'Their presence causes the problem'
Assawiya, West Bank — Anwar Khatib has been harvesting olives for four decades, but this year the crop is especially sparse and bitter. It’s not just the lack of rainfall that has made yields in the occupied West Bank only a third of what they are in a good year. It is that Mr. Khatib does not want to be injured or killed while picking his trees.
They are close the Palgei Mayim settlement, its white prefabricated homes spread out like toy boxes on the neighboring hill. “Every year there are problems,” he sighed after someone told him that seven Israeli settlers had been spotted nearby. “We can’t get to the trees.”
In recent years, fundamentalist settlers who believe the area belongs to them by divine will have attacked and shot Palestinians as they harvested near settlements. Three years ago farmers from this village south of Nablus had to be treated in hospital after being beaten by settlers wielding sticks, residents said.
Still, Mr. Khatib, a tall man with green eyes and a salt and pepper beard, needed to get to his trees Friday. He, like Palestinians in villages throughout the West Bank badly needs the income from the oil the olives produce.
The Friday sermon was echoing through the orchards from the village mosque’s loudspeaker. But Mr. Khatib’s would-be saviour came from another faith, surprisingly for him that of the Israeli enemy In a show of friendship to the Palestinian farmers, a dovish Israeli rabbi had come to Assawiya with ten rabbinical students to offer protection from settlers and show a kinder face of Judaism based on the bible’s teaching that all humans are created in god’s image.
“This is my first time meeting a rabbi, it’s great that he came,” Mr. Khatib said after meeting rabbi Arik Ascherman, the lanky, Arabic-speaking American-born head of Rabbis for Human Rights. Ascherman, considered by settlers and the army to be their number one nuisance during the harvest, has been bouncing from hilltop to hilltop this season as the army evicts him from one closed military area after another. “In recent years they have been keeping us out more and more because they do not want us checking on them from up close.” Rabbi Ascherman said.
Rabbi Ascherman says there has been less violence thus far this year compared to previous ones and credits the army with “doing a good job keeping peace” where it is deployed. But, he adds “in many places they have been telling Palestinians to hurry up and finish when farmers still had work to do.” David Ha’Ivri, a spokesman for settlers in the northern West Bank says RHR and other left-wing Israeli groups “come from outside to provoke violence between local Arabs and Jews. Their presence causes the problem.” He says
In a bid to help Mr. Khatib, rabbi Ascherman called an Israeli officer and asked whether troops could show a presence near his trees so that the Palestinian would feel safe from settler attack. The officer declined, so Ascherman himself decided to accompany Mr. Khatib. But very quickly the same officer, a member of Israel’s Druse Arab minority, pulled up in a khaki vehicle, alighted and called out: “Ascherman you’re in a closed military area. Get out of here. Allah be with you. You are looking for trouble.”
Soon a distraught Mr. Khatib also left, along with two relatives who had come to help him harvest. They said the officer had told them that if they wanted to be protected while they pick they should come again on Tuesday and do it in “coordination” with the army.
“It’s a lie. There will be no picking on Tuesday,” said Mr. Khatib.
“The coordination they mean is that between the army and the settlers,” a relative joked bitterly.
Over the years, Mr. Khatib said, he has lost half of his olive groves to expropriations for Jewish settlements. He did not apply for compensation because that would amount to selling his land to the Israelis, something considered high treason among Palestinians.
His cellphone rang. It was rabbi Ascherman, who said he had spoken to the officer and that the latter had told him that Mr. Khatib could pick today. The rabbi suggested Mr. Khatib call the officer and hear this for himself. But Mr. Khatib declined. He kept walking back to the village, further away from the trees he once picked alongside his grandfather.
