Rabbis for Human Rights try to protect Palestinians from settlers during olive harvest
November 9, 2007 1:32 pm Israeli Culture War, Israeli Peace movement, Settlers, Israeli Religious Right, Israeli-Palestinian conflict
A Palestinian farmer selects and sorts olive during the harvest
James Hider, Olive branch blossoms amid harvest of fear - Times Online, November 9, 2007
In an olive grove on the edge of Nablus, Fuad Amr and his sons keep one eye on the branches they are stripping and the other warily on the Jewish settlement that overlooks their land from a hilltop.
The settlers could descend at any time to intimidate them or even beat them and steal the fruit of their labour, as happens every year across the West Bank in the olive season.
The Palestinian farmers, however, have found unlikely allies - Jewish activists, some of them Orthodox rabbis, who risk violence to protect them.
“I am afraid,” Mr Amr said, as he flung black olives on to a plastic sheet, from which his wife gathered them into a sack. “I’m picking the olives and all the time I’m looking out for settlers. They come in buses, sometimes 20 or 30 of them.”
Last year one of his neighbours was hit on the head by a rock thrown by settlers, who cite the biblical-era Jewish settlements in the area as a claim to the land.
Every year, however, Israeli and foreign peace activists come to protect the Palestinians during the harvest and help them to pick their crops. Some of them have also been beaten by settlers, but they say that their presence prevents the Palestinians from being driven off their fields.
One of the Jewish groups is Rabbis for Human Rights, which aims to promote religion as a point of harmony and justice between Jews and Arabs.