January 2 2024

I bought a litre of Palestinian olive oil at a local Arabic market today, and although it was a small gesture, I feel the resonance of having it in my home. The olive tree is deeply sacred to the people of Palestine, and the man at the checkout told me that it’s the best olive oil in the whole world.

Part of a 75 year long campaign of unrelenting displacement and genocide against the people of Palestine has involved the decimation of olive groves, some of them being thousands of years old. Since 1967, 800000 olive trees have been destroyed by the imposing Israeli settlements.

I think about the roots of trees that these olives came from and how deep they go. I wonder if those trees are still standing and where the farmer’s and the farmer's family are. I wonder how this damage can ever be repaired, and I try to find hope, imagining the hands of those who tended the groves that bore the fruit that made the oil that’s in my cupboard. I imagine their sun stained hands proudly harvesting what they must also know is the best and most pure olive oil in the world.

I see bulldozers tearing out the trees, and the limbs of the people who’s ancestors tended to the trees for hundreds, possibly thousands of years being crushed and strung out under the rubble. Bombs dropping. Tanks rolling through villages. Snipers taking out unarmed families in the streets. And the blocking of humanitarian aid.

Eventually it will stop, and eventually the forces of healing and renewal will start to flow into the world, and there will be a reclamation. I hope that in my lifetime I'll start to see things change and turn around. For now I’m watching, grieving, tilling, planting, and dreaming a new world.

Hala Alyan:

“We bear witness because this is how we build new narratives, because often this is the most beautiful task of an ally, which is to say of a human, to say, “I see what you see”.

"Among the many things I was taught to believe that I now know are not true are the things I was taught about Israel and agriculture. I remember, on that Hebrew High School Ulpan trip so long ago, being taken a spot that in 1966 was on the border between Israel and Jordan--the border that is now the Green Line separating Israel proper from the occupied territories of the West Bank. The Israeli side was green: the Jordanian side was brown. ‘You see,’ our guide said. ‘The Arabs had this land for 2000 years, and did nothing with it. We've had it for twenty, and we've made the desert bloom.’

I remember how much that argument impressed me as a young teenager. Many years later, in a museum in British Columbia, I found the same argument cited as a rationale for taking the land of the northwest coast First Nations--’they weren't using it, weren't doing anything with it.’ It's simply the justification the conquerors use to convince themselves that they deserve the fruits of conquest. Israel represents progress, science--Palestine represents stagnation, regression, superstition.

Now, looking at the land from the perspective of permaculture and ecological design, I find myself impressed by the elegance of Palestinian agriculture, so integrally suited to the land and climate, frugal in its use of water, making use of the plants native to or adapted to this region, somehow preserving enough fertility in this stony soil after ten millennia of cultivation to produce figs and grapes and oil and bread. The ‘scientific’ agriculture practiced in some of the settlements, with profligate use of water, energy, and chemicals, seems to me another form of assault on the land. And the Israeli side of the border was green, I now know, because they'd taken all the water, as the Sharon government is now confiscating the aquifers.”

--

"Just over a year ago, I sat in a home near the Egyptian border in Rafah, in the Gaza strip. A five-year-old, curly-haired charmer of a girl was on my lap. Her older sister and brothers did homework to the background music of the thudding of bullets into the walls. The children were so inured to gunfire from the Israeli sniper towers and tanks that they didn’t even react until the gunfire grew so loud that the older ones dived for the floor, the babies for the fragile shelter of their mother’s arms.

I was there with the International Solidarity Movement, which supports nonviolent resistance against the Occupation. I’d come to help the teams that were with our member Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by a soldier in a bulldozer as she attempted to stop a home demolition, and with Tom Hurndall when he was shot trying to rescue a group of children who were under fire from an Israeli sniper tower.

I think of them, of the families I met and the traumatized children who followed us in packs whenever we ventured out on the streets, as I read the horrifying reports of the last weeks in Rafah. The homes I stayed in have been razed to the ground, along with the crowded neighborhoods where the old men would visit each other at twilight to brew tea over a small fire and talk, where the women still baked bread in clay ovens. The olive groves, the orange trees have fallen to bulldozers. Children like the ones I held and sang to, and their parents, have been killed in the demonstrations protesting the destruction of their communities."

