[GushShalom] Where we were when the government fell + Sat.olive harvest

[Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc)]

GUSH SHALOM - pob 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033 - http://www.gush-shalom.org/

in this mail:
[] FROM THE SQUARE TO THE ORCHARD
   or: where we were when the government fell
   report by Adam Keller of three hectic days
[] About the olive picking, Saturday
    NB: Only when you register!!
   reminder and update

                 ***

[] FROM THE SQUARE TO THE ORCHARD
   or: where we were when the government fell
   report by Adam Keller of three hectic days

On Saturday night the Rabin Memorial Rally at Tel- Aviv's Rabin Square - also 
this year a major gathering of peace-minded Israelis, in which all
self-respecting peace groups feel bound to make a presence but as before, it 
was an ambigious event, in which your participation is hedged with reservations 
about the program.

At least, attending this year's rally - unlike those of the past two years - 
did not involve the emotional wrench of having to listen to a keynote speaker 
directly involved in the war against the Palestinians -  PM Ehud Barak in the 
rally of November 2000; Dalia Rabin-Pelosof, Deputy Defence Minister in 2001. 
In retrospect she herself, the daughter of Yitzchak Rabin, may have felt 
uncomfortable with it; she resigned from the government a few months later, a 
step which marked a beginning of internal pressures and grassroots resurgence 
in the Labor Party, and which finally led to the party ministers' long-overdue 
resignation from the Sharon Government. 

So, this year's Rabin Rally, seven years after the murder, however officially 
touted as "non-partisan", was in a way the first manifestation of a new 
political reality. In other times, the enormous sign "We Believe in Peace" over 
the podium may have been only a cliche or pious wish; in the Israel of
November 2002 it was just a bit more: a crowd of about 100,000 mostly young 
people defying the trend of 'peace is dead'.

The organizers, meanwhile, had gone to considerable trouble to obscure the 
identity of Israel's partner for peace - featuring filmed addresses from King 
Abdullah of Jordan, President Mubarak of Egypt and Former US President Clinton, 
while pointedly neglecting to let any Palestinian speak; and the historic 
handshake between Rabin and Arafat featured only in the stickers distributed in 
big quantity by Gush Shalom, not in any of the organizers' posters and ballers.
But there were quite a few moments of dissidence - some on the podium, some in  
the crowd, quite a few in the interaction between the two: the explicit anti-
occupation signs conspicious among the medley of banners and placards visible 
in the square, "Hashomer Hatzair Youth Movement fights the occupation" and "Get 
out of the Territories!"  and "Refusal to serve the occupation is the true 
Zionism"; and the upswelling applause to actress Anat Gov's words "The right-
wingers try to criminalize us, to put all blame for the country's woes on the 
'criminals of Oslo'; well, better to be a peace criminal than a war criminal"; 
Singer Aviv Gefen calling upon "everybody who has had enough of the occupation" 
to raise their arms and getting a resounding response. 

Several peace groups - Bat Shalom, Gush Shalom, Kvisa Sh'hora, 
Women's Peace 
Coalition - took up a specific issue which has gotten far less than 
its fair 
share of public attention: "The Separation Fence"  - "fence" being 
an euphemism 
for what is in fact being erected as a monstrous 8-metre high 
concrete wall. 
This project is often welcomed as both a panacea preventing the 
entry of 
suicide bombers into Israel and the beginning of a "separation 
process" which 
will supposedly lead to the eventual creation of a Palestinian state 
- with 
little attention given to such details as that the monster wall is 
being laid 
along a line cutting through the agricultural lands of dozens of 
Palestinian 
villages, effectively annexing enormous swaths of territory to 
Israel. Also, 
while being enclosed within an enormous wall would make the West 
Bank even more 
of a prison camp than it already is, it does not at all 
automatically lead to 
Israeli withdrawal.  It didn't in the Gaza Strip which is already 
for years 
enclosed by a similar construction.

So, throughout the rally there were activists circulating among the 
crowd - the 
largest gathering of peace camp grassroots supporters anywhere in 
the year - 
distributing leaflets on the iniquities and dangers of the 
Separation Wall. 
Dozens of others held aloft large banners on which the bricks of a 
wall were 
painted with the slogan "The Evil Fence - Ghetto for Palestinians, 
Disaster for 
Israelis".  With more than twenty of them held side by side, a quite 
realistic 
image of a wall was created in the center of the Square.


Defending the olive trees

As it happened, on the very next day we became involved in one of the
concrete cases. An urgent phone call and request for help came from 
Falami, a
place which few of of us heard of before. One of the building 
contractors for 
The Wall had without prior announcement started to lay a swath of 
destruction 
across its fields and olive orchards. So it was that early Monday 
morning  
representatives of Bat Shalom and Gush Shalom, altogether four, 
found 
themselves in a small van, en route to a completely different world 
lying just 
half an hour's drive from Tel-Aviv. First crossing the unmarked, but 
somehow 
very obvious Green Line; a drive along a main West Bank highway, 
nowadays 
reserved for settler use  and lined with signs promising "The House 
of your 
dreams" at various settlements; then stopping at the entrance to a 
side-road, 
closed off from the highway by huge concrete blocks, to prevent 
Palestinian 
cars from using it; then a drive in a Palestinian taxi along a 
winding hilly 
track from one village to another; then Falami, our destination, a 
neat village 
of some 600 inhabitants. A man with a traditional headdress, who 
turns out to 
be the mayor, insists on letting us have breakfast in his home.

