60th Anniversary of Nakba

We Are All Refugees

We’re Going!

Blogging for Palestine

Intel: Nakba Inside

Olive Harvest in Jalud

A British Soldier at Nakba ’48-’49

Volunteers Needed for Autumn 2008 Harvest

PDF version


60th Anniversary of Nakba

-the Editors, June 2008

2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the Nakba (“the catastrophe”): the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948. While Israel celebrates the anniversary of its founding, it remains in violation of UN resolution 194, and the fourth Geneva Human Rights Convention, preventing the return of approximately six million Palestinian refugees. Meanwhile, Israel grants citizenship and the right to “return” to Israel to any person of Jewish ancestry worldwide.

In this issue, we Wepresent three articles that offer perspectives different from what you will find in the mainstream media. Colin Guiver shares recollections of what he saw as a soldier in the British Mandate in 1948. Henry Norr’s article explains how Intel, considered one of our most respected local companies, profits from the Nakba with a factory built on confiscated Palestinian land. Wilhemene Baramki writes about her family’s flight from their home in West Jerusalem.

-Eds


We Are All Refugees

By Wilhemene Baramki, February 2008

In May of 1948, 14-year-old Wilhelmine Baramki and her family packed a few of their bags and fled their west Jerusalem home. For several months prior, Zionist gunmen had been shooting at the bus that carried her father to and from work and the occasional bullet came through the windows of their home. It became too dangerous for her father to go to work. In the face of increasing violence, the family moved in with their aunt in a convent in Jerusalem’s Old City.

“Our home is still there but we can’t go back to it,” said Baramki. “We thought we were going temporarily. We locked all the doors, and marked which key went to which door. We just took the necessary things because we thought we were just leaving for two or three weeks and then we’d come back.”

However, the weeks passed and still they could not return home. Instead, the family decided to spend three months in Beirut. Before leaving, despite her family’s fears for her safety, Baramki’s mother snuck back to their home to wash, iron and fold the family’s laundry, so that they would have clean clothes upon their return, and to maintain a sense of normalcy amidst the uncertainty of the future.

Three months turned into a year and a half, after which they moved to East Jerusalem, then occupied by Jordan, where Baramki still lives today. She was not able to see her home on the Israeli side of Jerusalem until after the 1967 war. Four Jewish families had moved in. “It’s very sad to stand in front of your home and not be able to enter,” she said. “All our clothes, furniture, everything we had was in there and the Israelis came and took it. Even today the initials of my father, Anton Khoury, are on the façade.”

Baramki believes Palestinians should be treated the same as any other people. “We are all refugees,” she said. “We have to get our homes back. Everywhere in the world refugees get their homes back, but here we have nothing.”

The American people are key to the solution, Baramki believes. “Americans can do something to help. If America wants, it can change the situation.” Until that time, the Nakba continues. “All our families are dispersed,” she said. “We have sad memories of our childhood and sad thoughts of our future.”

Please see the Institute for Middle East Understanding for dozens more Nakba stories. http://imeu.net


We’re Going!

By Greta Berlin, May 2008

We’re going! Nothing will stop us from sailing to Gaza. And we’re here to tell you that we need your support, your donations, and your desire to see the Palestinians of Gaza free from this horrible occupation.

–Dr. Paul Larudee and Greta Berlin, Free Gaza Movement

More than 75 people have asked to be on the list of potential boat passengers sailing from Cyprus to Gaza on August 5, 2008. They come from 15 countries; the oldest is 84 and the youngest is 25. The list includes Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals, all with the same goal: to break the siege of Gaza and bring attention to Israel’s slow-motion genocide of 1.5 million people locked into an outdoor prison.

Gaza’s people are being slowly starved to death, denied medical treatment, and forbidden to leave their prison. Only an action as bold as sailing to Gaza will bring the world’s attention to the plight of these people. Israel tells the world that it no longer occupies Gaza, so we don’t need their permission to sail into the port. And we won’t ask for it. Nor will we allow the Israeli military to stop us, since we are sailing from international waters directly into the waters of Gaza.

We will depart from Cyprus for the 20-hour trip to Gaza. We expect to be met at the Mediterranean border by Palestinian fishermen who have invited us and know we are coming. We have on board several media outlets, which will be documenting the trip and sending their reports back to their home offices, so, if Israel decides to intervene in any way, its actions will be caught on real-time video.

