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IWPS Team working with other activists against the brutal occupation of Palestine…

The IDF turns back olive harvest accompaniers

On Tuesday 8th November 2011 two IWPS volunteers accompanied a Deir Istiya family to their land bordering on the illegal Israeli settlement of Yakir, as a protective presence while they picked their olive trees close to the settlement. The family had prior permission from the army to pick. On our arrival the settlement security called the army. 3 IDF soldiers eventually arrived and confirmed that the family could indeed pick on their own land but only if they went alone without IWPS volunteers. The IDF indicated that if we could give documentary proof that we lived in Deir Istiya, we could also go. Since that was impossible to do, we tried to call the local office of the DCL (District Liaison Co-ordination – the Palestinian authorities) and the DCO (the Israeli Occupation authorities) to see if they could help to get us access but, it being a major holiday of Eid, we were unable to get replies from either. After consulting the Mayor of Deir Istiya by phone and also on the wishes of the family, the 2 volunteers left the site.

We were accompanying the family at their express request and were concerned for their safety when we were turned away. A phone call to the family at the end of the day ascertained that they had remained safe and had been allowed to pick in peace for the day.

(There has been one other incident of this kind directly involving the British group of olive pickers in the Madama/Burin area. Earlier in Oct. a group had to withdraw on army orders to enable the farmer to continue picking but 2 arrests were made.)

This incident, which was the first of its kind for anyone on the house team, threw up questions of principle for us. After much discussion among ourselves, and consultation with others and with IWPS policy, it was decided that, although it appears to be taken for granted here that certain families need and therefore seek army permission to go onto their own land, we will not go down that path. We can afford the luxury of acting on the principle that Palestinians and their visitors (us) are (or should be) free to move as they wish on their own land. In practice, as we know, they are anything but free and sometimes even need army permission to step onto their private property at this time of the year. Most of the year some are denied even this, even when land is outside the settlement security zone. We could have asked our mayor for papers to prove we live here but, even at the risk of abandoning families, we felt that we should not seek such permission. Our policy states that we don’t ask the army for anything.

9th Nov.2011

The village of Deir Istiya today mourns the loss of Abdul Muttaleb Muhammad Hakim, a 45-year-old father of 5 who was killed in a traffic collision. He was on the way home from his sister’s olive grove, accompanied by his brother-in-law, who escaped the accident unharmed.

The crash happened at around 5.20pm on Wednesday 9 November on route 5066 in close proximity of the entrance to the settlement of Revava. It appears that Hakim was crossing the road when he was hit at full speed, pulling behind him the family’s donkey, which was also killed in the crash. According to Israeli soldiers who attended the scene, the driver of the car, a female settler, sustained injuries and was reportedly taken to hospital for treatment.

With the sole objective of servicing the transportation needs of Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank, route 5066 is part of the road network connecting those settlements with each other as well as providing convenient commuter links to the other side of the Green Line. These roads cut through Palestinian land paying no consideration to the needs of the rural Palestinian population in those areas. Badly lit and with no walkways or designated crossings, the road on which Hakim was killed has been the scene of a number of accidents over the past few years, involving pedestrians, who are invariably Palestinian, as well as lifestock.

Residents of the villages of Deir Istiya, Haris and Kifl Haris have long complained about the lack of safety measures to protect people forced to walk along these roads which encircle their villages, and which are often the only available access route for farmers to reach their land, sandwiched between ‘settler only’ colonies at the top of the hills and busy roads at the bottom. In many cases, individual farmers’ properties have literally been cut in half, meaning that during harvest times entire families have to keep crossing these dangerous roads.

This was a tragic accident waiting to happen, and it is symptomatic of the reality of the Occupation. Destroying thousands of acres of Palestinian farm land in the process, Israel’s illegal settlement construction is developing an infrastructure that clashes violently with its environment, and incidents like these are just one of many terrible consequences.

