Olive Harvesting in Jamma'in

Jamma'in

Simply being here is so very educational for someone like me who feels no connection to any land or place, no sense of belonging anywhere. I never had to feel any as I have been privileged with the opportunity to travel and explore while my home awaited me in Bulgaria or wherever I considered it to be at the time. Staying home for people here is already a form of resistance, a statement of not giving in and simply going abroad. Generations grow up one after the other for whom the simply daily activities are a form of resistance and what is scary, this is what they learn is the only possible life.

Tappuah outpost or what could be seen from it from the family's land

We went olive harvesting last week with a family in the village of Jamma’in, 16 kms south from Nablus, a village very close to the one we live in. Jamma’in is largely located in the B zone. The C zone is 2km west of Jamma’in. Today, there are only trees in the C zone. Area C is approximately 60% of the West Bank today and its land falls under full Israeli control; this is the land all around the settlements and it also comprises all the border with Jordan, the Jordan river. Jamma’in’s land borders with two settlements: the first one is Ari’el, the largest settlement in the West Bank, and Kfar Tappuah which is small in number but consists of ideological religious settlers, the one that tend to cause the most troubles. Every year, settlers attack Jamma’in villagers. They tend to burn Jamma’in farmer’s fields, threaten them with weapons, steal their crops, and use their grazing land.

The ancient house where the family's ancestors lived. This house is at the edge

of their land and the closest to the. settlement now. Settlers have been going in

the house to hang out and the family is afraid to even enter it now.

Fred and I accompanied a family from Jamma’in to their land that lays the furthest away from the village and the closest to the outpost of Tappuah. They seem a very traditional and religious family and speak in rural Palestinian dialect which is difficult for me to understand so the dive inside the culture feels complete. This family works very hard and it’s interesting to observe their work style which is different from the one of the families we worked with before. The members of this family often don’t put any tarps on the ground and let the olives fall straight to the ground and then pick them one by one in a bucket. This seems to be mainly women’s task so I join in with them most of the time. I feel like there’s something almost sacred in this process, giving each olive its due attention by picking it by hand, not leaving any on the ground, dry or fresh one. They work so meticulously that in the end there’s not a single olive left under those trees and not a single leaf in the buckets. Their trees are more than hundred years old as the family tells us and we can see they are bigger and older than any of the trees we happened to pick from before indeed. This adds to the feeling of sacredness in their specific harvesting ritual. At branch time the family lays some bread on the ground in the middle of the circle of people and we eat with our dusty hands passing or throwing some cucumbers or eggs around. I thought I haven’t been closer to the earth before.

The next day we picked with the same family again. That meant getting up at 6:00a.m., meeting them at 6:30a.m. and staying with them till work was finished at about 4:30 in the afternoon. That day they had taken some of their kids along who were much more open to talking. I became friends with a 15-year old boy. He spoke in perfect Fusha (the classical language) with me and told me the story of how his family was attacked by settlers last year. During their first day of harvesting a settler from the Tappuah outpost came down with two dogs and started the dogs on them. The following day around ten settler men came, all armed. They started yelling at the family to stop picking and leave their land. Luckily that day they had internationals (or `ajanib, foreigners, as they call us) and they called the Israeli army who actually came after about ten minutes and drove the settlers away. I asked him what the settlers did during those ten minutes. They were yelling at them, he said, they spoke some Arabic but they couldn’t understand each other, and they also stole the olive bags his family had picked so far during the day. Then he looked at me and said: “The Israeli army came to help us because there was a foreigner like you with us to call them. If it was us calling, they might not have done anything. That’s why we want you to come with us and if something like this happens again, make that important call.” This boy had just summed up why I was here for me and had managed to communicate through to me what his family hadn't.

That second day we were already accepted and felt like part from the family. Even a bit too much as one of the women had brought in one of her sons whom she asked me to marry.I knew she was just trying to save me from what looked like misery to them: my being an old maid at the age of 27. When am I going to have kids, it’s already late for me, said the grandpa, a father of thirteen children and he did seem concerned. I explained that if I had married and had children I would have stayed with my family wherever it was and not be with them today. That seemed to convince them and they welcomed me again and thanked me for being there and my marriage ceased to bother them… at least during that day.

In the evening we spoke with our contact from Rabbis for Human Rights who knew the family and confirmed the story the 15-year old had related to me about the settlers’ attack last year. I tried to remember the details from it so I can use it for a report or blog. It’s important that we don’t exaggerate anything and if we are not sure about something, be honest about it and say so. If the men were ten, write ten. If you are not sure, then write “as the villager said they were around --this and this-- number”. Now I started thinking about these settler men and their number. If they were not ten but less and appeared as a larger number in the boys’ eyes due to his fear, what is it that matters: the precise information for the actual situation or the precise information for the impact left on the boy by what happened, the actual trauma afflicted on him? Which one is it important to record?

I'm trying to balance this thing on my head (it was heavy!) along the example of women in the family

Next day my new friend told me about the situation in Jamma’in during the 2^nd Intifada that broke out after 28 Sep 2000. He told me he was arrested one day while working in a store for no apparent reason(he was 11 years old at the time) and he had the soldier pointing his gun at him, then they released him. I asked him if he had seen something during the army occupation of the village and he recalled an incident when he witnessed a man getting beaten up by the soldiers. I asked him if he was afraid during this whole time. He gave me this mature and calmlook and said he was used to all of this and one cannot be afraid from something he's gotten used to.

The kids from this family continued taking interest in me and Fred. I was asked one of the days if we had Jews in Bulgaria. I said we didn’t have many nowadays but even if we did, they were peaceful Jews and I tried to explain that not all of them were like the ones across from us on the hill. Then they asked me how was life in the US (they knew I had been there), if there was violence and fights in the streets. I said there was violence everywhere but perhaps less than here. “Their government wouldn’t allow that over there”, concluded one of the boys thoughtfully. I could see that they were simply trying to figure out what really was “the normal life” like.

The evening of the third day we spent with this family we were invited to the house of the grandparents, the one who have thirteen children who in their turn have many children of their own and all of them or most of them, go figure, were present at their house that night in honor of the olive harvesting. As we were walking the narrow street going to their house there were already children meeting us along the way and a lot more standing at the door waiting for us. We were given two chairs to sit on in the entrance room, served the obligatory coffee and surrounded by all these pairs of eyes belonging to their shy giggling owners. More than twenty children were present in the room and all of them were studying the unusual sight that we were to them. This is the son of my daughter, this is her daughter, this kid is the uncle to this kid and this is called such and such, I felt so very overwhelmed that for a while I could just smile awkwardly and look around around me with I felt must have been a silly expression. Then they put a cover on the floor in the other room and a huge plate with rice and fish was brought in by one of the women. We sat on the floor and all ate together in a circle. The sole idea that those grandmother and grandfather that we knew had started that entire house full of people and little children, just imagining what it took to feed all of them, all of this was quite overwhelming for me to grasp and picture. There was quite of a cultural experience for us.

Some of the shy giggles; they need to be multiplied by 5 at least for the real picture to be imagined :)

We worked four days with that same family and during that time I had to put up with a lot more of marriage talk which I learnt was to be taken jokingly and lightly. A 24-year old asked me to marry him the last day we picked in the presence of his mother who had just introduced him as a soon-to-be father. His mother came in to my rescue:”Tell him you are older than him”. I wonder whether this was all a joke or not. I still have a lot to learn about this culture with all my 5 years of study behind my back.