Many of us will stay for two to three weeks once there. Our doctors on board will stay and work in the clinics, while others will go fishing to make sure the Israeli military does not shoot at the fishermen while they fish for their families and their community.

We are busy raising money to buy the boats right now, and we have one almost purchased.

So, what can you do to help?

1. Get organizational endorsements. We have both the Carter Center and Desmond Tutu endorsing. You can check our hundreds of endorsements on our website, www.freegaza.org.

2. Invite us to your home or group, anywhere in the U.S. or overseas.

3. Recruit passengers. Everyone is welcome, but we are still looking for imams, priests and rabbis.

4. Donate to us, either through PayPal, or by sending us a check. Since we are now a 501c3, your donations are tax-exempt. We will take any amount.

As of the time of writing, we have raised over $150,000 to purchase one boat. However, to make this trip successful, we will need to raise another $150,000, and we think we can do that. In just a few short months, we raised most of the money we now have.

For more information, go to www.freegaza.org, or call 510-236-5338 or 310-422-7242.

Greta Berlin resides in Los Angeles and has been a volunteer with ISM since 2003. She has visited the occupied West Bank three times in the past five years and is one of the founders of the Free Gaza Movement.


Blogging for Palestine

By the Editors, June 2008

The blogosphere has become both an activist tool and a new media outlet in and of itself, allowing people from around the world to add their voice to the noise of the mainstream media or even challenge it. But what does this mean for advocates for justice in Palestine? Are the pro-Israel media biases found in the mainstream media the same in the blogosphere? If not, how is the blogosphere different? To find out, Norcal ISM discussed the issue with several bloggers who write frequently about Palestine. Here’s what they had to say.

Q In general, the mainstream media suppresses voices that express unfavorable opinions of Zionism and the state of Israel. Are alternative media and the blogosphere more open to these points of view?

A Yes, they’re much more open. The mainstream media in the U.S. are almost fanatically “pro-Israel”, and while dissenting viewpoints are occasionally given space they are almost completely marginalized. This is primarily because mainstream journalism is to a significant degree shaped by the demands and interests of power, and Israel is viewed by the U.S. establishment as a valuable client state. The internet is a much more open medium, and is far less subject to the constraints imposed on the mainstream media. Alternative media such as Znet, CounterPunch, AntiWar.com, and the Electronic Intifada are free to be as critical of Israel as they want. Similarly, in the blogosphere there are virtually no barriers to entry. Anyone can set up a blog for free and begin writing about whatever they want, expressing their opinions freely. The flipside of this is that the vast majority of blogs have very small readerships, which is a big handicap for those trying to use blogs to campaign for a particular issue. Excellent critiques of Israeli policy are not much use if no one reads them.

There are a few blogs that have sizeable readerships. Daily Kos, for example, reaches a daily audience in the hundreds of thousands. The problem with some of these high-readership blogs is that they start to act a bit like the mainstream media – they don’t want to scare away advertisers, they don’t want anything too ‘extreme’ to be displayed, they want to maintain ‘respectability’, and so on. An additional problem with Daily Kos for those wishing to use it as a platform to discuss the Israel/Palestine conflict from a “pro-Palestinian” perspective is that it is a partisan blog: its openly stated goal is to help elect Democratic candidates. Since there is currently a bipartisan consensus in the U.S. in favor of Israeli expansionism, and since pushing for a more just policy towards the Israel/Palestine conflict is unlikely to help the campaigns of Democratic candidates, the administrators of Daily Kos don’t like discussion of I/P very much, and neither do many of the site’s members. That said, the advantage to blogging on sites like the Daily Kos is that you’re addressing an audience composed primarily of politically active, news-consuming liberals – precisely the people we should be trying to reach.

Q How sizable is the media exposure of blogs? Is this an important new media that activists should be utilizing to advance progressive perspectives on Palestine and other important issues?

A It seems that the traditional media is taking more and more notice of blogs. Big news websites such as CNN now often provide links to ‘blog reactions’ in their articles, for example, and many mainstream publications now have online blogs or even blog networks of their own. Professional journalists now often create their own blogs – see, for example, ‘Fugitive Peace’, the blog of the Economist’s Israel/Palestine correspondent – presumably because it offers them a space to write more freely or at greater length than what they can publish in their newspapers and journals. However, the media tends to promote blogs that fall within a certain range of opinions; blogs deemed too ‘extreme’ are unlikely to be linked to or discussed in the mainstream. Since on Israel/Palestine, it seems much of the U.S. press views anything to the left of Kadima and Likud to be too ‘extreme’, this is a bit of a problem for those hoping to use blogs to springboard into the mainstream on this issue.

