Settlers target
the olive pickers
in the battle for land
by Justin Huggler in Yanun,
West Bank
The village of Yanun is an
unlikely front line. But the violence here almost daily is just as vital
to the future of Israelis and Palestinians as the suicide bombings and
battles between tanks and gunmen. It is violence that goes to the heart
of the issues over which the Israeli government collapsed this week.
One of the most recent victims
was a 68-year-old woman from Bolton, Greater Manchester, beaten by Jewish
settlers until she fell to the ground and told: "Next time, you'll
get a bullet." Up here, amid the crumbling limestone houses and
rolling hills, Palestinian villagers are being attacked almost daily
every time they try to harvest their olives.
For many, the olives are
their only livelihood but the beatings and shootings are about much
more than that. They are about the land and who owns it. For the hills
that surround Yanun are covered with new outposts built by Jewish settlers
living in the nearby settlement of Itamar built illegally on occupied
land under international law, the same as all Jewish settlements in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The settlers are the ones who attack the
Palestinians farming olives.
Similar attacks have been
going on in other villages. In Yanun, the Palestinians lost the battle.
Unable to take any more, they packed up and left. That, says Daniel
Milo, an Israeli peace activist, was what the aggressors wanted: the
settlers want all the land here and Yanun is in the way. "The settlements
are a cancer, and these are the metastasis [spread]," as Mr Milo
put it.
Could Yanun be a taste of
what is to come? Increasingly, the far right in Israel talks about "transfer"
expelling all the Palestinians from the West Bank. After the collapse
of his coalition government this week, Ariel Sharon is reportedly trying
to persuade the far-right National Union-Yisrael Beiteinu group of parties,
some of whom openly advocate "transfer", to join a new coalition.
The Labor leader, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, may have pulled his party out
of government in a desperate bid to fend off a party leadership challenge,
but it was not for nothing he chose to leave over a row on funding for
the settlements, deeply unpopular with his left-wing supporters.
Even America has called on
the Israeli government to stop the settlements expanding something Mr.
Sharon made clear he does not want to do.
The villagers are back in
Yanun now. They agreed to move back after peace activists such as Mr
Milo, both Israeli and international, volunteered to come with them
as shields.
The generator that used to
supply the village with electricity is a burnt-out ruin. The settlers
did that, the Palestinians say. Abdal Bani Jabr, a villager in his forties,
said the settlers used to ride in to Yanun on horseback in the middle
of the night and beat the villagers. Twice, he got a beating. The first
time he needed seven stitches above his left eye.
Hani Bani Minyeh, a farmer
from the nearby village of Aqrabeh, was shot dead when he went to pick
his olives. The settlers who attacked Yanun claimed they were defending
themselves from Palestinian militants. That was until this week, when
four of the peace volunteers got to experience the violence at first
hand.
They went olive-picking with the villagers and were attacked. James
Delaplain, a 74-year-old from Wisconsin, was so badly beaten that he
finds it painful to stand up. Mary Hughes-Thompson, 68, from Bolton,
who now lives in Los Angeles, showed us her left arm covered in black
bruises. Two other activists, an Israeli and an Irishman, were also
beaten.
When the settlers began threatening
them, the peace activists say, they agreed with the Palestinian farmers
to go back to the village. The Palestinians left first, so the volunteers
would be between them and the settlers. "I remember saying just
a few days before,'What can they do to me, they won't attack me at my
age'," Ms Hughes-Thompson said.
She saw the settlers attack
Mr Delaplain. "I was very afraid for James, I thought I'd got away.
Suddenly a young guy stepped in front of me. I was going to say something
but, before I could, he hit me. Two others came up and hit me, in the
ribs. The first guy kept saying 'You want to be dead? You want to be
dead?' "
Eventually the settlers let
Ms Hughes-Thompson and the other peace volunteers go. But there is no
doubt any more over the violence being perpetrated in Yanun.
Mr Bani Jabr, the villager,
said: "I decided to bring my family back when I got a better feeling,
after I saw these people [the peace activists] coming here to help.
But now, after the volunteers were attacked, I'm afraid to stay here
at all."