A Friday in Nabi Salih
Fri 4 Nov ’11
Nabi Saleh Friday protest
We travelled from Deir Istiya to Nabi Saleh this Friday via the Palestinian village of Brukin. The route was through the back roads which are the only roads majority of Palestinians use nowadays, because they are either banned from the ‘settlers only’ roads or ‘ethically cleansed’ from them by traffic fines which occupying force liberally dolls out to Palestinians.
A neighbour form Deir Istiya who travels every day to Ramallah where he works, said when I asked what were the fines usually for: ‘They will find something wrong with the car even if it is brand new and many are not, because Palestinians can not afford cars’.
So what years of checkpoint harassment could not achieve was successfully done by a more mundane method of pricing impoverished Palestinians from the significant parts of their occupied country ravaged by the settler roads, they can not afford to use.
Before the demo we visited Bushra, a lovely wife of the imprisoned Naji Tamimi, one of the organisers of the now famous Nabi Saleh Friday protests against the theft of the village spring by the nearby illegal Israeli settlement of Hallamish.
For me the settlements are a crime under the international laws banning annexation of occupied lands, but also a crime on the aesthetic grounds. Just like their inhabitants, they do not belong in the landscape of wavy hills of Palestine. Somebody likened them to having a Milton Keynes on the top of every hill which is a depressing but accurate description. And Hallamish is one of the ugliest.
Villagers of Nabi Saleh have to look at Hallamish day-in and day-out because it is perched on the top of the opposite hill on their ancestral lands.
Naji phoned his wife from Negev prison, while we were there and asked about us, guests in his far away house, and they talked for a while with Bushra’s face lit by a smile. They have five children and Bushra is a Fatah activist, one of the two women on the village Fatah committee of seven. When we asked her about her political work she said that she represented all women in the village. I later kept meeting her during the demonstration. All her and Naji’s children were there too, I was told.

Naji is due to be released in couple of months but Bushra hopes that he will come home earlier, in a prisoner release deal.
Their relative and activists Basem Tamimi is also in prison but he has not been charged yet. The court hearing is currently ongoing and it is expected to take a long time. One of the very young Nabi Saleh boys Israelis arrested and interrogated in an illegal manner, accused Basem of inciting stone throwing and that is now being contested.
Bushra said that the village, which has about 500 inhabitants and most of them belong to the Tamimi family, was saddened because Said Tamimi, who was imprisoned 20 years ago when he was 18 years old and who is serving a life sentence, was not amongst those freed in the recent Shalit release. His family and in particular his mother are devastated.
It is this solidarity which is so amazing and which has probably kept Palestinians together and helped them survive and preserve strength and pride through decades of horrendous Israeli occupation. Nobody ever talks only about their own situation, the problems of neighbours, relatives and friends are always brought up too.
I was in Nabi Saleh for the first time though I read weekly about the protests and watched fascinating video clips by Bilal Tamimi which made the Nabi Saleh one of the most important resistance demos in the West Bank.
The demo was unusual. We were on the tops of the hills, which Palestinians call mountains (-:, and Israeli’s far bellow on the road curbing around the ugly Hallamish colony and the British military post form the times of Mandate, which is still a visible landmark people refer to.
As the Friday prayer ended, a group of demonstrators descended down the main village road carrying a beautiful boat, like the ones thousands of Palestinian prisoners make in their long days in captivity, symbolising the Waves of Freedom ships which were on their way to break the siege of Gaza. People wore white ribbons with ‘Waves of Freedom’ written on them.

Down the main curbing road there were Israeli army vehicles, ready and waiting. What I feared the most was the white cistern truck called the ‘stink’ or the ‘shit’, which sprays stinking water which can not be washed form the hair and it has to be cut or clothes which have to be burned. As for the body, those who experienced it say that it takes many showers to get rid of it.
‘Give us teargas any time’, said Bushra smiling at the irony of her words, earlier, when I mentioned the ‘stinker-shit’.
In the previous demos the Israeli’s would douse the villagers houses in the stinky water and after smelling it on the sprayed road a bit later, I wandered how people managed to stay in them after, except that they had no choice but to put up with it.
As we approached the bend we could see the pale green army jeeps and a dark green jeep of the infamously cruel ‘border police’. The demo than split and one group went to the right down the steep hill of layered rocks lined with the red soil. My IWPS friends and I joined them and soon we were climbing the steep hills followed by the speeding army jeeps down bellow, who we surprised by our detour.
The view was out of this world, wavy rocky hills covered with the small silvery olive tree groves and the shadows of the masses of white clouds. It felt like we were on the top of the world. To the left in the distance there was a pretty Palestinian village with the slim minaret shooting towards the sky. And right ahead of us was Hallamish scarring the landscape. We could see in the distance towards Ramallah another ugly illegal settlement of ‘all-the-same’ mass produced ‘housing units’, and thought that is exactly what they are, not ‘homes’ but the ‘housing units’, without any links to this land.
To the right of Hallamish, a dozen of long mobile houses were in full sight. This is the so called ‘outpost’, which is the first step colonisers take in their relentless theft of Palestinian land.
The occupied village spring was also visible, even though far away, at the bottom of the hill, surrounded by the lush greenery of threes in the otherwise pretty bare surrounding landscape.
The demo routine of teargas started and both the main road we departed from and the hills where we were, looked like a scene form some weird rock concert, with teargas grenades coming form bellow reaching high up in the sky and than spiralling down and erupting into clouds of sharp white smoke which tore through the lungs and burned the eyes even in smallest of quantities.