Blogs and the internet in general can be very useful for campaigners. Apart from anything else they give you the chance to test out your arguments, and this can enable you to become a more effective activist. Large blogs like Daily Kos, despite their drawbacks, can be used to inform people about the realities of the conflict (which is important, since they’re not going to get accurate information from the mainstream media) and persuade them to a more balanced, reasonable point of view.

Q Blogs are supposed to be open discussion forums which should mean that all kinds of opinions and views are welcome. Is there censorship in the blogosphere? If there is censorship on blogs that cover this topic, how fairly is it applied?

A There’s certainly censorship in the blogosphere – the person who owns the blog gets to choose what appears and what doesn’t. The precise rules and accepted views vary from blog to blog. Some blog owners reject the banning of writers and comment on posts in moderation, while others do both very liberally. The big blogs tend to be relatively lax about censorship, and rely more on community moderation. That may sound polite, but for Zionist bloggers this often means using nasty tactics such as making truly vile insults, bullying and misinformation. Their goal with these tactics is to change the debate, misdirecting it towards ad hominem attacks, and thus away from a rational discussion of Israel’s human rights violations, Zionism, Palestinian history and resistance to Zionism. If these tactics don’t work, Zionist bloggers will sometimes seek to shut down the debate altogether. But, as long as you put forth a serious and well-reasoned viewpoint, and try to bear in mind the main goal of the site (if there is one – e.g. with Daily Kos it is electing Democrats), then such larger blogs are usually not a problem.

Daily Kos does seem to have a double standard with regards to Israel/Palestine. This presumably stems from its stated purpose – namely, electing Democrats. Since there is bipartisan and quite broad public support for Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, it is not the interest of people trying to get Democrats elected to have lots of diaries and comments decrying Israeli crimes against the Palestinians. This makes administrators less patient with ‘troublemakers’ (or alleged troublemakers) from the “pro-Palestinian” side than the “pro-Israel” one. This was evident when, last year, the Daily Kos administrators unfairly banned several ‘pro-Palestinian’ diarists for “offenses” that would have been merely frowned upon if perpetrated by “pro-Israel” diarists. As an example of this double-standard, one blogger was banned for including in her diary a long quote by a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (AAMB). Yet if a ‘pro-Israel’ diarist were to quote Olmert, Peretz, Halutz, or Sharon, each of whom bear responsibility for far more destructive terrorism than the AAMB, no-one would bat an eyelid.

Q If I’m interested in contributing to blogs about Palestine/Israel, what are some existing blogs that I can contribute to?

A There’s Daily Kos (www.dailykos.com); smaller (and friendlier) sites like Booman Tribune (www.boomantribune.com) and EuroTrib (www.eurotrib.com). For the most part, the blogosphere itself is a wide open space, so theoretically, anyone can start a blog about anything; however, just starting a blog doesn’t mean that anyone will read you. There are small blogs that are part of the “I blog for Palestine” network, whereas the big liberal blogs get the most eyeballs, so many critics of Israel have tried to participate on these, with mixed results, either just as members of these blogs or as owners of small blogs who cross-post articles and diaries at larger blogs.

Blogs are also a great help while doing solidarity trips to Palestine as well as when one returns. There, a blog offers a very direct and unfiltered way to reach a wide audience on your experiences, and upon returning (which can often be for years between trips there), it can be a constructive way of contributing to the struggle for Palestinian rights and liberation. However, online activism is no substitute for activism of the traditional kind. It can be a useful addition to it and a facilitator of it, but ultimately no amount of blogging will make up for getting people out on to the streets.

– The Editors


Intel: Nakba Inside

By Henry Norr, May 2008

Sixty years ago, there was no Kiryat Gat. Then came the Naqba, an extraordinarily brazen case of ethnic cleansing, and, a few decades later, a record-breaking series of investments from chipmaker Intel.

Today, Intel is putting the finishing touches on Israel’s biggest construction project this side of the Apartheid Wall, and Kiryat Gat has become one of the crown jewels of the country’s booming high-tech economy. But if the Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, has it right, Palestinian resistance forces could soon be capable of exacting a spectacular new price for their dispossession.

