuesday afternoon, one group detailed to prevent settlers from descending into the fields, another stationed to stop Palestinian villagers from provoking clashes. Guy Inbar, a spokesman for the Israeli agency that oversees the West Bank, said harvest days were limited — to two in some places, to five in others — in coordination with the Palestinian Authority and large clans in 70 areas to reduce violence and vandalism. He noted that there were also cases in which Palestinians damaged Israeli-owned trees, but that they were fewer. “It’s a very sensitive and difficult season, of course,” Mr. Inbar said. But he denied that Israeli restrictions prevented Palestinians from gaining access to their trees, saying the agency’s mantra was “until the last olive” — meaning that those unable to harvest their crop in the allotted time would be permitted extensions. About 100,000 farmers tend eight million olive trees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and olive oil is a $100 million annual business, accounting for 20 percent of Palestinian agriculture. The new program employing Mr. Najar is run by a French humanitarian group that said it was spending $32,000 from the European Union to hire 90 pickers in Burin and two other villages. “Even if we’re working for money in the olive harvest, we’re enjoying it,” Mr. Najar said as he took a break under a tree with several university students also being paid to pick. As for this year’s crop, Mr. Najar pronounced it “50-50.” “It is the nature of olives,” he said. “One year it’s good, the next year it’s not as good.” |