The
Olive Trees Of Palestine Weep
By Sonja Karkar
07 September, 2007
Women For Palestine
Universally
regarded as the symbol of peace, the olive tree has become the object
of violence. For more than forty years, Israel has uprooted over one
million olive trees and hundreds of thousands of fruit trees in Palestine
with terrible economic and ecological consequences for the Palestinian
people. Their willful destruction has so threatened Palestinian culture,
heritage and identity that the olive tree has now become the symbol
of Palestinian steadfastness because of its own rootedness and ability
to survive in a land where water is perennially scarce.
Throughout the centuries,
Palestinian farmers have made their living from olive cultivation and
olive oil production; 80 percent of cultivated land in the West Bank
and Gaza is planted with olive trees. [1] In the West Bank alone, some
100,000 families are dependent on olive sales. [2] Today, the olive
harvest provides Palestinian farmers with anywhere between 25 to 50
percent of their annual income, and as the economic crisis deepens,
the harvest provides for many their basic means of survival. [3] But
despite the hardships, it is the festivities and traditions that accompany
the weeks of harvesting that have held Palestinian communities together
and are, in fact, a demonstration of their ownership of the land that
no occupation can extinguish except by the annihilation of Palestinian
society itself.
And that is precisely what
Israel has been doing -- through brute force and far more insidious
ways. Under an old law from the Ottoman era, Israel claims as state
property, land that has been "abandoned" and left uncultivated
for a period of four years and this land is then usually allocated to
Israeli settlers. Of course, the land has not been voluntarily abandoned.
Because of Israel's closure policy, which imposes the most draconian
restrictions on movement, Palestinian farmers cannot reach their agricultural
lands to tend and harvest their crops. Not only are permits required
to move about in their own homeland, but farmers are forced to use alternative
routes which must be negotiated on foot or by donkey because about 70
percent of these alternative routes -- those connected to main or bypass
roads -- have been closed by the Israeli army with concrete blocks and
ditches. And now a wall is being built for "security reasons"
which will permanently separate Palestinian families from their farmlands,
except for the gates that allow access at certain times, but more often
than not, at the whim of Israeli soldiers who may not even turn up to
open them. [4] This makes year-round maintenance of farmers' crops extremely
difficult if not impossible. Hence, the "abandonment" of land
that Israel uses to justify its land theft.
Since 1967, the Israeli military
and illegal settlers have destroyed more than one million olive trees
claiming that stone throwers and gunmen hide behind them to attack the
settlers. [5] This is a specious argument because these trees grow deep
inside Palestinian territory where no Israeli settler or soldier should
be in any case. But, Israel is intent on appropriating even the last
vestiges of land left to the Palestinians and so turns a blind eye to
any methods used by settlers and soldiers alike to terrorize the farmers
away from their farms and crops, even if that means razing their land.
Farmers are constantly under threat of being beaten and shot at, having
their water supplies contaminated (already scarce because 85 percent
of renewable water resources go to the settlers and Israel), their olive
groves torched and their olive trees uprooted. [6]
On a larger scale, the Israeli
military brings in the bulldozers to uproot trees in the way of the
"security" wall's route and where they impede the development
of infrastructure necessary to service the illegal settlements. Some
of these threatened trees are 700 to 1,000 years old and are still producing
olives. [7] These precious trees are being replaced by roads, sewerage,
electricity, running water and telecommunications networks, Israeli
military barracks, training areas, industrial estates and factories
leading to massive despoliation of the environment. If Israel has its
way, neither the trees nor the Palestinians who have cared for them
will survive the barbaric ethnic and environmental cleansing of Palestine.
The irony of it all is that
Israel's uprooting of olive trees is contrary to the Jewish halakhic
principle whose origin is found in the Torah: "Even if you are
at war with a city ... you must not destroy its trees" (Deut 20:19).
Under the pretext of "redeeming" the land the Jews claim God
gave them and the trees they are supposed to preserve, Israel continues
to violently expropriate Palestinian land. With each uprooted tree,
another slab of concrete is put in place for the wall and the illegal
Jewish settlements -- the landscape sculpted and changed beyond all
recognition and no longer the sacrosanct place that has long given Israel
its spurious Biblical justification for dispossessing the Palestinians
of the land they have nurtured since time immemorial.
The agonizing pain of loss
felt by Palestinians for their ravaged land is not expressed in the
statistics. Only those who have suffered the same cruel violations or
those who seek to protect and preserve the delicate balance of the world's
environment can understand what it means for people of the land. International
law, although on their side, remains ineffective as no world government,
not even the United Nations, is prepared to pressure Israel to stop
its illegal collective punishment of the entire Palestinian population.
Today, there are campaigns all around the world to end the uprooting
of trees in Palestine and to replant those which have already been uprooted.
And each year, when the Palestinian olive harvest approaches, international
volunteers join Palestinians to provide some human protection from the
acts of violence visited on Palestinian farmers by Israeli settlers
and soldiers who want to stop the harvesting of crops. These wonderful
acts of solidarity help to heal the land, but they cannot heal the pain
of those who have to watch the uprooting of age-old olive trees, the
desecration of their land and their millennia-old heritage. Such heartbreaking
reality has led the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, to say, "If
the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would have
become tears ..."
Endnotes
[1] UN Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affiars, "The Olive Harvest in the West Bank and
Gaza," October 2006.
[2] Applied Research Institute
of Jerusalem (ARIJ), "Olive Harvest in Palestine. Another Season,
Another Anguish," November 2004.
[3] Canaan Fair Trade, www.olivecoop.com/Canaan.html.
[4] OXFAM, "Forgotten
Villages: Struggling to survive under closure in the West Bank,"
September 2002, p. 21.
[5] ARIJ, "Olive Harvest
in Palestine. Another Season, Another Anguish," November 2004.
[6] UN Report of the Special
Committee to investigate Israeli Practices affecting the Human Rights
of the Palestinian People and other Arabs of the Occupied Territories,
No. 40, September 2005.
[7] Atyaf Alwazir, "Uprooting
Olive trees in Palestine," Inventory of Conflict and Environment
(ICE), Case Number: 110, American University, November 2002.
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