On a cursory glance, Falami seems a bit better off than many other 
places in 
the West Bank. That is because up to now they had enough land - and 
an 
irrigation project to make good use of these lands - to live mainly 
from 
agriculture. All that is now under immediate threat. We go into a 
car, and 
travel through a pastoral landscape. Suddenly, we could here shouts 
ahead.

Further on the unpaved road, a crowd of villagers, with some 25 
internationals 
scattered among them, are shouting about something happening on the 
firther 
side of the road, vehemently remonstrating with somebody there. When 
we come 
closer we can see: on the other side, an olive grove is being 
systematically 
destroyed. The man with the chainsaw was deft and efficient. First 
the side-
brances were lopped off one by one, then the central bole, and then 
off to the 
next tree. It did not take him more than two of three minutes to 
destroy a 
tree. He was guarded by eight armed men - four "Border Guards" in 
khaki; four 
private security guards in dark blue. With each tree he tackled they 
speard all 
around, their rifles pointing outwards. Gradually, we started 
getting off the 
road and coming closer.

Verbal admonitions were clearly utterly useless towards this crew. 
They either
ignored them or answered with obscenities. Some of us started 
running ahead of
them, getting to still undamaged trees and holding on to them. The 
man with the
chain-saw was quite angry: "Get off, fucking bastard leftists! I am 
going to
cut off the tree. If you get in the way, that's your lookout!" He 
did lop off
the outer brances. Then he hesitated and started cursing his private 
and state
guardians: "Go on, go on, get rid of these interfering bastards! I 
ain't got
all day!". The guards tried (and succeeded with some of us). They 
were beating,
dragging, kicking, using rifle butts - the private security guards 
(who legally
have no right to use force) being the most violent. Still, the bole 
of an olive
tree is exactly the right size to be hugged and held on to with all 
one's
might... There were some moments of a dialogue of some kind. If he 
is to be  
believed, the man with the saw was especially angry because he felt 
we were 
trying to deprive him of the first job he got after a long time of 
unemployment. "And anyway, if I don't do it, somebody else will". 
(An old 
argument, as was the Border Guards' "I am just obeying orders".) 
After a time, 
they just seemed to decide to leave us where we were and go on to 
other trees - 
which seemed an effective tactic, since there were more trees than 
activists. 

But still, better hold on to the one tree you were hugging, holding 
on and on 
and not relaxing. For a very long half hour, the universe seemed to 
shrink to 
the scope of a single olive tree with half its branches already 
lopped off.
Gradually, one became aware that the sickening sound of the saw had 
ceased, and 
that something was going on on the road above. As we learned via the 
cellphone, 
an official of the special governmental agency charged with creating 
the wall 
had arrived, and negotiations were going on. It turned out that the
contractor was supposed to cease work pending the arrival of the 
French Consul
on the following day, to discuss the fate of the irrigation project 
which the
French government had built in this village. Anyway, the result of 
the
negotiations was an all-clear. It was possible to come out of the 
trees. We
had saved them, at least for one or two days.


On the following morning, the village looked quite different. When 
we arrived
(seven Israelis this time) the Falami school children were strung 
out on parade
along the street, having just greeted the village's important guest 
on his
arrival. The Consul was already inside - one of the East Jerusalem 
consuls, who
are de-facto ambassadors to Palestine. When we got in, the mayor was
extolling the French-installed irrigation system: "Our land has 
become a
paradise. We grow everything: apricots and cucumbers and cytrus, 
anything you
want. We have good land and the water. Now our people see them 
taking it all 
away".

After the meeting, the consul was taken to see for himself. A 
procession was
formed. The Consul, a good-looking tall man in a neat blue suit 
asking 
attentive questions in fluent Arabic, was accompanied by village 
notables and
represantives of Palestinian NGO's arrived from Nablus and Ramallah, 
and 
followed through the main street by a crowd of villagers mixed with 
internationals and Israelis. Two young men brought up the rear, one 
holding 
aloft the French Tricolor and the other - the Palestinian Black-
White-Red-and-
Green. From the top of a blockhouse, the Palestinians pointed out 
the details 
of the impending destruction: "The wall will pass through that green 
field, 
cutting it in half. All the further fields will be lost to us. The 
hothouses,  
over there, will be destroyed. The well will remain on the other 
side. We will 
have no control over what comes through the pipes." The government 
claims that 
Palestinian farmers will be allowed to work their fields on
the other side. From experience (as when Palestinian farmland was 
enclosed
within a settlement's perimeter fence, and a similar promise given) 
the
Palestinians are highly sceptical. A representative of the 
Agricultural Relief
Committees spreads a map of the Separation Wall's entire planned 
course:
"Everywhere, they try to grab the ground water. That is the main 
consideration,
not security. It is an old plan, but now they are actually 
implementing it".