I was thinking that American taxpayers funding the Israeli army machine would probably be scandalised to witness the sight of their hard earned and nowadays scarce dollars turning into stinky water, which I heard is so expensive that, thankfully, Israelis use it sparingly and hundreds of teargas grenades and all that with the aim to subjugate the occupied people. Even the worst of Hollywood could not glorify that.
The wind was on our side and we followed the Palestinians and would safely stand metres away form the nasty gas watching it being blown towards the soldiers.
People sat on the rocks, women, children, internationals, while young village man went dangerously close to the soldiers making a point that they were not scared and that they would not obey.
After some time the ‘shit’ cistern appeared in the main road followed by the teargas cannonade and I saw from another hilltop one young man collapsing and than two more followed. I toughed that they were shot either by the teargas canisters or by bullets as their limp bodies were carried by the running groups of people.
I thought that this is how it happens! This is how Basem Abu Rahme was killed in April 2009 in Bil’in with the tear gas canister fired into his hearth.
When we reached one of the guys he looked unconscious but the Palestinian woman who was helping him reassured us that his life was not in danger and that he would recover.
She was surely right, less then 10 minutes later the young man stood up and to my surprise rushed down towards the line of soldiers who looked like some strange Robo Cop larmy form another planet, with helmets and all kinds of equipment and antennae sticking out of them. And confronting them was soft, unprotected, vulnerable body of a young man in a cloud of teargas with his hands up shouting slogans about freedom.
David and Goliath in reverse. I found it hard to think that soldiers were probably teenagers themselves, maybe scared and unsure what to do.
The action has moved to the end of the curving main road which ends with a yellow metal barrier gate Israeli occupiers use to try to coral Palestinians in, when they deem it necessary. Three jeeps and a dozen of soldiers stood there with a larger number of jeeps, other military cars and soldiers stationed a few hundred metres above, just under the settlement factory which a friend told me was built on Bushra and Naji’s land.
Next to the gate was a short round grey watchtower. Demonstrators scattered around moving towards the soldiers, some throwing stones, others just standing there watching.
The teargas rained, but it posed no problem because a friendly wind continued to blow it back to the soldiers.
The soldiers milled around some knelling and taking ominous firing positions and spraying metal balls all over us. These were the so called rubber bullets which is a ‘cuddly’ name for the heavy metal marbles encased in thin layer of hard plastic, which can certainly kill if they hit ‘the right spot’.
The soldiers were supposed to fire them in the legs but they whizzed around our heads like flies. A villager told me that they were fired in clusters, 15 at the time.
Teargas canisters are also supposed to be fired up in the air but I saw the soldiers shooting them straight into protestors and using them like a weapon.
As all this was going on taxi vans, passenger cars and trucks would drive to the gate as if it was just an ordinary day and stop some distance away form the solders, turning back when soldiers failed to wave them through.
And all of a sudden out of a blue the solders got into the jeeps and drove up towards the settlement factory.
Kids and villagers surged forth taking over the vacated ground and hurling stones into the watchtower for a while.
And than a group of soldiers appeared from behind the tower and started chasing the youth. They stood no chance under their heavy killing gear and on the foreign terrain. It was no context – the villagers rejoiced in leaving them behind and when a soldier toppled and fell like catapulted through the air. There was a cheer like the one we hear after the score at the important football matches.
I jumped around like a monkey at this small victory, at this small accidental justice which had to be savoured.
But that was not the only victory for that day. Following the soldier fall the jeeps started rolling down from their factory and entered the village. We all rushed up the hill to see what they were intending to do. They drove through the village at speed and their only way out was via the downhill road where the demo started earlier that day.
They made what military strategists would probably call a strategic mistake. In fact, from a point of view of a lay person like me, it was tactical disaster: army jeeps driving under the hill full of angry villagers and stones. The stones sure as hell rained on the jeeps, sounding just like ‘rubber bullets’ army showered us with not so long ago. More damage to the Israeli war machine to be fixed by the US taxpayers. Tough!
As the jeeps were retreating in haste a teen staggered towards me and my friend with his hand bleeding. He was shot by the rubber bullet and looked like he was going to faint. We took out our First Aid kit and made a spectacularly bad attempt of helping him. Some Israeli activists came over and assisted knowledgeably. Somebody came by and suggested the guy should be taken to the ambulance and we saw him later with his arm in the sling.
A lesson for us that we have to brush up on out First Aid in hope that we will never have to use it.
A day with nice occupation soldiers very near Revava settlement

