9th, February 2009
Day 3: Wallajeh and Badil
Planting in Al-Walaj village
Imagine you read in tomorrow's newspaper that the government plans to build a fence between your house and your backyard. Imagine further that your backyard consists of three greenhouses and acres of farmland that are your life's work, that have been in your family for years, and for which you havelegitimate ownership papers in several languages. Such is the situation for Na'el Khalil, a thirty-five-year old olive farmer in the village of Wallajeh, near Bethlehem, on whose farm we planted nearly two-hundred olive trees this morning. As long as Na'el has olive trees on his property, the Israeli government cannot "legally" (via an archaic law coopted from the Ottoman Empire) confiscate his land.
Farmer' story and reflection
Since the beginning of the second intifada, Israeli soldiers have periodically arrived at Na'el's door and summoned him to court for having a home on his private land without an Israeli permit, threatening to demolish the place. One time, Na'el said, "They fined me 25,000 shekels ($6250 US). I refused to pay. They put me in jail for fifteen days." The Israelis have since summoned Na'el to court some ten to fifteen times in the last decade.
Participants' impact and reflections
The participants demonstrated vigorous enthusiasm upon arriving at Na'el's farm, first making an assembly line to pass the young trees from the road down to the fields, then splitting up into teams of twos and threes with pick-axes and hoes to plant. Keenan from San Francisco said it was great to become an active part in the story, that, "This we can do, this we can dig and do and see."
The planting is tough physical work. Richard Irvine, a hearty, healthy forty-year-old from Belfast, said, "It was actually harder work than it looks." Richard first came to Palestine three years ago when he saw an advertisement for the ATG/JAI's Olive Picking Program. He had learned about the Israel-Palestine conflict years earlier as a teenager in a specialized subject for school, and "it never left," but he never did anything about it, either, until recently. He's since created and teaches a course called The Battle for Palestine at Queens University in Belfast.
Lunch with the farmer' family
After a morning of hard work Na'el's family invited the whole forty-some person crew to his patio and fed us a delicious meal of rice and lentils with cucumber and tomato salad, all covered in yogurt. We ate up and enjoyed the rest.
Badil and Refugees issue
This afternoon we went to the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian and Refugee Rights, the professional wing of Palestine's refugee movement. Badil's communication officer, a well-spoken and obviously yet humbly intelligent man named Hazem Jamjoum, talked with us about the history of the Palestinian refugees and their right of return. The participants entered the lecture room a bit tired and suffering from post-meal fatigue, but left two hours later galvanized by the force of Hazem's faculties.
From Badil, the participants headed off to dinner with their host families or at the hotel, and enjoyed a free night in Beit Sahour.
