Picking olives between barbed wire laid by settlers to deter farmers from gaining access to their groves

Today Ann, Noirin and I were on the road again, requested to join a farmer in the village of Hares, whose land lies in a military area, and who is forced to apply for a permit to allow him to harvest.

To get there we first took a bus from the village at 6.30 a.m. The bus was mainly filled with students all travelling to An Najah university in Nablus. One young woman on the bus got talking to Ann and very soon asked her if there was anyway she could help the local students since the journey to university was so expensive, more and more of them were finding it impossible to continue. This was a story we heard several times - and those of us who had been in Palestine the previous year had noticed that the cost of travel had gone up by at least 50%. We left the students in al Funduq, where they still had to face the queues and searches at Beit Iba checkpoint, while we got a taxi in the opposite direction.

In Hares we met our famer, Ashraf, and he ferried us and the buckets and bags by car to the end of the village, where the village lane joins the main road. The farmer's land only lies 400 metres up this road, but he cannot take his car up there, since the army will not allow him to park. This also means that his wife, who has mobility problems and cannot walk far, cannot accompany us.  However, a largish group from Rabbis for Human Rights, along with their tour bus, arrives and take us plus buckets up the road, where they drop us all off along with two young Israeli men who will work with us all for the day.

To get to the groves we have to climb over large boulders and then pick our way about 100 metres to a road track, clambering over barbed wire to do so. In the past there was a village track through all these groves, but this was blocked by boulders six years ago and the track is no more. The track which we reach, in contrast, is a military road (although armed settlers also seem to have the right to walk or drive up and down it) and we can only cross with 'permission'. The farmer has been given a permit to pick this week and it remains to be seen whether we will be allowed to accompany him. A group of three soldiers appears, with Captain Rafi (the same man who promised much and delivered nothing last week in Tell) amongst them. He clearly recognises us but we do not acknowledge one another. Ashraf talks confidently with Captain Rafi; Ashraf is a retired lecturer aged 60 and the Captain Rafis of this world do not faze him. We are asked to provide our names and all give our first name, which Rafi duly writes down on the corner of a piece of paper. He then leaves, but the three soldiers with him all remain on duty all day. We proceed across the military track and approach what I can only describe as a neat cluster of residential houses and gardens: it could have been a housing estate in Holland or even southern England.

Severed trees and a country garden

Ashraf's trees lie between the military track and these houses, but I have not seen trees like this before. At first they seem like giant shrubs, but Ashraf shows us the base of each tree, which are about two feet in diameter (indicating they must be at least 200 years old). The trunks though, have been completely cut through at a height of about one metre, and the new shrub like growth I can see is new, soft leafy growth from the severed trunks. The settlers here cut these trees down between four and six years ago. The attack means that the trees now have only the smallest of crops, high up on the new growth. Worse than this, Ashraf is rarely alllowed access to the trees to prune them, so it is almost impossible to get into or up the trees to get to the few olives that it bares. There are no strong branches or the open shape that I now understand is necessary for a healthy olive producing tree. Our arms quickly get covered in scratches trying to get to the olives and our legs are scratched too by the thorny undergrowth which Ashraf has also been unable to clear.

And right next to us, maybe four metres away from the closest tree,is a pristine garden, with a lush green lawn, flower beds, a gazebo, a hammock and two children's bikes. It must be watered every day to achieve the lushness that I can see.

In contrat, Ashraf's land looks and is neglected - for those who care to see it this way, the contrasting views could be a confirmation of Arab inability to care for their land. Of coures, his land not many yearaa ago included the site of the garden that I'm looking at - the trees that would have been uprooted to make space to create that garden would have been planted by Ashrafs great great grandfather.

We'd only been there for ten mintues and we were already incensed with anger, but Ashraf had no time for self pity. He had four of us volunteering for the day and he wanted to make the most of it. He was a smiling bundle of energy, pruning and clearing vegetation whilst we searched for olives. Meanwhile our three watchers lazed around in their little outpost.

An Israeli view point

We gradually dealt with all the 'nearly' trees and began to chat with the two young Israelis, one of whom spoke excellent English as well as Arabic. The two lived near Tel Aviv and one had volunteered to help with the harvest in previous years. It emerged that one, the talkative one, had served in the army, while the other had avoided it on 'psychological grounds'. They both thought that it was now easier to get out of  army service- that the IDF did not want 'unmotivated' people and would rather use mental health grounds to avoid the problem of such recruits. Mr. Talkative, on the other hand, said that he'd decided to serve because he had believed that he would have a 'better attitude' (ie. he thought that he would behave better towards Palestinians) than some other soldiers. He paused and then said that he was now not sure if he had made the right decision and he was not sure what he was going to do about being called up for reserve duty. His rationale for serving in the IDF was, for me, the sort of Israeli rationale that tries to make the occupation more 'humane' but completely fails to confront the central injustice of there being an occupation at all. I wandered if this was also the rationale that had brought them here as volunteers: simply trying to mitigate the worst excesses of occupation and settler behaviour. Certainly as we talked they seemed quite shocked by some of the stories we told about the beaviour of the Israeli state. They were shocked, for example when we told them that one of our group had been denied entry to Israel and about the way in which Israel prevents humanitarian aid being delivered into the West Bank.

Ashraf, though, helped us all through the day. As we sat having lunch he commented on how this was the way it should be - different nationalilities all sitting together in peace. He said that peace must come one day, that it was essential not just for Palestinians, but for Isralis and for all the other peoples of the world.