Muted Eid Al Fitr in Yanoun
Yanoun's olive groves from below.
Yanoun's olive groves from above, with the settlement watchtower and water infrastructure on top of the hill.
It must have taken Umm Mustapha* all morning to get her daughters ready to go out. A mother of six from Yanoun, a tiny village in the West Bank, she would have been up at dawn, making breakfast, locating clean pairs of jeans and combing the hair on tiny heads. Today was Eid Al Fitr, the day of feasting after the fasting month of Ramadan, and the mother of the family was to spend the day visiting relatives with five neatly groomed daughters in tow. Her one son, Mustapha, was let off. He was given some toys and sent to play with the rest of the village boys.
This is Eid in Palestine. This year's celebrations in Yanoun, where I have been placed as an Ecumenical Accompanier (EA), were rather subdued. Abu Yahya, a local patriarch of indeterminate age – at least 90, said the consensus – died a few weeks ago and the festivities came too early to allow for the full period of mourning to pass. A couple of days before Eid, a shepherd boy from nearby Aqraba died in suspicious circumstances. But as Ramadan ended, the foremost thought in everybody's minds here was the rapidly approaching harvest season and the challenge of picking their olives under constant threat of violence from settlers living on the hills above.
"I don't feel anything at Eid," said Ahmed Khadar, a farmer from Yanoun who sells vegetables, olives and mutton for a living. "It's only for the children. Every day here there is killing and violence, how can I feel happy about Eid?"
I visited Ahmad in the middle of the afternoon. We sat in his yard for a few minutes, but the weather is turning autumnal these days and soon we ended up in the warm salon of his modest one-bedroomed house.
Ahmad, like everyone else in Yanoun, had spent the morning trooping from house to house, offering Eid greetings to relatives and drinking endless cups of tea and coffee.
"Normally, all my wife's sisters would come to visit in the evening, and we would make mensaf [a traditional meal of rice, meat and yoghurt]," he said. "We would perhaps have 15 people here. But my uncle Abu Yahya died less than 20 days ago, so we won't do that this time."
Abu Yahya was the first of Yanoun's residents to be attacked by youths from the nearby settlement of Itamar. One day in 1996, he was tending his sheep when a stranger approached. Being short-sighted, he thought it was someone local and went to offer a handshake and a cigarette. He was badly beaten with his own walking stick, left with several broken bones and blinded in his left eye.
That was twelve years ago. But the problems caused by Itamar's ever-expanding presence remain. In 2002, after an extended period of harassment, Yanoun's residents were all forced to leave the village they have inhabited for centuries. They were only able to return when an international presence was established to protect them from settler violence. Since 2003, EAPPI has been responsible for providing that presence, and EAs are a daily sight in the village.
The presence of international observers is particularly important during the olive harvest. Violent Israeli settlers, often armed with M-16 machine guns, do their best to make it difficult for Palestinians to reach their trees, many of which they have tended for hundreds of years. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF), which has an obligation under the Geneva Conventions to keep order in the Occupied Territories, often fail to protect Palestinian civilians from abuse by settlers.
"Whatever the settlers want, the army does it," claimed Ahmad. "Last year, the IDF set limits within which we could pick our olives. We said 'okay,' and got on with the work. But the settlers came and told the army to move the limits back, and they did. It meant that we couldn't harvest all of our trees."
It would be hard to verify this particular incident, but it certainly fits the pattern of previous harvest seasons, when the IDF has supervised farmers' activities and theoretically been present to protect them from settler attacks. Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organisation which campaigns for effective law enforcement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), claimed after the 2006 harvest season that Israeli civilians had engaged in various acts of "assault, threats, theft and sabotage. In general, the security forces and the police have stood by and not prevented this harassment, and in certain cases even use them to justify stopping the harvest at the site."
Amnesty International alleges that the IDF are complicit in some attacks, at least through their failure to intervene and prevent them. In June 2006, the Israeli High Court of Justice (IHCJ) ordered the army to protect Palestinian farmers as part of their law enforcement duties in the OPT. In some cases, the IDF's response was to implement "closures" – barring Palestinian farmers from their land in order to "protect" them. Some farmers are now required to get visitors' permits in order to access their own land. This, as noted by the IHCJ, is tantamount to rewarding the settlers for violence.
It is not only human rights organisations who have grave doubts about the rule of law in the OPT. Israel's Attorney General has noted "a lack of appropriate law enforcement against Israelis" in the West Bank. A recent report by the World Bank asserted that the Israeli authorities have systematically failed to investigate and punish violence by settlers. It noted that the lack of physical security and adequate legal protection for Palestinian farmers means that large areas of their land go unfarmed, severely damaging an already tepid agricultural sector.
The situation brings despair to the hearts of Yanoun's farmers. This year's olive crop is already expected to be a meagre one. No rain fell here between April and the middle of September and the trees, which should be heavy with olives, are relatively bare. In addition, what protection the IDF does provide is only available for one week during the harvest season, for olive trees which need year-round care in order to bear the optimum amount of fruit.
To be prevented from tending and harvesting many of their olive trees compounds the problem of low rainfall for Palestinian farmers. It effectively removes several slices from an already small pie. It is no wonder that this year's Eid was a muted occasion in Yanoun.
*Names have been changed throughout.