>From there the procession moves to another sector: the scene of 
yesterday's
clash at the olive grove, which is inspected by the visiting 
diplomat.
Everything is as it was left on the previous day, the destroyed 
trees and the
undamaged ones - even the strewn pieces of our placards, torn to 
pieces by the
security guards. Then he got into his car and drove off. There was 
some
confusion as to what comes next. The consul was going to have a 
crucial meeting
with the government officials in charge of building the Wall, and 
take up the
issue of the Falami lands. The officials had refused to meet him in 
the village
itself, judging the place "too dangerous" and the meeting was to be 
held
somewhere in the open fields. 

While still standing there a movement became visible among the trees 
of the 
ravaged olive grove. Soldiers appeared, moving purposefully in a 
skirmish line, 
their guns at the ready. We linked arms, preparing to offer passive 
resistance 
to an eviction order - but the soldiers moved past, studiously 
ignoring our 
presence. We continued standing and waiting - when suddenly the 
elements 
intervened, a cloud moved across what had been a scorching sun, and 
the first 
thunderstorm and heavy rain of the year found us standing in the 
open field.

Fortunately, the Palestinians pointed out nearby a low-ceilinged 
cave - 
apparently being used as a sheepfold. For an hour Palestinians, 
Israelis and 
internationals sat huddled together, some dozing, a few turning on 
squeeking 
radios. It was there that we heard of the Sharon Government's fall 
and the 
scheduling of new elections. The Italians, who seemed to predominate 
among the 
international contingent, started singing an old partisan song; soon the others 
joined the catchy tune and the clapping.

Gradually, people started drifting out, though the rain had by no means fully 
abated. The news filtered around: the meeting for which we had waited was 
taking place a few hundred metres up the track. We moved in that direction, 
determined to make our presence felt - and encountered the soldiers. "No, no, 
forbidden. It is security, the French Parliament is here. Security!" shouted a 
young sergeant. There we were, blocked in the drenching rain. A bit ahead of us 
we could make out a square, heavy car, light gray in colour, with a winking 
yellow strobe light on top. Not far from it, another grey car with the initials 
T.V. marked largely with white tape. (The reporter of a French network has 
shown a remarkable devotion to duty, going on to take his footage in the 
heaviest of rain.) An army jeep pulled up - and got promptly stuck in
the mud. All further efforts merely stuck it deeper and deeper. And
suddenly everybody - peace protesters, villagers and blocking soldiers alike
- burst out laughing, there in the drenching rain. 

Epilogue: The consul's meeting with the officials, on which the Falami vilagers
pinned so much hope, ended in failure. The officials' mandate was limited - or
so they said - to discussing "The laying of irrigation pipes under the fence,
once it is completed". For any deviation from the track defined for "the Fence"
itself, they refered him to the political echelon, to Sharon personally or the
newly-appointed acting Defence Minister Mofaz - and meanwhile, the army 
declared the respite over and allowed the contractors to move back in.
So, by the time you read this, the olive grove over which we struggled may have 
been already completely devastated, and the bulldozers may be cutting a swathe 
of destruction through the beautiful green fields where we walked yesterday.

[We don't suggest this time to write letters about Falami to Sharon, Mofaz - 
but maybe you can help spread this story to newspapers.]


[] About the olive picking, Saturday
    NB: Only when you register!!
    reminder and update

Action: Picking Olives.

Date: this coming Saturday, November 9.

Details: On the Gush answering machine, 03-5221732. 

The olive picking season is coming to an end. Next Saturday is the last day.
On that day, Gush Shalom and representatives of other peace organizations are planning the 
mobilization of more than a handfull of volunteers for aiding the villages that have suffered the 
most from settlers’ harassment and who have explicitly asked for our help.

We shall help the villagers to pick the olives that have remained on the trees and can 
still be saved!

We shall defend them by our very presence from the settlers!

We shall celebrate the end of the harvest, in the course of  which Israeli and 
international peace activists have done their best to help saving the fruit!

It is a great experience – an action that is at the same time a practical help, a political 
demonstration and a symbolic act of Israeli-Palestinian friendship. Those who have 
already taken part, please make another effort! Those who have not - you have an 
experience waiting for you!

COME AND TAKE PART!

Call 03-5221732 in order to get the details (in Hebrew as well as English) [N.B.: You can only 
participate when you register by phone!) and leave a message, telling how many you are and 
your phone number, or whether we should inform you how to proceed from different 
locations with your own (or combined) means of transportation. 
So far we can tell you that there will be a bus from Tel-Aviv leaving at 9 am].

---
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