On Monday, the international volunteers travelled to a village on the outskirts of Beit Jala, along with school children from Dar-Al Kalima Lutheran School in Bethlehem, through the Environmental Education Center, to help the Zireneh family harvest their olives.
As they approached their fields, they went past and over various roadblocks in the area, something the IDF have done, in an attempt to prevent all of the local farmers from taking their tractors to their land to work the fields. The roadblocks had been built over the past few years.
Story of the farmer
The Zireneh family bought the land they currently farm twenty years ago, 13 years after 30 dunams were stolen by the Israeli Authorities, to build the illegal Gilo settlement in 1972. Despite the fact that Israel did offer them millions of dollars for the 30 dunams, the family refused, as it was the land of their family for generations, yet as Elaine Zireneh expressed ‘If you offered me $US100 million for one rock, I would never take it.’
Elaine’s mother also lost a substantial amount of land, to enable Israel to build Gilo. Elaine, one of eight siblings, bought the land and the trees we were harvesting today from her own money, after her working tirelessly for many years. The family also lost land when Israel built a bypass bridge, just beside the land we were harvesting today, when 80 olive trees were uprooted by the Israeli Occupation Army. Despite all of this turmoil, Elaine also takes care of one of her brothers, who recently had a stroke, and spent time at the YMCA Rehabilitation Centre in Beit Sahour.
Israeli soldiers' harassment
Two soldiers were present today, who had been watching other families harvest their olives, demanded to see the ID card of Fuad Zireneh, Elaine’s brother, who showed them his ID card, which the soldiers then took, and then questioned whether the land was actually his and demanded to see the deeds to the land where we were harvesting olives, to prove that the land was his.
Obviously, Fuad does not carry these deeds with him, so he went back to his home in Crimson, to retrieve the documents, meaning he lost valuable time harvesting his olives, purely for the sake of harassment of Palestinians.
Olive pressing
After leaving the field from a morning of picking, the group went to the olive pressing facility, where the olives that the group picked the day before were currently being pressed. The Palestinian Authority decides the official time for the olive harvest every year, depending on weather and other factors, and it typically starts around the 20th of October. Farmers hope that rain will come before the olive harvest, to get some of the dust off of the olives and trees, which did happen this year. The olives are weighed, moved to the other building where they are cleaned and then pressed to make olive oil. The participants were able to see the effects of their work of the last few days.
Tour in a refugee camp and Bethlehem
After the olive pressing, the volunteers had a traditional Palestinian lunch in Beit Sahour, drove around Bethlehem to see settlements, Palestinian villages, and the Palestinian police station which was demolished by Israeli F16s, and then went to Dheisheh Refugee Camp, the largest refugee camp in Bethlehem, in order to provide them with an insight into the Palestinian refugee situation and the circumstances in which refugees live. This was followed by a tour of the Nativity Church, to enable the participants to visit the birthplace of Jesus Christ to conclude the day’s events.
