Acrid harvest among West Bank olive groves

Harvesting olives is a laborious process, not made easier if teargas is drifting over the groves as it does most Fridays here in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli-Palestinian clashes are almost ritual.

“This happens two or three times a week maybe. But with an emphasis on Fridays,” says Ram Kaho, an Israeli border police officer whose squad of 40 patrols one of the many fault-lines on the tense interface between the two communities.

Kaho’s sector is where the Jewish settlement of Hashmonaim rubs up close to the Arab village of Nilin — soon to be cut off by the barrier Israel is building in the valley between.

“This is an especially difficult place,” he says. “In relation to other places we have lots of injuries. So it’s a very problematic area.”

Israeli settlements on occupied land in the West Bank are perhaps the most contentious issue in the way of a peace settlement with the Palestinians ending decades of conflict.

The Nilin clashes have been going on for about a year.

In 2004, the World Court in The Hague ruled that Israel’s proposed 720-km (430-mile) barrier on occupied Palestinian land — begun in 2002 — was illegal.

Israel says the barrier, a mix of wire fence and concrete walls, keeps suicide bombers out of its cities.

When Kaho’s police hear the Friday Muslim call to prayer from the hill opposite, they brace for action. They are sure that as soon as prayers are over, some Palestinians backed by international activist supporters, will begin throwing rocks.

A group of figures appears among the olive trees and prickly-pear cactus on the rocky hillside opposite. Kaho raises his binoculars and speaks into his radio. There are several bangs, then gray puffs of tear-gas smoke blossom on the slope.

The distant figures scatter, blurred by the heat haze.

“We are here to stop them attacking the machines,” says the major, pointing to the big caterpillar-tracked diggers that are breaking up rock for the wall’s foundations in the dry little valley just beneath his position.

Half-way up the hill, a couple of young Palestinian men and their father perch on ladders, stripping blue-black olives from a tree onto canvasses spread on the ground below.

They seem oblivious of the flying whiz and exploding pop of tear-gas canisters just up the slope. But the breeze soon blows acrid fumes over the small stony terrace of ochre soil where they are working.

“There would be more of us here harvesting, normally, but the soldiers make us go away. And we send our young kids home,” said one of the men, who declined to give his name.

The protesters are no match for the Israelis, who have automatic weapons and armoured jeeps. Three Palestinians have been shot dead in the West Bank over the past four days, for aiming firebombs at troops, the army says.

“Here we really, really try to avoid any use of lethal force,” says Kaho. He relies on an arsenal of gas and stun grenades, or “shock weapons” as he calls them, to keep the stone-throwing attackers at bay.

The olive harvesters are allowed to get on with their work but when the protesters mingle among them “we start to worry”.

An ambulance with flashing red light appears higher up the ridge, lurching slowly down a stony track to where someone has apparently been injured.

“They are well organised,” says Kaho, 37, who has a livid scar above his left eye from a stone propelled by a Palestinian sling-shot. The Palestinians say the wall takes big bites out of their land and divides families. Legal challenges have forced a re-routing of some small sections but stone-throwing attacks have not stopped it being built.

The officer sets off to lead his helmeted squad up the dusty hill, through the trees and onto flatter ground. A stun grenade goes bang and the sound of rifles firing follows. Rubber bullets are being used, says another officer.

At a safe distance, by the checkpoint guarding Hashmonaim settlement, about 40 rightwingers have turned out to support the police, waving white-and-blue Israeli flags, singing songs.

REUTERS