DAILY TRIFECTA: Double Standard-Bearers In The West Bank
Apparently, it's a fine line between "harassment" and "terrorism."
TITLE: Facing violence and harassment, hundreds of Palestinians flee West Bank villages
https://www.timesofisrael.com/facing-violence-and-harassment-hundreds-of-palestinians-flee-west-bank-villages/
EXCERPT: According to the Yesh Din organization, another group opposing Israeli control of the West Bank, there have been more than 185 settler attacks against Palestinians in over 84 towns and villages around the territory since October 7.
One such incident took place in the Palestinian village of Susya in the South Hebron Hills on October 28.
Speaking to The Times of Israel in Susya, Ahmad Jabra Nawaja, a shepherd and resident of the village, related how he was beaten by armed, masked men in IDF uniforms who threatened to kill him if he did not leave his land.
Nawaja said he was sleeping in an agricultural wagon on his property with his wife and two daughters because they were worried about settler violence and the possibility their homes might be set ablaze with them inside.
“We were woken up by loud shouts, and saw guns aimed at us,” Nawaja told The Times of Israel through a translator.
He said the men were armed with M-16 assault rifles and that he believed them to be settlers dressed in IDF uniforms.
These men called IDF reserve soldiers to the scene, who checked Nawaja’s ID and then told the first group of men to leave.
But later that night, at approximately 4 a.m., the men who Nawaja believes were settlers from a newly established reserve regional defense battalion came back, dragged him out of the wagon, kicked and beat him, and threatened that they would kill him if he did not raze all the structures on his property and leave the site.
“When he put the gun to my neck I was terrified. I thought he was going to shoot me, I thought it was over. My heart was beating like crazy,” Nawaja said.
He said his daughter Sara threw up and his other daughter, Siwar, got a nosebleed due to their stress and fear during the incident.
Nawaja said that such violent and threatening attacks were a new development since October 7 and that he was concerned about further such incidents.
“We have nowhere else to go. We don’t have any alternative,” he said.
TITLE: The last Palestinians resisting in the olive groves: ‘The settlers are trying to take away the food we put on the table so they can then take our land’
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-11-17/the-last-palestinians-resisting-in-the-olive-groves-the-settlers-are-trying-to-take-away-the-food-we-put-on-the-table-so-they-can-then-take-our-land.html
EXCERPT: “I will die of a gunshot, but not of hunger,” Fayza says as she separates the olives from the leaves, sitting on the ground. The 62-year-old has been harvesting olives in the West Bank village of Salfit, the largest olive oil producing area in Palestine, since she was a child. Fayza and nine other members of her family are the only people from the surrounding area working in the olive groves at the height of harvesting season. It also appears that they will be the last. Since October 7, when Hamas launched an incursion into Israel, leaving 1,200 people dead, attacks on farmers have multiplied throughout the West Bank, preventing Palestinians from accessing their land and even being killed if they get too close to their fields.
In Salfit there have been no deaths, but there has been harassment and theft of produce. Jamal Mustafa Abu Salimé, owner of an olive grove, considers himself “lucky.” He can at least cultivate this field, one of the five he owns. He has already given up trying to work the others — some 200 hectares in Area C, controlled exclusively by Israel — scattered in the vicinity of the city, due to harassment by settlers from Rosh, a nearby Israeli settlement. At the end of October, he made one last attempt, arriving earlier than usual, at 4 a.m., to avoid confrontation. But it didn’t work. As soon as the 12 workers in his crew began unloading tools, a drone flew over them at close range. They fled.
“If you see the drone, keep your heads down,” he warns, pointing in the direction of the settlement. He also says that they are frequently targeted with laser lights, but that doesn’t worry him. The settlement is not visible from the olive grove, some 700 meters away. That is why they have been able to go to work for four days. Even so, on November 6, they brought in more machines to speed up the process. “It’s only a matter of time before they come after us too, so we have to work fast,” says one of the workers, Mohamed Saed Al Hasan. He says that when the attacks started in other fields the family got together and decided not to put themselves at risk by coming to collect the harvest, but after a few days his father changed his mind. “There are 12 of us in the family and we can’t give up the $2,000 we get from the oil,” he explains. The landowner does not pay them a salary, but shares a percentage of the profit, and for them it is their only income. “The settlers are trying to take away the food we put on the table so they can then take our land,” he says.
Fayza, however, refuses to work against the clock. “Of course I fear for my life, but I don’t plan to stay inside my house and close the door, which is what they are after. Every day when I come here and see that there has been another attack, I read verses from the Koran to protect us, because only Allah determines when it is time for us to die,” she says. The woman casts her eyes skyward, jaded, when asked what harassment she has been subjected to. The day before, she says, six Israeli army soldiers cut them off as they left the camp heading home. They interrogated and searched them. It is still fresh in her mind how in neighboring land, at a higher altitude than this, just 12 days ago, the army came in with bulldozers to raze the crops. Or how practically every night brigades of soldiers enter the town to carry out raids and arrests. At the entrance to the olive grove are the remains of a Bedouin village, home to 40 people who fled in mid-October after the army destroyed their homes.
All agree that the olive harvest in Salfit was proceeding relatively normally before October 7. “Since the Israelis started attacking us, the Palestinian National Authority has done nothing. We are alone in this,” says Salimé. In other areas of the West Bank, coexistence before the Hamas attack was rarely placid. In places like Qusra, southwest of Nablus, olive growers had to tell the Israeli army that they wanted to harvest their land and they would tell them when to do so: it was the soldiers who protected them from the settlers. But with the outbreak of the war, the army has not only stopped doing so but has joined in the attacks, according to the mayor, Mohamed Jabe. As a result, no one in Qusra has been able to harvest a single olive.
TITLE: Rabbi helps occupied West Bank farmers amid rising Israeli settler violence
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/11/13/rabbi-helps-occupied-west-bank-farmers-amid-rising-israeli-settler-violence
EXCERPT: Stooping under the weight of his body armour but uncowed by the threat of violence, rabbi Arik Ascherman guards an olive grove in the occupied West Bank, protecting Palestinian farmers from rising Israeli settler violence.
“There is no excuse, there is no explanation, no justification for what Hamas did” in its October 7 attacks on southern Israel, said the US-born 64-year-old, a veteran activist with the Rabbis for Human Rights group, referring to the deadly incursion in southern Israel by Hamas, the group that rules Gaza.
“But the average Israeli today is not prepared or willing to distinguish between Palestinian terrorists and terrorised Palestinians,” he added, alluding to reports of a rise in settler attacks since October 7.
“It’s an all-out war between two peoples,” said Ascherman outside the village of Taybeh, near Ramallah as farmers whacked olives weeping with oil onto pinstripe tarpaulins skirting the tree trunks.
“Nobody at this point is willing to help Palestinians, out of our pain and our anger.”
Nearby his comrades – even if they are only a handful – prove him wrong. They are posted as lookouts, prepared to face off with settlers who may descend at any moment to harass and fight the farmers.