On Tuesday I had the most amazing experiences while picking olives with one of my IWPS colleagues with an older man form the village of Haris near Deir Istiya. First of all Abu S. had olive trees right next to the perimeter of the illegal Revava settlement, to the extent that we could hear the hammers banging in the ever expanding number of houses which have made Revava reach to the edge of a busy… road leading to Ramallah and Qalqilia in the opposite direction. In the afternoon the settlement children played on the playground which was probably less than 20 metres away from where we picked. We were suspended in the midair trying to reach from the rocks the branches of a large tree overtaken by thorny ivy, when a jogger run by. A skinny guy with the kippa, turned around and said ‘sabah alhair’ smiling and sped off. I could not believe it! Couple of years ago some friends from Haris told me that once a settler jogged into Haris, which was raided at the time daily by the Israeli Occupying Army, without a worry in the wold saying hellos to the bemused villagers. Our jogger looked exactly as if he was just turning the corner in some remote part of the NYC’s Central Park in the early morning, before he would take a shower and take a metro to his Wall Street office. Except that this was no NYC and he was an unwanted coloniser in the occupied West Bank. What was his jogging route? To another settlement? Are joggers connecting the colonies on the stolen tops of the West Bank hills, like the maze of ‘settlers only’ roads do, making the West Bank look like New Yersy? Is there a group of soldiers with their evil looking skinny machine guns jogging at his tail making sure that the settler joggers, like all other illegal Jewish colonisers can do what their hearth desires in this place? Abu S. was a sweet man. he replied ‘sabah anur’ and smiled. Abu S. wanted things to be good. He talked about the need for the peace in the World and his respect and good feelings for all the people. ‘If I would see a lost Jewish child I would put them in my car and take them to their parents’, he said. ‘Wallahi I would’ , he stressed. He told me that in that location he had 500 olive trees which were cut as the settlement expanded over the last 20 years, first slowly and than with particular vigour and ruthlessness form about six years ago. Now he has only 70 trees and majority of them are young trees which he planted to replace some of the old ones settlers destroyed. And when Abu S. said ‘destroyed’ he always added ‘pulled out with their roots’ because he said that the cut olive tree would grow back, and that is not what the intruders wanted. Abu S. was a very gentle and nice man but he was not surrendering and giving up easily. They destroy and he rebuilds what he is allowed to rebuild. Soon after the jogger episode a four wheel drive arrived with 2 soldiers carrying machine guns and an unarmed civilian. They stopped a few metres away from where we were picking and politely called good morning. Abu S. responded and than informed us that these were ‘very good soldiers’ who were there to protect him form the settlers. Abu S. harvests alone because his wife is ill and his children live in Jordan and near Jerusalem. His army escort was arranged via the Israeli organisation Rabbis for Human Rights who, I am told, have particularly good relationship and regular meetings with the Israeli occupation forces. There is no doubt that if Abu S. had a large family to help him harvest they would never be allowed on their land that near to the illegal colony. Soldiers parked under the massive pine tree nearby where they had plastic chairs ready for a whole day shift. At mid-morning we had our breakfast under the same tree where soldiers sat with their guns. Abu S. planted it as a teenager 50 years ago. He told us that there were many more pine trees nearby, but they were also uprooted by the settlers. In fact the massive dent was visible in the red earth where the large pine was standing not so long ago, it seemed. ‘This was a place were people form Haris used to come and sit when the weather was hot. The temperature here was at least 10 degrees lower than in Haris’, Abu S. reminisced. He spent many nights sleeping in those fields as a child with his parents, brothers and sisters during the olive harvest