Picking olives with these people and listening to their stories for a couple days was one of the most intense experiences of my life. I'm not really even sure where to begin. I asked someone how it all started, and he pointed to the ridge of a hill that is now covered in sheds and prefabricated homes from the settlement. He said one day 10 or 15 years ago, a tent showed up on the ridge. A year or so later, a shed, and then electricity wires. Then the settlers started coming onto their land. Settlers would come into their village with submachine guns, yelling that all the land was theirs, that it belonged to their ancestors. They uprooted many of the olive trees and moved them back to the settlement, claiming that their ancestors had planted them and that they therefor belonged to them. Waleed, one of the people I got to know best, told me how when they were shepherding their sheep and goats on the hillside, settlers would come down and beat them and tell them that the hills were now theirs, and that the villagers weren't allowed there anymore. He told me that because the hills were where the villagers mostly took their sheep and goats to graze, they had to sell more than 3/4 of their flock, which is a big deal for people living at the subsistence level. Others told me how they had been shot at picking in their olive trees, on land they owned, that the settlers now claimed as their own. Waleed's uncle had been shot in the leg while running away from settlers who had approached him while he had been picking his olives, on land he legally owns, on one of the hills. People told me stories about how the settlers used to break into peoples houses and beat them up in their own homes in front of their families and children, how they destroyed property and fields, burnt down the electricity generator the U.N. had donated (and threatened to burn it down again if it was rebuilt), etc, etc.
I was listening to stories like this all weekend. Probably the most intense interaction I had was when I was when I came across a small family of a couple of young men, a small girl, and their 80 year old grandmother. I was trying to talk to one of the young men about what had happened in the village, and what he thought the solution was for both the village and for Palestine in general. The old woman kept interrupting, red in the face and on the verge of tears, shouting things like "they killed my grandson! All he was doing was herding his sheep! Why would they do that? He wasn't hurting anybody. He was such a nice boy, he had just been engaged, he had his whole life in front of him." Five minutes later, "they beat up my neighbor! They beat him so hard his left eye fell out of his head! He has to put a glass eye in there now so there isn't a hole in his head!". And so on, for about half an hour. What the hell am I supposed to say to someone in that situation? How do you respond to something like that? I just quietly said I was sorry, and didn't know what else to do.
I asked Waleed if they ever tried to call the authorities for help whenever anything would happen, and he said that they had tried over and over. That when the settlers would call the army, they would show up in a few minutes, but that when the villagers tried, they would show up hours after the settlers had already left, and when they saw that nothing was happening currently, they would leave. One time he said one of the army people was standing right there smoking a cigarette while the settler was beating someone up, and that other times the army was present while settlers uprooted trees, and didn't do anything to stop them. They were there only for the protection of the settlers. Waleed said that whenever they would try to file a complaint or criminal charges against the settlers with the army, they would tell him that it wasn't their job, and to go talk to the military police. They would go to the military police, and they would tell them to go talk to the army. They were never able to get even a single settler held responsible (the only time some of the settlers were brought to trial was when they beat up and broke the nose of a man named David Nir, an Israeli businessman from Tel Aviv who was there as part of an Israeli peace group, but all the charges were dismissed).
Although the level of physical violence has decreased, there is still a lot of bullshit going on. According to one of the international volunteers I was staying with, one time the settlers came and started bathing themselves and their dogs in the village drinking water well, armed to the teeth of course. Death threats and verbal harassment are commonplace. The settlers used to have a giant search-light that they would shine on people's houses in the middle of the night, looking through their windows, although when I was there they only had giant stationary spotlights that illuminated the village. Israeli soldiers go on patrol through the town and the fields a couple times a day, and although the villagers aren't afraid of them at all in terms of physical abuse, they get out sometimes and take a bunch of pictures of everything. According to one of the international volunteers there, that is so that when anything new is built, even something as small as a goat shed with a tarp on the roof, they can issue a demolition order. He pointed to some rubble, which is what was left of a house one of the older sons of our neighbor had tried to build for himself. He was also presented with a bill for the cost of demolishing his own house. The son has since moved into a nearby city to try to start a life for himself. According to the volunteer, the villagers, with assistance from the volunteers, had tried to get permits to build, but they are always ignored. They were not even able to receive permits to repair houses that were damaged by settlers. And when the villagers build anyway, a bulldozer can show up at any time and demolish what they've built. When you look up around the ridge surrounding the town and see all the sheds and houses that the settlers have built over the years, at the vineyards they are now planting on the hills they confiscated from the Palestinians, at the chicken sheds that are apparently one of the biggest sources of organic free-range eggs in Israel, the contrast is particularly striking. I have heard that occasionally Israel demolishes these illegally built outposts of settlers, but it is definitely not happening in this case. Also, the villagers need to apply for a special permit to go on any of their own lands that border the