Palestinian villagers flee from al-Faluja during the Nakba in 1948 photo credit: www.PalestineRemembered.org
Palestinian villagers flee from al-Faluja during the Nakba in 1948 photo credit: www.PalestineRemembered.org

I. Tragedy

Located in south-central Israel – southwest of Jerusalem, northeast of Gaza City, at the northern edge of the Negev desert – Kiryat Gat stands on land that once belonged to two Palestinian villages, al-Faluja and ‘Iraq al-Manshiya.

While the area is well within the Green Line, Israel’s 1949-67 border, its history is in one way unique: Israeli forces never captured it during the 1948-49 war. Egyptian troops occupied it in May, 1948, and despite Israeli counter-offensives, 4,000 Egyptian soldiers managed to hold on to the two villages until the two governments signed an armistice on February 24, 1949.

Surrounded, the Egyptians were in no position to stay in what was called the “Faluja pocket.” To their credit, however, they insisted as a condition of withdrawal that Israel guarantee the safety of the civilians in the area – some 2,000 locals and 1,100 refugees from other parts of Palestine.

On paper, Israel agreed. In an exchange of formal diplomatic letters, the two governments pledged that civilians wishing to remain in al-Faluja and ‘Iraq al-Manshiya could do so, and that “All of these civilians shall be fully secure in their persons, abodes, property and personal effects.”

Within days, however, it was clear that the agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. Under the direction of Yitzhak Rabin (later Prime Minister of Israel), and probably with the direct approval of founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Israeli troops mounted what historian Benny Morris calls “a short, sharp, well-orchestrated campaign of low-key violence and psychological warfare designed to intimidate the inhabitants into flight.”

What Morris labels “low-key,” however, probably didn’t seem so to the victims. A survivor recalls that the Jews “created a situation of terror, entered the houses and beat the people with rifle butts.” An American Quaker relief team recorded details of the violence they observed, such as the case of a man brought to them with “two bloody eyes, a torn ear, and a face pounded until it was blue.” And UN observers reporting to Ralph Bunche, the distinguished African-American diplomat then serving as UN mediator in Palestine, noted not only beatings and robberies, but also cases of attempted rape and “promiscuous firing” on civilians by Israeli soldiers.

The most unusual documentation of the ethnic cleansing comes from a source even ardent Zionists can’t easily dismiss: Israel’s own foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett. Worried that the behavior of its forces might jeopardize Israel’s campaign for UN membership, he fired off an angry memo to the Israeli Defense Forces, charging that their actions in al-Faluja and ‘Iraq al-Manshiya were calling into question “our sincerity as a party to an international agreement.”

Noting that Israel was denying responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem, he wrote “From this perspective, the sincerity of our professions is tested by our behavior in these villages. … Every intentional pressure aimed at uprooting [the local population] is tantamount to a planned act of eviction on our part. … There is no doubt that here there is a calculated action aimed at increasing the number of those going to the Hebron Hills [then controlled by Jordan] as if of their own free will, and, if possible, to bring about the evacuation of the whole civilian population” of the area.

The IDF, however, was apparently undeterred, and by April 22, 1949, the last of the Palestinian residents and refugees had fled the two villages. Five days later, Rabin ordered them leveled.

II. Technology

In 1955 Israel established a “development town” – a settlement for new immigrants, originally mainly from North Africa, later also from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union – on the site of the two villages. Called Kiryat Gat, it was notable mainly for its poverty and high rate of unemployment.

But in the mid-1990s Intel chose the place as the site for a huge new plant it called “Fab 18” (“fab” being industry lingo for a facility where semiconductors are fabricated). The company put up $1 billion – at the time the largest foreign investment ever in Israel – and the Israeli government kicked in another $600 million. The plant opened in 1999 and was soon cranking out Pentium processors worth more than $1 billion a year.

By now, however, Fab 18 is well behind the fast-advancing state of the art in chip manufacturing. So this year Intel signed it over to Numonyx, a new joint venture with other investors, which will use it to make flash memory, a product that doesn’t require the latest technology.