--

"At last we come to the pipeline leading down from one of the settlements above us. A big sewage pipe ends in a small tank, then disappears. A clear spring gushes from the mountainside next to it, but where the pipe enters the water there's a foul smell and the stream no longer runs clear.

As we drive on, we pass three settlers, a young man in a skullcap and two women in long dresses. They are unarmed, just taking a holiday walk, but they look uneasy and scowl at us. I am wondering how they can live in this place as the beneficiaries of outright theft, walk these roads uninvited and unwanted, justify a life of barbed wire and machine guns in the name of religion. I am thinking about the bible story where two women come to Solomon claiming the same baby. Solomon offers to cut the child in half--whereupon the true mother cries out 'no!'

It seems to me that Israeli policies are cutting the child in half, literally, with walls and fences and the apartheid wall. And the settlers belie their own claim to this land by the utter contempt with which they treat the actual land itself--dumping their sewage and garbage onto the Palestinians' fields, guzzling its water, uprooting trees, gouging the hills along the route of the fence. 'Holy land' does not seem to translate into any real conception of sacred earth.

Farther along, deep pools are carved into the limestone rocks. Here, Fatima says, children used to swim. Families used to come and camp for the weekend. Now the pools are black, and no one can swim there because of contamination.

At the far end of the valley there are groves of orange and lemon trees. Their blossoms perfume the air, and again I have the sense of having stumbled into a magical, timeless world of unexpected warmth and abundance. But behind the grove the stream stinks of sewage. A fast, paved road crosses our road here, leading out of the valley. But we cannot take it; it is reserved for settlers. We stop and talk to the farmer who owns some of the groves. Last week, he tells us, the settlers came down and threatened him as he was trying to tend his trees. They told him he should leave, that it would be better if he would go away. 'This is our land,' they said. 'Did you see what we did to Sheikh Yassin? We can do the same to you.'

But the farmer is not leaving."

--

"To change the system, you need to change the paradigm, the way you frame the situation and think about it, the deep assumptions that shape your viewpoint. That’s Donella Meadows’ most effective way to intervene—changing the world view and the constructs that support the system. It’s also, generally, a hard and painful process. A new paradigm, a new construct of self and world, goes against everything we know and believe. If I’m telling myself that I’m a fun-loving, party kind of a gal—how painful to instead admit that I’m an alcoholic! If I’m justifying the deaths of children by telling myself that I’m bringing democracy to the region, or safeguarding my sister’s children in Hadera, or fulfilling God’s plan, how painful to look at the broken bodies on the pavement and say, 'I did that. I have blood on my hands.'

I’m thinking about one of the many fruitless arguments I’ve had about the issue, this one with an ultra-Orthodox rabbi’s wife, shortly after I’d returned from doing solidarity work with the nonviolent Palestinian resistance in Gaza and the West Bank. I tried to describe to her what I’d seen in that bullet-riddled, shell-shocked land, the ongoing, everyday horrors and humiliations and frustrations, the houses bulldozed, the farmlands confiscated, the lives blunted and stunted and blasted into oblivion, and at the end she said to me:

'But we’re good. So if we’re doing it, it must be good.'

That’s one hard paradigm to shift, because there is nowhere to go from that pinnacle but down, no change we can make that doesn’t require us to face the possibility that maybe we are bad, or at the very least, that we are good people doing some bad things. From that vantage point, of course any critique, no matter how measured, seems anti-Semitic, an assault on that basic self-definition of Essential Goodness."

--

"Couldn’t Hezbollah just stop shooting rockets, and the Palestinian factions stop bombing?

Yes, certainly they could, and it would be good if they did. Children would live who otherwise would die.

When we’re caught in a self-reinforcing cycle, it’s a fairly useless exercise to ask, “Who started it?” Or to debate whether one side or the other has the ‘right to defend itself’ by continuing the cycle. Far better to ask, 'Who is in position to stop this cycle?'

And it is Israel, the occupier of the territory, the fourth largest military power in the world, that sets the conditions of the region, that has the power to create a habitat where violence flourishes, or peace is favored."

--

"Only justice for the Palestinian people can bring security to Israel and bring peace to both peoples. Every day that justice is delayed increases the danger to Israel and to the Jewish people worldwide. True friends of Israel will not support her in policies that sow hatred and reap retribution. Real allies of the Jewish people will listen to and amplify the voices of all those who cry out for justice."

-Starhawk 2004-07