A Successful Olive Harvest
2008 October 3
About 20 Israelis and internationals showed up to help the Jamals (not their real name) with their olive harvest, and about 20 photojournalists showed up to record the event. About 20 settlers, with several children and babies, showed up to interrupt the harvest, and 40 to 60 Israeli soldiers and police also showed up.
The settlers generally try to provoke a violent reaction – by name-calling, swearing, threatening gestures, covert kicking, hitting, shoving, or stoning. Usually, the police and soldiers just watch until a scuffle begins. Then the settlers immediately scapegoat a harvester and demand the police arrest him. Typically, in recent years, the police detain the scapegoat, declare a closure so everyone has to go home, and then release the scapegoat.
Today, however, the police did not just watch and wait. They assigned a specific officer to each of the known violent settlers in advance. Each officer kept himself between his assigned settler and the olive harvesters. Whichever way the settler moved, the officer mirrored that movement. This mirroring went on throughout the harvest. The entire event resembled a huge, intricate, unending ballet.
The scene was in fact quite chaotic, with dust flying everywhere. The settlers did in fact shout and swear and pull out the tarps catching falling olives and rush at harvesters, trying to obstruct and interrupt. But they apparently had been told, perhaps by the police, perhaps by their own leadership, to not touch the harvesters. Public opinion in Israel has apparently been shifting against the settlers, or at least against settler violence.
A few harvesters were covertly kicked or shoved or knocked down. But Rabbi Arik Asherman, one of the leaders of Israeli resistance to the occupation of Palestine, kept saying, “No matter what they do, just keep picking.”
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