Intel is now Israel’s largest private employer, with some 6,100 employees there (more than it employs in Silicon Valley), and according to an email from Intel spokesperson Chuck Malloy, this figure does not include 1,300 employees who are officially employed by Numonyx. These figures will grow substantially when Intel completes a new and more modern facility next door. Called Fab 28, this project dwarfs the previous one in cost: Intel has again broken Israeli records by spending $3.5 billion on it, plus $450 million in government grants. Production is scheduled to begin around the middle of this year and reach full volume – with annual output of about $3 billion – in 2009.

The microchip plant Intel has built on the site of al-Falijua village
The microchip plant Intel has built on the site of al-Falijua village

III. Chickens coming home to roost?

So good, apparently, is Intel’s business at Kiryat Gat that a company executive recently disclosed plans for a third fab on the site. The Palestinian resistance, however, just might have something to say about that.

Kiryat Gat happens to be less than 20 miles from the northern Gaza Strip. That’s beyond the range of the standard homemade Qassam rockets Palestinian resistance forces regularly fire over the wall that imprisons them. But in recent months they have used upgraded Qassams and occasionally larger Grad or Katyusha rockets to strike Ashkelon, an Israeli city about 10 miles away. And on May 24 of this year Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet security service, informed the Israeli cabinet that Hamas now has rockets capable of reaching Kiryat Gat.

Of course, Diskin may have been exaggerating, but even if Kiryat Gat isn’t yet within range, it’s likely that it will be soon.

Is Intel prepared? Undoubtedly – it’s inconceivable that the company would keep pouring billions into Kiryat Gat without taking precautions against this obvious danger. And for $3 or $4 billion dollars, it’s surely possible to fortify a building against any weapon Palestinians are likely to get their hands on.

Henry Norr first wrote about Intel’s fab at Kiryat Gat in 2002 in the San Francisco Chronicle

End Notes

This account is drawn mainly from Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge, 2004), p. 521-525, the latest and most detailed Western-language account of this episode.

For additional information about the villages, including pictures and oral histories (in Arabic), see www.palestineremembered.com/Gaza/al-Faluja and www.palestineremembered.com/Gaza/Iraq-al-Manshiyya


Olive Harvest in Jalud

By Dimitri Jefferson, May 2008

The fall 2007 ISM Olive Harvest Campaign was my first visit to occupied Palestine, and I was apprehensive about what lay ahead. To say that I was shocked and saddened by what I saw and experienced would be an understatement. During my stay I witnessed the incessant race-based bigotry and violence manifested by both Israeli Occupational Forces (IOF) and Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians.

To see this oppression of Israeli apartheid firsthand was truly upsetting. The illegal settlements and hundreds of checkpoints that have metastasized in the West Bank strangle commerce and social infrastructure by inhibiting free movement. Policies of collective punishment used by the IOF are both illegal and cruel.

I experienced the idle malice of Israeli soldiers and settlers while harvesting olives with the people of Jalud, a village just south Nablus. Of Jalud’s 4000 acres, almost seventy-five percent has been illegally and forcefully confiscated to form the colony known as “Shiloh”. On a sunny day in November, a group of families from Jalud, accompanied by international human rights workers (HRWs) and Israeli activists, attempted to harvest olives from a plot of land adjacent to Shiloh. Not longer than two minutes after we arrived, IOF soldiers appeared, screaming for us to leave, cocking their rifles and pointing them in people’s faces. A man approached the soldiers and showed them the deed to his land as well as a map. Next, about a dozen male settlers walked up. Armed with guns, batons, and attack dogs, the settlers were extremely aggressive. One of the settlers approached a woman and pushed her to the ground, spilling her olives in the process. A few dozen more soldiers drove up in jeeps. The soldiers started loading up their guns with rubber bullets and threatening the farmers with tear gas. I was appalled to see the settlers and soldiers talking and laughing together as they terrorized an innocent group of people.

 A demonstration against the Annexation Wall in Bil’in November 2008 photo credit: Dimitri Jefferson
A demonstration against the Annexation Wall in Bil’in November 2008 photo credit: Dimitri Jefferson

This hatred and unwarranted brutality contrasted sharply with the kindness and enduring charm of the Palestinian people. Once back in the village, we were invited to have tea and join in the jovial scene of children playing and people laughing. It was then that a man walked up to me and asked, “Why do you look so sad?” I explained that I was sad because of the prejudiced and oppressive display that I had just witnessed. To this he said, “That is life, my friend”. This lighthearted spirit is a testament to the strength and patience of these besieged people. May they someday live in peace and autonomy.