settlement outposts (which are illegal even under Israeli law). The week before I had arrived, they had been given three days to pick in that area. According to Waleed, he would need two full weeks to pick all his olives there, but 3 days was all they were given. In years past, after the permit ended and the army forced them out of the area, the settlers came down and picked the majority of the olives that were left for themselves. This year, international volunteers initially went with the villagers into the permit zone to make sure they were not harassed, but at the request of an angry Israeli settler, the army cleared them from the area, as well as pushed back the borders of where the Palestinians were allowed to pick. After that particular incident, according to one of the international volunteers, one of the Israeli soldiers came up to him and apologized, and said that if it was up to him he would let the internationals stay and let the villagers pick wherever they wanted. The volunteer said he scoffed at him and asked him why he didn't raise his voice and do something about it, but even though this guy is aiding and perpetuating what I can't see as anything other than a racist and colonialistic situation, I can't help but feel just a little bit sorry for him, if he doesn't believe in what he is probably being forced to do by his superiors. Incidentally, while I was researching an organization an Israeli friend of mine is working for, I found the testimonial of a soldier who was sent to jail for refusing to serve protecting the settlements, and it turned out he was one of the soldiers stationed at Itamar, you can read his letter here: http://kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=33069. I don't think most Israelis support the creation and expansion of settlements, or many of the things settlers do. But the overwhelming majority do look the other way at it, or minimize their importance, and don't recognize the settlements as one of the major sources of conflict. This is just one little town, this kind of stuff is happening all over the West Bank. If you want a super in-depth account of what is happening in Yanoun from a former international volunteer, go to http://www.kirkensnodhjelp.no/Documents/Kirkens%20N%C3%B8dhjelp/Geografiske%20filer/Midt%C3%B8sten/Living%20with%20settlers.pdf. Also, if you want to listen to some of the interviews I translated for a French friend of mine who is some kind of journalist, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8g01rRVoTA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdCW-QqnCFo. There is one point in there where I ask Waleed if he thinks that the international presence helps a little bit, and he responds "No, not a little bit. A lot! Before the internationals came the settlers would come here EVERY DAY and harass us, but now we are ok."
I have read about these kinds of things happening, but to hear it told from people who have experienced it first hand is something else entirely. These people are living in a situation where Israel, the state that controls the area, has controlled the area for the past 40 years, and will continue to control the area for the foreseeable future refuses to give them any kind of police protection whatsoever, forcibly denies them access to land they legally own, and refuses to issue building permits and then demolishes homes if they are built anyway, while the settlers, simply because they happen to have been born Jewish, have an army unit stationed nearby for their protection, are not prosecuted for assaulting Palestinians even when death is involved, are allowed to forcibly confiscate land from Palestinians and designate areas where the Palestinians are not allowed to go, even if those places are private Palestinian property, and are allowed to keep building outposts, despite the fact that they are technically against Israeli law, without fear of having them demolished. I have my own opinion of what that constitutes, I will let you decide for yourself.
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Half my experience in Yanoun was extremely intense, but the rest was very enjoyable. I spent a couple days picking olives with the villagers. They work sun-up to sun-down, it is pretty tiring work. But I think I like manual labor, working up a sweat and just joking around with everyone around you all day while you work. All the villagers cousins come in from the nearby city, and they all pick olives as a big extended family, from little children to old women. Every few hours you take a 10 minute break for tea, and everyone just lays back under the shade of a tree and tells jokes or throws olives at someone who isn't looking, or wrestles someone or whatever. Both the adults and children, it seems their favorite thing to do is to point at someone and say to me "Him, he is... crazy!" in English and then they all crack up laughing;) At the end of the last day I was there we loaded all the bags of olives onto a tractor the U.N. had donated and drove into the little nearby city of Aqraba (isn't that the name of the town in 'Aladdin'?) and went to this garage with a big olive press machine there. A whole lot of other farmers from other farming villages were waiting in line, and everyone shared tea and traded stories. The press machine grinds up the entire olive, seed and all, and then presses it to get out the oil. It comes out dark green, but they tell me that after the silt settles you have pure yellow olive oil. The rest of the stuff, the ground up pits, gets thrown out this shoot out the back of the garage, and the tractor pulls up to collect it. Apparently they use it instead of firewood when it gets cold. Anyway the stuff is soft and mushy and a tiny bit oily, and the little kids would play in it when no one was looking and make little snowballs to throw at each other (and me;) until the adults would yell at them to stop. Then an adult would make a snowball and peg a little kid when he wasn't looking and it would start all over again;) I went roaming around the little area around the press and met a lot of people, once they found out I was a foreigner I even got a little crowd around me asking me all kinds of weird questions, it was pretty fun. These people are really just PEOPLE, not some stereotyped violent fanatic savages. There may be some cultural differences, and they may seem large when you can't speak to them, but underneath they are really just people, not all that different from you or me...
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