which lasted for couple of months. Harvesting 500 trees is a massive job and the whole family would move into the field house, whose remains were still there, very near one of the settlement houses. Abu S’s tone with the soldiers was conciliatory and it was obvious that he surrendered to what he thought was inevitable. But he felt that he needed to tell us this: ‘Don’t think that I forgot that settlers took my land, but there is nothing that I can do because America and Britain want it to happen, and they support Israel’. We had our breakfast of cans of fizzy orange drink and traditional Palestinian breakfast of houmus, yogurt, pitta bread etc. and soldiers and the civilian, who was probably a settlement security, started having theirs. Abu S. invited the soldiers to eat with us and they politely refused. I could not believe it! We are picking olives right next to the expanding settlement with, friendly joggers and soldiers protecting us who we are exchanging pleasantries with. When we finished our breakfast and started walking back to our half harvested large tree, one of those which Abu S. said settlers forgot to destroy, the soldiers asked us where we were from and I asked them why they were there. ‘To protect you and the settlers’, one of them said. ‘What threat are we – one elderly man and two elderly women with a bucket and a stick for tapping the olives off the branches’, I asked. The soldier smiled in agreement. He looked like he did not feel good being there and like he knew very well who the baddies and who the victims were. ‘I am a religious man and I have two kids and I do not wish any harm on anybody’, he said. He spoke perfect Arabic and when my colleague asked him where he leaned it he said that his grandparents moved to Israel from Yemen. His grandmother spoke Arabic at home so he leaned it. My friend than said: ‘Do you know that you should not be here’? ‘It is all in the Bible…’, the Yemeni soldier started to say. ‘That was very long time ago’, interrupted my colleague. ‘I don’t decide about these things. If I refused to be here I would go to prison. This is what politicians choose to do’, said the Yemeni soldier. ‘ You are participating in an occupation which is illegal under international laws and very few countries in the world do not condemn it’ , continued my colleague. The Yemeni soldier repeated that he would be in prison if he refused to be there and the other soldier who spoke very little gave us a disapproving look. The Yemeni guy practically nodded as my friend continued to explain why they should not be there and Abu S. became fidgety fearing an escalation with an uncertain outcome and we went back to our olive tree. Before we finished the large olive three ‘the settlers forgot to destroy’, the civilian companion of the solders approached us calling ‘ya zalame’, which is how local Palestinians say ‘hey man’ to each other, carrying 3 hot coffees. I was so surprised that I took them and than as he left I thought that I should have refused them. It as not just a boycottable Israeli coffee but it was also served by an Israeli settler and I took it and said ‘thank you’! We moved to the next olive tree which was even nearer to the settlement buildings, with a wide dirt road leading into the settlement. Abu S. was worried because the soldiers could not see us and we left a half finished tree to move to the one which was more visible. ‘ These soldiers are good’, insisted Abu S. ‘What can they do? This has all been decided by Obama and Britain’. And than the last shock of the day came in a shape of a tall and big soldier who jumped out of an army car and approached Abu S. as if he was his long lost father. ‘Job well done my ya zalame’, he said’ with a wide grin. Me and my colleague were picking and I was not sure again how I was supposed to be reacting. Do I say ‘hi’ or give this friendly occupation soldier a nasty look? I picked olives thinking ‘what the bloody hell is going on here today’? ‘Is that your tree’, asked the big friendly soldier. ‘Yes it is’, answered Abu S. ‘and not only this tree but that over there too’, said Abu S. smiling and pointing at the settlement. ‘ OK than, keep u a good work, my man’, said the noisy soldier and jumped into a jeep. ‘He is a good man’, said Abu S. ‘He is Druze and I did tell him what is mine’.