Dimitri Jefferson lives in the Bay Area. His first trip to Palestine with ISM was in 2007.


A British Soldier at Nakba ’48-’49

By Colin Guiver, May 2008

In, 1946, I was 18 years old and the British Army was waiting to conscript me into the Royal Corp of Signals which pleased me to no end because that meant no shooting. When I learned my posting would be somewhere in the Middle East, I was thrilled as I did not wish to be serve in Germany after experiencing the bombing of London and Weymouth. My hopes lay in places like Palestine or Trans Jordan. I knew of the stories of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia as he lived and was killed in a motor cycle accident just a few miles from where I was born in Weymouth, England.

I arrived first in Cairo and soon was sitting in a jeep, crossing the famous Sinai Desert from Lawrence’s book, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”. My first sight of Palestine was at Beersheba, and I was not disappointed at all Bedouins and Palestinian Arabs in traditional clothing was the normal attire-not the t-shirts and jeans of today. My army camp was just a few miles north of Gaza and Working trips took me to places like Hebron, Akaba on the gulf, and the wonderful city of Petra in Jordan. I could not believe my luck. Once, we even followed the Turkish Railway and saw the abandoned forts and trenches of the southern desert war of the Arab revolt.

It was some surprise to me, when on a trip to Haifa and driving through a mainly Jewish Tel Aviv, to find that this Palestine also contained a large number of people who looked like Arabs, but were dressed in very European clothes and their houses and farms appeared to be very modern. I saw the same thing in Haifa and Jerusalem, so got to observe the resident Jews of Palestine.

One day some rusty old ships ran aground and the Jewish flood gates opened to what we all knew was a problem. We also knew this happening was not good for our Palestinian workers. My driver, Librahim Farly filled me in on what all this meant for his future. Libraham an Arab friend and was the man who not only taught me to drive, but also started teaching me some Arabic. I can still say, to this day, my army number in Arabic which surprised a lot of friends at that time and still does today, to me fond memories of the time spent in an Arab country. Librahim told me was that the British government will let the Palestinian people down just like they did in the 1914-18 war. I understood then why T.E. Lawrence changed his name to Shaw and tried to hide in a small cottage, “Clouds Hill”, near Weymouth. It is still there, but hard to find off in the woods-just the right place for someone ashamed of his country’s failure to keep its promise for the Arab revolt.

The end came very quickly for all of us Brits in Palestine. With a big push from the USA , England, at that time broke and shattered by more than five years of war, did not argue. After losing many soldiers to the Jewish underground, they simply gave in. I returned home. They gave me a medal, it’s in a drawer somewhere.

Now, 60 years later, I find it so difficult to watch on TV what is happening in Palestine. It is so very sad. I am hoping the new U.S. President will help both sides to achieve a lasting peace. The Palestinian people need our help now to recover all the property they have lost. – without the land there is no real Palestine-only memories that are 60 years old and fading fast.

Colin Guiver was a Signalman in the British Mandate Army. He now resides in the Bay Area.


Volunteers Needed for Autumn 2008 Olive Harvest

By Asa Winstanley, November 2007

olives

The Olive Harvest is an annual affirmation of Palestinians’ historical, spiritual and economic connection to their land, and a rejection of Israeli efforts to seize it. As the indigenous people of this land, Palestinians have farmed olives here for thousands of years. The annual harvest is a symbol of life for Palestinian communities. Sadly, agricultural productivity over the last seven years has decreased dramatically because of closures and sieges that prohibit access to farms and markets. Over half a million olive and fruit trees have been destroyed since September 2000. Palestinian agriculture is being destroyed by the policies of the Israeli government, and the rights of Palestinians to their land and to a livelihood are being denied.

International and Israeli volunteers join Palestinians each year to harvest olives, despite efforts by Israeli settlers and soldiers with bulldozers to destroy this vital centerpiece of Palestinian life.

qawawis

The 2008 Olive Harvest Campaign is part of the ongoing work of the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led movement of Palestinian, Israeli and international activists working to raise awareness about the struggle for Palestinian freedom. ISM uses nonviolent, direct-action methods of resistance to confront and challenge Israeli persecution of Palestinians. With your participation, we will expose the injustice of the Israeli Occupation and send a message to the world that the Occupation must end and the wall must fall!

Please come to Palestine and join ISM for the 2008 Olive Harvest Campaign.